La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (26 page)

There was no proof, just a lot of rich circumstantial evidence: forty official and private visits to Japan in the two decades before Chirac’s 1995 presidential victory, the replacement of the head of France’s foreign intelligence service in 2002 for his alleged investigation into Chirac’s links to Japan, a legal investigation into Chirac’s finances showing that he and his wife, Bernadette, had traveled to Japan in 1994 under the first part of Bernadette’s maiden name, Chodron.

The mainstream French media did not go after the “love-child” story. The left-leaning daily
Libération
wrote a brief story about the report—only after it appeared in the British press.

When the story broke, I called on Claude Angeli, a managing editor and longtime investigative journalist for
Le Canard Enchaîné
. Much to my surprise, he said the love-child story was of no interest. “The only thing I would care about is whether Chirac misused public money to support the child,” he said.

Then I asked Catherine Colonna, Chirac’s press spokeswoman, about it. “No comment!” she replied. Then she said she had something to ask me: “How could you dare ask such a question?” Colonna had lived in Washington for many years, and I knew that she knew why I asked. The rules are different and the interest in a political leader’s personal life is greater in the United States. There was no denial, however. To deny the rumor would have meant that she considered the exercise worthwhile.

For the philosopher and radio host Raphaël Enthoven, rumors are an inevitable part of French culture and cannot be disputed. Instead, rumors create a facade, an artificial image that can give protective covering. Enthoven is tall, dark, handsome, and mysterious enough to pose in any perfume ad. The first time I saw him, he was giving a reading and analysis of a text by Albert Camus, all about the wisdom of love and how it is harder to be happy than to flee happiness. He also happens to be the former partner of Carla Bruni and the father of their son. Several years ago, Bruni wrote and sang a song about a certain Raphaël: his low voice and “velvet glance.” He “has the air of an angel, but he’s a devil in love,” she sang. I met Enthoven over coffee to discuss the role of seduction in French history. I also brought copies of some of the media stories about his life with Bruni. He took my pen and began to mark them up, saying, “So this is wrong! This is wrong!”

If these were all lies, I asked him, why not go public with the truth? “Because you can’t change this, you can’t,” he said. “You can’t correct an image. No denial can extinguish a rumor. People want to believe that the forbidden is the truth.” Still, he said there was a perverse advantage in having a public persona that didn’t conform to reality: he could hide behind it. “Sometimes, you can hide under what people think of you,” he said. “It’s a fantasy. It’s an image. I mean, they are not talking about me; they are talking about someone who looks like me.”

The same could not be said of Frédéric Mitterrand, France’s minister of culture and communication and the nephew of the late president François Mitterrand. He chose to reveal his secrets, and that decision nearly did him in.

Mitterrand would never have made it as a cabinet secretary in the United States. In 2005 he published
La mauvaise vie
(
The Bad Life
), a memoir in which he revealed disturbing secrets through what the critics called beautiful prose. This combination made Mitterrand’s confession an excellent exercise in seduction, a strategic (and perhaps also therapeutic) act of bringing the public closer to him. He triggered the reader’s empathy; this made him even more appreciated in France.

In his memoir, Mitterrand told the story of his sexual coming of age. Then he revealed the secrets of his sexual practices, specifically, how he, as a middle-aged gay French man, craved good sex with “boys,” especially when he paid for their services. Acknowledging that the “boys” had been forced into prostitution by poverty, he nevertheless reveled in the certainty that his dealings with them were business transactions and that he would get what he paid for.

“The profusion of very attractive and readily available boys puts me in a state of desire that I have no need to curb or conceal,” he wrote. “Money and sex, I’m right at the heart of the system—a system that really works, since I know I won’t be rejected.” As the story progressed, the prose became more sexually graphic and, frankly, disturbing. A boy of an undefined age in Thailand particularly aroused Mitterrand. When he kissed the boy, he felt “his lips cool, tongue deep, the salty saliva of a young male with no trace of tobacco or alcohol. His skin is exquisitely soft, his supple body twists when I stroke and squeeze him, and I get the sense that he experiences pleasure wherever I touch him.” In making love to the boy, he wrote, “I’ve never felt so blissful and so powerful.” This sort of conduct was easier far away from France, Mitterrand wrote. “In France, it can be a whole production to get most call boys hard, but we’re definitely not in France now, and we use the washcloth, the soap, and the shower attachment to explore and measure ourselves against each other,” he continued.

