The Ecole Nationale d'Administration is a launch pad for meteoric careers in the civil service, politics and industry. Anne-Elisabeth Moutet asks how its unabashed elitism will serve France in the 2000s
They are all alike. Or at least they look it. Smooth, clever, quick with an analysis, sometimes impressively efficient; often infuriatingly flippant and detached from the nuts and bolts of the organisations they run. France is the only country – apart from Japan, with omnipresent Tokyo University ('Todai') graduates – which has a seamless front linking top civil servants, government officials, business leaders, even finance wizards. The President of the Republic, Jacques Chirac, is a member of the club. So is his prime minister (and Socialist political opponent), Lionel Jospin. So are their rivals within their parties. So are the chairs of France Telecom, Renault, oil giant Elf-Aquitaine, 17 of the 20 largest French banks, water utility giant Vivendi, four out of six broadcast television channels (public and private), half the French Cabinet, two-thirds of partners at Rothschild et Cie merchant bank. And so on, and so on.
All these people are graduates of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, known in France as ENA. It is a government school whose students enter via a gruelling competitive examination (only 120 are admitted each year) and exit with a precise ranking that will determine their careers.
The influence of ENA has been compared with Oxbridge in the UK. It is at the same time more and less meritocratic, ENA-bred technocrats will argue almost convincingly. 'In France, you succeed and are integrated into the highest levels of society only through scholarship,' says one. 'In one generation, you can become a firm member of the establishment. In the US, in one generation you can become very rich but you will not become a Wasp. What is undemocratic is that once you belong to the elite, you will never fail. There are no sanctions, except for political ones, and these are not final, because the same people come back two years later. There is a network of solidarity.'
ENA was created on October 9, 1945, by a decree signed by General Charles de Gaulle, then heading the newly liberated France's provisional government. He wanted to remove once and for all the largely Napoleonic French administration 'that sadly had shown in 1940 how obsolete it had been allowed to become'. Behind this lay an old French fear – the defeatism and failure of its elites, as shown by the large number of high-level collaborationists in the Vichy government during the Second World War. Much the same had happened in 1871, when Professor Emile Boutmy created the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, later IEP (familiarly known as Sciences Po) directly after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.
The school was the brainchild of a future prime minister, Michel Debré, who would later draft the Constitution of the Fifth Republic in 1958. He said he wanted to give 'young students of all conditions' access to the kind of studies until then 'the preserve of the children of the rich Parisian elite, studying at the Institut des Etudes Politiques'. Ironically, Sciences Po, which had fulfiled its promise in 1914, had failed in 1940 to vote for the government of Marshal Henri Pétain, and was nationalised in the same legislation that created ENA.
No one could have known, in the flush of liberation, quite how much influence ENA graduates, or énarques, would eventually wield in France. Yet their image – there are now around 4,500 énarques in France – evolved to evoke some of the very things ENA was created to dispel: a haughty, inbred caste of privileged young men (and about 20% women) firmly believing that their destiny is to rule the country in close association with other énarques, with little more than contempt for whoever is not cast in their mould.
The scarcely concealed real power is evident when you start listing famous ones. According to another study, only 10% of politicians are énarques, yet they hold almost all the high-profile jobs. Of all France's presidents of the Fifth Republic, only two – Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Jacques Chirac – were young enough to attend the new institute. De Gaulle tended to pick old Resistance companions as his chief ministers, with the notable exception of Georges Pompidou (who, like his contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre, taught French literature in a lycée during the Occupation).
Pompidou's resulting inferiority complex made him pick his own best and brightest from among the énarques, rather than from the ranks of historic Gaullists, whom he felt would always remind him of his wartime attentism, or lack of political commitment. Hence the brilliant careers of politicians and industrialists such as Chirac, Raymond Barre, Michel Jobert, Jacques Calvet and Edouard Balladur. Similarly, the Left had its own énarques: Lionel Jospin, Michel Rocard, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, Laurent Fabius, Pierre Joxe, Jacques Attali, and later, Martine Aubry and Elisabeth Guigou, among others.
The former Speaker of the Assemblée Nationale, Philippe Séguin, as well as his successor, Fabius, are énarques. The governor of the Banque de France, Jean-Claude Trichet, is an énarque. Autodidact big bosses, who may harbour their own opinion of énarques, still hire a few – so that those crucial telephone calls or discreet meetings can always be arranged between 'old colleagues'. Foreign governments send a few of their best and brightest to ENA to have someone who will help them understand France: there is a special programme for foreigners at the school, the only notable differences are that they are not ranked (ensuring they have a better time among the fiercely competitive students) and spend only three months doing a practical trainee stint (le stage) in a French administration, as opposed to two stints of six months for French students. Such high-flyers as the German Joachim Bitterlich (currently tipped to become the European Union's foreign policy representative) or the Briton Matthew Kirk of the Cabinet Office attended ENA; most European nationalities are usually represented, as well as Japan, South America and Africa.
