It's all smiles in Manhattan for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but in France sexual politics has changed for ever

For Dominique Strauss-Kahn, it was all smiles as he walked out of court. But back in France there has been a tectonic change in attitudes, writes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

Strauss-Kahn and his wife Anne Sinclair leave the apartment where they are staying in New York Photo: AFP

by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in Paris

8:58PM BST 02 Jul 2011

The photograph of Dominique Strauss-Kahn smiling with his glamorous wife, Anne Sinclair, as a free man in New York speaks volumes.

Everything about their appearance and demeanour telegraphs "victory", in this legal wrangle worthy of a television courtroom drama.

But, regardless of the outcome, the allegations that have emerged, both in court and in the media, about Mr Strauss-Kahn's escapades have caused a tectonic change in French politics, where habitual sexism and routine male straying were once seen as harmless.

French male politicians seemed slow on the uptake, but the women made up for it in spades. Seven of them, from the far Right to the far Left, and including two cabinet ministers, promptly denounced the chauvinism of their colleagues in scathing tones.

"I never wear a skirt when I come to the National Assembly for Wednesday's questions," disclosed Chantal Jouanno, the secretary of state for sports, and a former karate national champion, explaining thatSophie rude gestures, catcalls and jeers were so habitual among male MPs that they were never recorded or censured.

In a country where the most stringent privacy laws in the Western world are usually supported by public opinion and editors, suddenly the media were re-examining their choices. "Investigative reporting must stop at the bedroom door" had once been a mantra.

A couple of weeks ago, Le Monde, France's most austere broadsheet, where "all the news that's fit to print" had for half a century mostly meant arcane political and economics features written in high jargon, gave pride of place on most of its page three to a long piece on Strauss-Kahn's alleged escapades. This included the name and address of a swingers dining club where he was apparently known to habitués as "Le Ministre", and a police report on his having been surprised enjoying a prostitute's favours in a parked car in the Bois de Boulogne in 2007.

This was strong, indeed unprecedented, stuff.

A few days later, a Gaullist junior minister, Gorges Tron, who is also the mayor of his suburban town, got accused of sexual assault by two City Hall employees who alleged that he had abused them during reflexology foot massage seances he was, it was disclosed, in the habit of giving women in a specially appointed office. That this bizarre arrangement, on City time and presumably budget, was allowed to go on for years showed how much French politicians believed they could get away with.

Mr Tron, in time-honoured fashion, accused the women of political manoeuvring, and one of them of theft. But he was ordered by Nicolas Sarkozy to resign from the cabinet; and the National Assembly promptly voted to lift his MP's immunity, meaning he will have to fight charges in a criminal court in the coming months. The feeling in France was that this would never have happened before "L'Affaire DSK".

Now, however, if you are to believe the Socialist luminaries being interviewed all day on television after the latest developments in New York, everything is supposed to go back to square one.

Never mind that, as the alleged victim's lawyer said, "you can be a liar and still have been raped". "Dominique" was coming back: the white knight of the Socialist primaries. "It has all been a nightmare," as Jack Lang, the former culture minister said. The philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy, a prominent proponent of DSK's innocence, expressed his "happiness".

It remains to be seen whether French women will cave in meekly. This, to put it mildly, is very unlikely.

"Are we supposed to go back to our baskets nicely like before?" the novelist and feminist Sophie Chauveau asked. "I think not. You can't put this toxic paste back into the tube now."

Mr Sarkozy, who remained silent throughout L'Affaire, is watching with interest. Soon to be a father again, his own wife's wealth a pittance next to Miss Sinclair's, he feels that the character and extravagant habits he has been excoriated for in the past are no longer the issue for him, but rather for his adversary.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2011

Le Président Doth Protest Too Much

A THIN-SKINNED NICOLAS SARKOZY TAKES ON THE PRESS.

Paris

It’s hard to think of anything Nicolas Sarkozy could have done worse in his handling of le scandale (also known, somewhat unimaginatively, as Twittergate) these past two weeks. What started as vague Internet rumors and idle post-cheese course dinner-party gossip on the love life of the French president and his third wife—safely insulated from any media airing by some of the most stringent privacy laws this side of Beijing—has morphed into a major political crisis, threatening, as no mere opinion poll ratings could, Sarkozy’s bid for reelection in 2012.

The facts, if you can call them that, are a couple of blog and Twitter posts, soon alluded to on France’s answer to the HuffPost, LePost.fr, suggesting that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy had allegedly moved in with award-winning singer Benjamin Biolay (who once worked on one of her albums) while her husband, supposedly on the rebound, was said to have been giving the benefit of his presidential experience to environment minister (and French karate champion) Chantal Jouanno.