Morocco was another venue for pleasure seeking, and Mitterrand made the case that young male Arab prostitutes were the beneficiaries, not the victims, of their profession. They used people like him “as a substitute wife and, at the same time, as a savings account,” he said, adding, “The beautiful ‘
gosses
’ [boys] arrive as if for a sport, and to finance the appliances for their future marriages to the cousins chosen by their mothers.” The secrets confessed were padded with elegance; the ambiguity of language infused them with mystery. The French literary elite considered it a courageous, moving, and well-written book, and refrained from passing moral judgment. Even after his appointment as culture minister, the center-right newspaper
Le Figaro
gushed, “He is a seducer, in the time of seduction itself…. [Mitterrand] has shown himself stripped naked in
La mauvaise vie
, his book of memoirs and confession in which he recounts his homosexuality.”

I found the book troubling, creepy even. It was pornography, and not just that, self-indulgent exhibitionism. In a country where millions of people are of Arab descent, I couldn’t understand how Mitterrand could exploit Arab boys and enjoy credibility with France’s ethnic Arab population. I felt I understood one of the most famous lines in American Supreme Court history. Articulating his definition of pornography in a 1964 obscenity case, Justice Potter Stewart said, “I know it when I see it.”

So I felt I knew it when I read it.

When I asked French scholars and friends about Mitterrand’s book, few seemed distressed. Some told me I was being too American. “It’s a very beautiful book, very dignified,” said Frédéric Martel, a sociologist and former cultural attaché in Boston who has written books about homosexuality in France (he is gay himself) and about culture in America.

“Frédéric Mitterrand does not hide,” Martel said. “He talks about homosexual prostitution without any mask. He is well known on television, and his popularity has protected him. The artist can say everything.” But Martel predicted there could be trouble ahead: “Whether the popularity of a political man, who is now a minister, allows him to say everything is yet to be known.”

The trouble came in 2009, when Mitterrand came to the defense—a bit too forcefully—of Roman Polanski, the Oscar-winning Polish-French filmmaker, after Polanski was arrested in Switzerland at the behest of a prosecutor in California. Polanski, who was living in Paris, had pleaded guilty in 1977 to having unlawful sex with a thirteen-year-old girl, and had fled the United States before the sentencing. A fugitive from justice for more than thirty years, he was now facing extradition.

Calling Polanski a “marvelous man,” Mitterrand said, “If the cultural world doesn’t support Roman Polanski, that would mean there is no culture in our country.”

The issue played into the hands of the French far right. Marine Le Pen, the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the ultraright National Front movement—and who later would be named his successor—read excerpts from Mitterrand’s book on prime-time television. She branded him a pedophile, and called for his resignation. Unconstrained by the code of silence that paralyzed much of the rest of the political establishment, she had pushed the matter into public view. Suddenly, Mitterrand’s book and his personal behavior became an issue.

Mitterrand had tested the tolerance of the tribe. He had accepted an appointment as a high-profile minister and assumed he would not be judged for having immortalized his confessions in writing. He should have been more cautious. And when he went on the offensive in a prime-time television interview, the beautifully wrought confession was stripped of its magic, and the truth was laid bare.

He confessed that he had paid for sex abroad. “Yes, I’ve had relations with boys,” he said, “but you can’t confuse homosexuality with pedophilia.” He called his behavior an “error,” though not a “crime.” When asked how he knew he had never paid for underage sex, Mitterrand replied that he could tell the difference between a youth and a “forty-year-old boxer.” He vowed not to resign.

In the end, he triumphed over Laurence Ferrari, the interviewer, not because of the force of his arguments but because she hadn’t done her homework. In the course of her questioning, Ferrari admitted that she had not read his book.

President Sarkozy backed his minister. To fire him or allow him to quit would have acknowledged that a mistake had been made in giving him the job. As time passed, the outrage subsided. Mitterrand threw himself into his work, traveling around France to open cultural exhibitions, sit on panels, deliver speeches, pin medals on artists and artisans. When he showed up at a festival of young filmmakers at Saint-Jean-de-Luz in the southwest corner of the country, he was greeted with a standing ovation.