Edith Cresson, that famously crusading anti-énarque, who ordered the school's removal in 1992 to Strasbourg in a failed attempt to lessen its influence, still employed three énarques in the top jobs among her staff when she was prime minister. Probably the most accurate criticism I have heard of her was that 'she didn't know how to pick her énarques. The ones she got were absolutely the wrong ones, no charisma or organisation. They let themselves be trampled all over by everyone else's énarques during inter-ministerial staff meetings. Of course, later she gave up on énarques and hired her dentist.' Thus speaks another énarque – a chief of staff for one of Cresson's former ministers.
You can rise pretty high in France without belonging to this caste but, as the example of the late prime minister Pierre Bérégovoy shows, you are never allowed to forget that you are not quite top drawer. You will not be forgiven your mistakes. Bérégovoy – driven to suicide in the early 1990s by the disclosure of an interest-free loan he was given by a shady business friend of François Mitterrand – was the target of cruel jokes from members of his own government. Interior Minister Pierre Joxe, himself an énarque and the son of a Gaullist minister, once 'defended' Bérégovoy against criticism by remarking: 'You only have to look at Pierre Bérégovoy's socks to know he's an honest man.'
What is conveniently forgotten is how weighted the scales are in favour of those students who already know what the game is all about, usually because their families have been there first. The oral examination that ends the round of written tests to get into ENA is as much a test of social ease, a certain type of detached repartee, of social background, as it is of general knowledge. The selection committee, which in addition to professors, includes old boys and girls of every variety, tries to put the student off, with questions such as: 'What trade did [JM] Keynes' wife practise?' (One student who actually knew the correct answer – a Ballets Russes dancer who ran with the Bloomsbury crowd – was still not passed: he had committed, he recalled with bitterness 30 years later, the cardinal sin of shooting back his answer 'too earnestly, as if I were sitting in a quiz show instead of making a flippant joke of it'.) 'Who, for you, is the woman who best represents the average French female?' 'Do you prefer Athens or Sparta? Talleyrand or Fouché?' The same unlucky candidate gave Michèle Morgan as the epitome of French femininity, only to be countered languidly by a white-haired diplomat with: 'But what about Brigitte Bardot?'
The two-year course includes a practical stage in an administration, state-owned company or even a foreign country, as well as lectures in public law, economics, history and political science. Tension is kept at a high pitch; the final exam includes a ranking that effectively will decide the énarques' future career for the next 40 years. Only the top 15 students of their 120-strong year at ENA (la botte) can join the civil service grands corps (Inspection des Finances, Cour des Comptes and Conseil d'Etat). These are inter-ministerial bodies that control state finances and procedures of the state administration. Inspection des Finances is by far the strongest network – they are superénarques who believe they are a different breed from all other énarques. Most of them then go on for a stint at the French Treasury: no anti-Frankfurt advocates need apply. The rest will become préfets, diplomats, and so on, their networks never as high powered as expected; their careers and pay never quite hitting the heights.
The result of this inbreeding, critics have repeatedly warned, is to create structural weaknesses in the French economic and political fabric, a tendency to do deals with one's peers rather than let them assume the full weight of their decisions – witness the constant bailing out of ailing French companies by the government, from Dassault to Air France.
The French elite rise to the top without any business experience; they apply to every situation the strong authoritarian hierarchic mould they learnt in the civil service; they are remarkably insular and ignorant of the world outside France. For example, Jacques Attali insisted that an 'Anglo-Saxon plot' had cost him his job at the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development, not his lavish spending on the bank's headquarters. They demoralise the majority of civil servants, politicians, and businesspeople who, knowing they are not members of the club, realise that most top jobs will escape them, even if they have spent an entire career in their company or political party.
Unlike Whitehall civil servants who come from a slightly more varied academic background, even if a great many are Oxbridge, they have read an infinity of different things there, énarques have spent their formative studies swotting on narrow subjects. 'While the studies were of a very high level,' remembers one British énarque, who enjoyed his time at the school, 'I found it impossible to have real debates with my classmates. They were amazingly bright but they would never "waste time" in conversation or intellectual debate when they could be gaining the few points that meant a difference in ranking. All they always wanted was "the right answer" – it dismayed many of our lecturers.'