The rumors, carefully avoided by the mainstream French media, fully aware of guaranteed dire judicial and political fallout, then surfaced in the British tabloid press, which went at it with glee, even a certain insouciance. Sarkozy and Madame have from the start been a staple of the London popular newspapers, a piñata sent from heaven to revive flagging sales and casual anti-French prejudice (tinged with envy: any poll run by the Sun or the Daily Mail would find its readers convinced that the elevator-shoed poison dwarf ruling France has more fun and a better sex life than 90 percent of them). British tabloids have bid at auction on nude pictures of Carla Bruni, run endless jokes on Sarkozy’s lack of height (and Carla’s occasional “wardrobe malfunctions,” Fleet Street code for visible lack of undergarments), commented on Sarko’s custom-made low-slung lecterns, alleged that he planned to slight the queen at the last D-Day celebrations (with more than a bit of help from White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on that one), have seemingly never quoted La Bruni’s name without mentioning her string of famous ex-lovers (Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Donald Trump .  .  .), and in general been having what they see as clean, harmless fun.

So everyone was flabbergasted when, far from ignoring the whole brouhaha in dignified fashion, the Elysée mounted a campaign against what Pierre Charon, a senior Elysée press adviser and old political pal of Sarkozy’s, described as “an international plot by foreign financial interests, aimed at sabotaging the 2011 French presidency of the G20.” “These rumors have cropped up in coordinated fashion,” charged Thierry Herzog, the Sarkozys’ lawyer. “Someone must be behind this.”

There followed, in the age-old French tradition, a witch hunt. A blogger and the web editor of Le Journal du Dimanche who had alluded to the rumors were promptly sacked by their publisher, Hachette-Filipacchi Presse, which happens to be owned by a crony of Sarkozy’s, Arnaud Lagardère, the missile and aerospace manufacturer. (Hachette-Filipacchi is a perilous place to mention the president’s private affairs: The editor of Paris Match, the celebrity weekly, was similarly fired two years ago for having run a picture of Cécilia Sarkozy, the president’s previous wife, with the man she’s now remarried to, on a New York street.) Hachette-Filipacchi also requested a judicial inquiry into the “fraudulent entry of data into a computer network,” strongly believed to have been pushed for by Sarkozy. Charon, meanwhile, settling some private scores, accused former justice minister Rachida Dati, now exiled in disgrace to Brussels as a Euro-MP, of spreading the rumors (probably true, but then they were on everyone’s lips) and even manufacturing them (unlikely). The glamorous Dati hit back, posing as a victim (“My phones were tapped!”) and threatening lawsuits of her own.

If the hoped-for effect was the cowing of the French press, predictably, for all but the Elysée grand strategists, it backfired. Timid (and underfinanced) the Paris newspapers may be, but all this legal activity gave them the perfect excuse: They reported on the cases, never (heaven forbid!) the actual rumors. By early April, all but the names in play were the subject of French front page stories, cover features, and TV news flashes. The last veil was then ripped by Biolay himself, egged on, it was said, by Carla Bruni, who sued France’s respected but little-watched international news channel France 24 for mentioning him in a review of the foreign press coverage, and thereby put himself in the glare of any media attention he had until then managed to escape.

By this time Sarko, having first dismissed at length a Sky news interviewer during a visit to London (“I don’t have even half a second to consider these absurdities .  .  . ”), found himself reduced to sending his wife onto the morning radio talk shows and such friendly venues as Madame Figaro, the women’s supplement of Paris’s most respectful daily, to decry, in pained but restrained tones, the vulgarity and cheapening nature of it all. Bruni, who has more experience of the foreign celebrity media than her husband, laughed off any suggestion of conspiracy, protested that Dati was “a friend,” and denied that any police investigations had been ordered. (Unfortunately for her, Bernard Squarcini, the head of DCRI, French homeland security, contradicted her hours later.)

L’Affaire is by no means over. Last week Sarko, in Washington, was again quizzed, this time in a Katie Couric interview on Iran’s nuclear program. (Couric gave him a much easier time than she did, say, Sarah Palin: “It must get slightly annoying?” she commiserated about the coverage of his private life.) Even austere newspapers like Le Monde have run many column inches on the consequences for Sarkozy’s reelection in two years. “Can the president keep his cool?” is the implicit question.

As with every ailing regime, leaks now gush out, in print, of every instance of Sarkozy weakness—how he was nearly incapacitated by his 2007 divorce; how he has surrounded himself with courtiers who daren’t warn him of obvious mistakes. (Pierre Charon was described to me by an Elysée aide as “un amuseur, someone who, 500 years ago, would have worn a parti-colored costume and a hat with bells on around the king.”) What makes all this unfortunate is that Sarkozy is still sensible in his political decisions​—reforming France’s cumbersome state pension system and, abroad, pushing for tougher sanctions on Iran, to cite just two. But unlike most of his predecessors (recall Mitterrand who for 14 years hid the existence of two parallel families, in addition to his legal one, from the public, using the vast resources of the French state), Sarkozy is no cynic. If you prick him, he does bleed. And if you wrong him, he shall want revenge.

© Copyright The Weekly Standard & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2010