The protection of privacy had trumped the calls for justice and punishment. A survey by the BVA polling firm determined that 67 percent of the French believed that Mitterrand should not resign.

Laurent Joffrin, the editor of
Libération
, defended the tradition that keeps lives private. He suggested in an editorial that it would be wrong to challenge Mitterrand’s word and try to prove that he was not telling the truth. “This obstinacy would have consequences that all of us must think about,” Joffrin wrote. Recalling that André Malraux, the country’s first culture minister, had called man “a miserable little pile of secrets,” Joffrin asked, “Do we want to reveal them? Do we want a society of total transparency, that is, a society of inquisition?”

The answer, obviously, was no. The French people wouldn’t stand for it. The codes might crack, but the glue of the centuries-old construction of secrecy would hold.

During his political life, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was convinced that he had discovered the formula for winning elections. It was not a sophisticated polling operation or a massive grassroots organization. It was not an army of brilliant speechwriters or policy aides educated at France’s top graduate schools.

Giscard had a much simpler solution: he went after the votes of women. And he did it not with promises of pay equity or better child care, but with
le regard
, the look, the electric charge between two people when their eyes lock and a bond is created.

Giscard served as France’s president from 1974 to 1981. As befits a French politician, he transformed his presidency into a three-volume political memoir with the grandiose title
Le pouvoir et la vie
—“Power and Life.” In it he boasted that he had worked hard on his
regard
and turned it into an effective campaign tool. “During my seven-year term, I was in love with 17 million French women…,” he wrote. “In all the demonstrations, parades, meetings, I would force myself to stare at each woman and each man who happened to be in front of me. Was there some method in this way of acting, some sort of trick to influence and seduce? Presumably.”

His honesty was at once disarming and alarming. He even talked about how his system turned him on: “By doing this, I would receive the special radiation of energy that is transmitted from one being to another, and this sensation made me feel good and emboldened me. As a result of looking at the women of France, I saw them, and I fell in love with them.”

He acknowledged that English-language readers would certainly find this way of thinking “very French!” He didn’t seem to care. More important was that he wanted readers to know how adept he was at visually undressing women. “It is true that I directly felt the presence of the women of France in the crowd, that I guessed their silhouettes and that I would linger just a little longer to look at them, the duration of this extra half-second when, suddenly, the nudity of the human being appears in the eyes,” he wrote. Though Giscard traveled widely and loved crowds all over the world, his special love for French women made him long to come home to them. Nothing compared to the erect, elegant posture of French women, which showed off their height. He praised their natural way of walking—“precise, without rigidity or a too-visible desire to attract attention.” Most of all, he adored their “delicious smiles,” because they conveyed both maternal and romantic love. It was, he recalled, a “pleasure and an anticipation that I cannot describe in a more precise way other than to compare them to the feelings you have when you are in love.”

Giscard did not limit himself to generalities. His memoirs are peppered with descriptions of specific women who attracted him. During a political event in Corsica, he imagined a female member of his own team, Alice Saunier-Seïté, in bed. As she introduced him before one event, he noticed her “muscular” body, the “feline ease” of her movements, her tanned-looking legs. “A bizarre thought crosses my mind,” he wrote. “When she makes love, she must put the same vehemence into it.” Giscard appointed her as his secretary of state for universities.

Giscard’s shamelessness and abundance of description touches on a fundamental rule of French politics: good politicians love and are loved. Their brand of love must fit one of the unofficial pillars of the French Republic: seduction. Politicians in any democratic country must woo the public, but in France it is assumed that their powers should not only be personal and magnetic but also extend to the bedroom. Appealing political positions are not enough.

France has always been a feminine country, and I’m convinced that its male politicians have some strange connection to France as a woman. And not just any woman: not a maternal figure like Mother Russia, but the beautiful, bare-breasted Marianne.

An aura of virility and sexual potency is not merely a plus. It’s a necessity. A political man who reveals his sexual prowess is proving his good health and vigor: he is showing his constituents that he is fully and physically capable of running the country. “To come to power, you have to seduce, and to stay there, you have to prove yourself
vigoureux
,” wrote Jacques Georgel in his book,
Sexe et politique.