The danger with Oxbridge graduates can be dilettantism; but it has advantages – a sense of distance that the average énarque cruelly lacks. On the other hand, it does not much matter what your social background is when you have been to ENA; the school makes you. And in France, accent and delivery have got to do with education, not background. However, the snobbery is confined within the school. The Inspection des Finances actually prints its own annuaire (listing of past graduates of inspection), distinct from the less exalted annuaire de l'ENA. Anyone thinking that Jospin (ranked in the 80s, foreign ministry) is on the same level as Chirac (ranked tenth, Cour des Comptes) or Fabius (first, inspecteur des finance) is missing a key nuance in French politics.
Through France's mathematical and scientific tradition, and because the only other school that approaches ENA in terms of social promotion is the top engineering school Polytechnique – which your brightest énarques, from Giscard d'Estaing to author Alain Minc, have also attended, énarques are usually much better plugged into technology and business. One example is Michel Bon, chairman of France Telecom, universally acknowledged to be the best among European telecommunications chiefs. Bon, an atypical enough inspecteur des finances that he headed the hypermarket chain Carrefour for several years, really understands what industrial policy is about.
But then French culture is about top-down industrial policy all the way from Louis XIV: anything that requires massive investment and infrastructure, from the high-speed TGV trains to fibre optics, telecommunications, etc. Your average énarque, however, is blind to the 'bottom-up', that 'post-industrial revolution that takes place in the bedrooms of 14-year-olds', as the writer Adam Gopnik once put it. The Internet baffles them – they cannot comprehend that it has no centre.
And yet most members of this elite still feel they have to prove themselves in different areas, always with the detached attitude of the amateur. The solution in France? Literature, of course. Attali, Jean-Yves Haberer, Juppé, Giscard d'Estaing have all written rather bad, bloodless novels. Jean-Claude Trichet writes poems and essays on poetry. Banque Nationale de Paris' Michel Pébereau, even in the middle of the bank's current hostile takeover bid for Société Générale and Paribas, reviews science fiction books for a highbrow magazine. Having monopolised almost all positions of power in France, énarques still crave recognition from circles that they know have little power.
© Copyright The European & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1999
Wednesday, September 1, 1999
Monday, November 23, 1998
'Monica's story' much like Diana's
The most famous feminine icon of our media-obsessed fin-de-siècle is an attractive, egocentric, not-particularly bright, love-addicted young woman from a well-to-do broken home, prone to frequent temper tantrums, with an eating disorder, a questionable taste in men, a serious telephone, shopping and hairdressing habit, and who, just out of her teens, fooled herself into thinking that she would one day become consort to the Master of the World.
No, not Monica Lewinsky. The late Princess Diana, of course.
The announcement, earlier this week, that Diana's approved biographer, Andrew Morton, would write Monica's own story for St. Martin's Press/Michael O'Mara books, should come as no surprise to us.
After all, both women alternately tried to conform, then chafed (rather than rebelled) against bewildering expectations of public and private behavior. They found themselves hounded by the establishment and the media, their telephone calls tapped, their love life speculated upon. Both have followed various courses of psychotherapy and counseling. Vast sums of money have been offered to auction off their clothes. Both rated "Vanity Fair" photoshoots. Both spent claustrophobic months cooped-up in their plush apartments, eating TV dinners in front of the tube, reduced to tears at the prospect of a life forever spent under a magnifying glass.
The similarities go much further than the effects of the celebrity machine steamroller. Both Monica and Diana were painfully ill-equipped to deal with adulthood, their barely-adequate schooling (whether at West Heath College or Bel Air Prep School) offering them little opportunity for self-esteem. After managing a single prize over her entire high-school years (for "best-kept hamster"), Diana was so desperately unhappy in the Swiss finishing school she was subsequently packed off to that she dropped out after one term. Monica was the only girl in her class not invited to her classmate Tori Spelling (daughter of "Dynasty" producer Aaron Spelling)' 15th birthday. Diana's first jobs were as cleaning lady and nanny. Monica's were as shop assistant and legal receptionist.
Both girls have unresolved conflicts with more poised, but less scrupulous mothers, who drilled into them unreasonable expectations, and whom they have regularly, if somewhat wistfully, termed [their] "best friend[s]". Diana's "bolted" (the accepted expression, in the English upper classes) from the family home to pursue an affair with a married man, ultimately losing custody of her children. Marcia Lewis-Lewinsky divorced Monica's father California-style, with a settlement including therapy costs for her daughter. "I was brought up with lies all my life," says Monica in the infamous Tripp tapes. "To get money from my Dad I had to tell him a story. My Mom lied about everything ... all the time."
