With the ongoing Clearstream scandal, the French ship of state suffers a direct hit. All that was whispered about French government is exposed. The laundry is out. The revolving door between ministerial power and corporate power is jammed. We read that Chirac himself has $75 million sitting in a Japanese bank account. He denies it, but we still read ¬–and we can't believe we're reading it!
Is this the end of the vaguely monarchist Fifth Republic? Is this where French power finally says OK and wakes up and welcomes the 21st century let alone the 20th? Does the French exception end here?
Because so much of that so called exception was power carried out a la francaise: passively accepted lack of transparency, the ignored revolving door, power manifested and ornamented as if none of the horrors of the 20th century had ever happened; as if France, in many ways, had never experienced world wars or lost an empire, either.
The people of France have moved on as best they could, to be sure. They are of the present (and prove so by voting against incumbent politicians, regardless of affiliation, every chance they get.) It's power itself that has long been stuck in pure delusion. And it's not economic delusion as many American and British pundits so hyperbolically claim, but real hallucinatory delusion over what a politician's power really amounts to and what job a modern official has been elected to do.
I'll never forget an image from last November when kids were burning cars every night. The top cops of France showed up to Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin's palais to brief him on the situation. But they showed up in their formal uniforms, including not only the kepi, but with cuffs and shoulder pads all carefully embroidered in golden fleur de lys: Musketeers ready to do their duty for la France, circa 1871.
Obviously, the fantasy-life of a French politician doesn't exist in a vacuum; politicians need enablers. Disappointingly, it’s the news media in France that has helped validate these political delusions of grandeur.
Some of this is cultural, but much is personal. More so than in Washington or London, media heavyweights in Paris are extremely close to the powerful. They went to the same school. They dine and drink together. They get married.
This proximity has consequences. One is the famous Mitterrand baby, the late president's daughter kept secret for a generation. At Mitterrand's death, the world press interpreted France's discretion towards Mazarine as somehow just French, the way public life is handled in the Hexagon.
Hardly. The reason the baby was kept secret was because the press in France censors itself, and not out of altruism. They don't report on what is taking place in the bedrooms or the antechambers of power because too many of them actually live there. If they were to blow Mitterrand's cover, who says someone wouldn't blow theirs. And Mitterrand knew that only fear brought silence: He tapped phones of journalists who didn't seem scared enough.
It has taken an over-the-top blood match to change things. Media scruples have shifted thanks in large part to the all out war of succession between the centre-right princes, Villepin and Nicolas Sarkozy, the populist-prone Minister of the Interior.
In recent years, each of these two men has been so desperate to bring down the other that they’ve trampled over mutual friends and important allies to do so. Their hatred and colliding ambition have exasperated journalists, businessmen, and other anonymous middlemen who until now basked in the perks that came with discretion. But as the fight between the two men became more public, messy, and embittered, Mafia-like Omerta in political France became weaker.
Because now, amazingly, it seems that conflicts between politicians and media barons, and internecine conflicts in general, are to be done out in public. The head of Le Point, a newsweekly, is openly irate that his old friend Villepin leaked him phony Clearstream info incriminating Sarkozy (information he dutifully ran on the front page at a time when Omerta was alive and well).
The owner of Paris Match, press baron Arnaud Lagardere, is annoyed that Sarkozy is blaming his magazine for the near end of his marriage. When Lagardere is cranky and mouthing off for the public record, consider the oblique status quo in French media effectively over. (Intriguingly, Lagardere's family also owns EADS, the defense company from where the fake Clearstream allegations against Sarkozy first emerged.)
At the very least, with this Clearstream scandal, the regal masquerade that has long defined French politics is thrown into crisis. Annoyed media bosses and businessmen, who usually serve as sober-minded gatekeepers sparing princely politicians like Villepin from reality, have contemptuously deserted their posts. And without journalists and their bosses to edit out the dirty bits, reality, cold as ice, comes rushing in.
Who knows what will hold. Villepin and mentor Chirac are not only fighting for their political lives, but fighting, in the end, to stay out of jail. (This goes a long way to explain Villepin's disastrous campaign against leftist students last winter -- if he had won, he would have been the right wing's messiah and therefore, untouchable.) Everyone knows that Chirac has lost complete faith in his disciple, but considering his options, Chirac has no choice but to stick with his dead-ender Sundance Kid.
And in one of the greatest ironies of all, Villepin –a man who's career hopes were pinned to his grandiloquent 2003 UN speech arguing against Bush's war in Iraq– has now ordered his Justice Minister to pursue journalists and prosecutors investigating the Clearstream allegations, mirroring tactics used by the Bush administration against war critics.
Whose disciple is Villepin now?