Politicians are not hounded out of office for sexual indiscretions, and the public is often happy to let their secrets remain officially under wraps. But seduction flows as an undercurrent in public and private life, so it is natural that talking about politicians’ personal lives is part of the national discourse. There is one exception to the sexual indiscretion allowance: gender. A female politician is expected to be faithful to one partner.

I called on Giscard one morning at his antique-filled home in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. Dressed in a sober dark blue suit and tie, he received me in his study at a table covered in green baize. He had agreed to talk to me about France’s global stature and its potential for using “soft power” in the world today.

I gently moved the conversation to
le regard
that had created a special connection between him and the women of France. He nodded and pursed his lips in the subtlest of smiles. He did not hesitate in talking about the sexual tint of French politics. “Yes, that’s absolutely true,” he said. “It’s exactly what I think…. And the touch of the body, body contact. It’s a transfer of energy! When I see a smiling face, warm and pleasant, I want to touch it, and not just the face. The arm, the hand—to become energized.”

As I listened to these words from a former president, I felt my Americanness all the more keenly. In the United States, sexual desire is considered a distraction from the hard work of governing. Politicians are supposed to be pure, or at least strive to be. Americans have proved time and again that they see a politician’s cheating in marriage as tantamount to cheating on the voters and the country. Even the most innocently playful banter can have negative consequences. In France, the ability to seduce a lover and engage on the playing field of sexual pleasure, in or out of marriage, is regarded by both men and women as a basic male competency, and no male politician dares risk being seen as inadequate.

In October 1992 the popular magazine
Actuel
asked French politicians three questions: Have you completed your military service? Have you smoked marijuana? Have you cheated on your wife? These were the questions that had plagued Bill Clinton in his campaign for president that year, and in France, the exercise could have been considered an invasion of privacy.

Politicians on the left had no hesitation about the third question. Some of the answers were comical; all of them were ambiguous.

The former minister Claude Évin: “Cheated, no. Had diverse relations, yes.”

Jean-Jacques Queyranne, a deputy from the Lyon suburbs: “What French political man, what man-child would be pure enough? There you go. I answered.”

The former minister of commerce Jean-Marie Bockel: “The answer that I would have facing my wife, if she were here in front of me and if we were discussing this subject, is that I do not claim to be perfect.”

Jacques Rocca Serra, a senator: “I will not lie to you. In Marseille, everything is known. I do not drink. I do not smoke. I never gamble. But I have one passion, and I repeat one passion: I love women. I have been a very, very, very great womanizer. This earned me a very bad reputation, even though I’ve always strictly kept it separate from my political or professional occupations. Yet, while I was married—which only lasted for four years—I refused to cheat on my wife.”

Jean-François Hory, the president of the radical left: “I would respond the same way as Clinton: We have taken care of the problem, my wife and I. And it is no longer a problem today.”

On the right, where greater lip service is paid to the teachings of the Catholic Church, the answers were just as creative.

Patrick Devedjian, a deputy from the Paris suburbs: “If my wife were here she would perhaps answer you. She knows the answer.”

Alain Carignon, the mayor of Grenoble: “No. But I only recently got married…. I still have time…. Because life without seduction is death!”

During the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the United States, even French politicians associated with Catholic causes chose to congratulate Bill Clinton for his strength of libido rather than admonish him for his weakness of character. “He loves women, this man!” Marie-Christine Boutin, a deputy in Parliament and one of the major figures of the religious right in France, told a French interviewer. Boutin is an unusual politician in France because she brings her religious beliefs into the National Assembly. She is an anti-abortion activist, and she has held a Bible and shed tears in arguing against France’s domestic partnership legislation, which she claims encourages homosexuality. But Clinton’s sexual behavior was different. “It’s a sign of good health!” she said.

The French never understood all the fuss about Clinton and Lewinsky, the young White House intern. “Americans are the puritan descendants of the Mayflower,” Devedjian told the authors of
Sexus politicus
, a 2006 book on sex and politics in France, repeating an oft-sounded idea. “Our institutions originate in the decadence of ancient Rome. We are an old people. The mistresses of monarchs, from Louis XIV to Napoléon III…are part of our history. In truth, what is scandalous across the Atlantic is one of the favorite traditions in France.”

The French media and political elite made much of the fact that the report by independent counsel Kenneth Starr on the Lewinsky affair noted the president’s use of a cigar in a creative way. One of the funniest lines about the Lewinsky affair came from the parliamentary deputy André Santini, a center-right politician from a Paris suburb. “
Bill Clinton est l’homme qui a réconcilié la pipe et le cigare
,” he said. “Bill Clinton is the man who reconciled the pipe and the cigar.”
Pipe
has the same meaning in both French and English. But in French it also has a second meaning: it’s a vulgar slang term for fellatio. Santini, a passionate cigar smoker, liked the phrase so much that he used it over and over. France’s political leadership also felt Clinton’s pain. At one point, President Chirac telephoned Clinton to assure him of his esteem and his friendship “in this personal ordeal.”

The concept of sexual sin and forgiveness means little in French politics, and Bible-thumpers like Mark Sanford of South Carolina don’t exist in France. As a congressman in 1998, Sanford called for Clinton’s impeachment (“He lied under a different oath, and that’s the oath to his wife,” Sanford said); eleven years later, as governor of his state, he lied about his own extramarital affair. The French political elite was astonished when the sex antics of Sanford and María Belén Chapur, his “soul mate,” as he called her, made news. A lead paragraph like this one that appeared in the
New York Times
would never be found in a French newspaper: “Gov. Mark Sanford said Tuesday that he had visited his Argentine mistress more times than he initially disclosed and that he had had inappropriate flirtations with several other women as well.”

There is nothing unusual in France about a politician who is missing in action, as was Sanford when he secretly decamped to Buenos Aires to meet his lover. “Missing in action” is a tried-and-true component of French political life. Giscard, when he was president, was rumored to have crashed his car into a milk delivery truck returning to the Élysée early one morning after a
rendez-vous galant
, a romantic assignation. He neither confirmed nor denied the story. Chirac’s chauffeur wrote in his memoirs that Bernadette Chirac would incessantly ask, “But in short, Mr. Laumond, where is my husband tonight?”

What really made the French giggle about Sanford was his need to babble on about his feelings. French commentators were bemused that he got teary about crossing the “sex line” with Chapur, admitted his sinfulness, apologized, and asked for forgiveness. It is impossible to imagine Chirac or Sarkozy or any French politician giving such a performance.

Compare the fallout after the Sanford revelations with the smooth-as-silk—and very French—handling of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair. Strauss-Kahn, the former finance minister and Socialist Party presidential hopeful, was rumored to have had a long and deep history of interest in women other than his wife. Even in senior governmental circles, there was surprise when he was named head of the International Monetary Fund. But Sarkozy pushed for the appointment. Strauss-Kahn had been an able finance minister, he was considered a gifted economist, and his new assignment would get a potential Socialist rival out of the country.

Hints about Strauss-Kahn’s behavior had been the subject of rumors for years. In a kind of French parlor game, journalists and authors quoted one another as a way to avoid responsibility for the stories (and lawsuits). Press articles appeared with enough detail and innuendo that any reader could connect the dots and draw conclusions.

So many sources told so many stories that at least some of them had to be true, the French said. But the stories also made Strauss-Kahn a living legend, and some people expressed quiet admiration that such a high-profile political figure could find time for such an active social life. But then, as the media columnist Daniel Schneidermann told me, “There are no formal complaints; there are no judicial proceedings; there is no evidence with proof that you can print.” Anne Sinclair, Strauss-Kahn’s wife and one of France’s most respected television journalists, was asked in 2006 if she suffered because of her husband’s reputation as a seducer. She answered, “No, if anything I am quite proud! For a political man, it is important to seduce. As long as I seduce him and he seduces me, that’s good enough.”

A cover story in
Le Nouvel Observateur
in 2003 on group sex and “exchangism” clubs included a small sidebar headlined, “The Minister Is There.” It recounted a visit to a “private libertine soiree” by an unnamed minister with presidential ambitions. “They are oddly calm, almost tense…,” said the article. “Women are in uniform: short dresses, sexy underwear, leather skirts.” The minister looked taller than he appeared on television, “almost electoral,” the article continued. The details of the group sex were a bit blurred, although readers were told that “the poor man, overwhelmed for a second, quickly masters the situation.” One of the spectators remarked, “You really think he can become president?”