It was her mother - thin, celebrity-focussed, more successful with men - who got Monica her intern's job at the White House. It was Diana's maternal grandmother, Lady Fermoy, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, who eventually pushed her as a suitable bride for Prince Charles; but it was Diana's mother who first encouraged her children to play with the young princes, and used to joke that Diana would marry Prince Andrew. This is the boomers' sense of entitlement gone mad: Windsor Castle or the White House as post-prom playground; as the convenient set for ambitions vicariously vested in their children.
Just as Diana ranted about the courtiers, the "gray men" who tiresomely wanted her to read up on the institutions she carelessly opened, Monica complained about Evelyn Lieberman and other White House staffers who expected of her -- typing skills! correct spelling and grammar! Diana rollerskated down the corridors of Buckingham Palace to the muffled sounds of her Walkman. Monica stalked the East Wing corridors with gifts of pizza and Godiva chocolates. Reproaches of unseemliness were greeted with rolled-up eyes by both girls alike. Even their indiscretions are amazingly similar, down to the expletives. "When I think of all I've done for this f***ing family!" [the House of Windsor] Diana complains to her boyfriend James Gilbey in the notorious "Squidgygate" taped telephone call.
Flareups were frequent: Diana shouted at her secretaries, press assistants, her husband's staff; rang up Camilla Parker-Bowles to tell her she had sent hired killers to her house; dropped her friends dramatically; fired aides, maids, hairdressers, masseuses, therapists. Monica merely screamed at the Secret Service and at the long-suffering Betty Currie. "If I'd know the sort of girl you were, I would never have gotten involved with you," President Clinton is quoted as telling Monica: feelings heartily endorsed by Prince Charles.
Both Diana and Monica have repeatedly described themselves as "insecure" and "vulnerable"; and in both cases, they have been enthusiastically believed when putting forward their cases for public consumption. Diana's stage was the world media, while Monica's, so far, has only been Ken Starr's Grand Jury; but it is interesting to note how well the jurors received her testimony: time and again, evidence of identification and bonding shows through the transcripts. Motherly advice is profferred: ": Monica, none of us in this room are perfect," says one juror at the end of her deposition. "We all fall and we fall several times a day. The only difference between my age and when I was your age is now I get up faster." Diana charmed the historian Paul Johnson and the film producer David Puttnam; Monica has obviously bowled over Larry King, who had repeatedly said on air that "the President did the wrong thing by this young girl."
Andrew Morton, one of the hardened breed of British Royal correspondents, will no doubt find himself in familiar territory when he starts working with Monica. "They clicked very loudly," his publisher Michael O'Mara said last week, describing the first Morton-Lewinsky meeting. "They were making progress on the book before [Morton] even signed." Diana had picked him personally to write the 1992 biography revealing her bulimia and her suicide attempts, and which finally sealed the end of her marriage to Prince Charles. Its serialization in the Murdoch-owned "Sunday Times," raising as it did Britain's Republican sentiments, was seen as high treason by the Windsors. (Diana answered all Morton's questions in a series of tape-recordings in order to be able to deny ever having met him, a cute legalism Clintonites should appreciate.)
There will be talk of midnight binges (Monica, unlike Diana, did not make herself throw up afterwards); of best friends to whom one "babbles." There will be names of heads of State and foreign countries thrown incongruously into a Barbara Cartland recital: Monica accompanying the Defense Secretary to Bosnia and giving her analysis to Clinton late at night; Diana meeting president Sadat of Egypt during her honeynoon and impulsively kissing him.
It should be acknowledged at this stage that both women tried to please according to the rules they were brought up with. Diana, perfectly capable of stalking her men (the married art-dealer Oliver Hoare, who received more than 200 anonymous phone calls traced to her private line; the Pakistani surgeon Hasnat Khan, whom she regularly visited at night in hospital, and whose parents received a surprise visit at their home near Lahore) outwardly cultivated the pure English rose style. Monica, in the Beverly Hills style documented by the late Nicole Simpson and Faye Resnick, "fooled around" at the drop of a beret.
Of the two, Monica got the rawest deal - a $600,000 book contract instead of a $80 million divorce settlement; Monica inflatable dolls instead of Diana Franklin Mint memorial figurines - but it should be said that she was the more sincere of the two. She did love her "Butthead", whom she saw, perhaps accurately, as a lonely, insecure little boy (a description which could easily apply to prince Charles, but which his ex-wife never considered.) Unlike Diana, she never wished to topple the head of State, trying to protect him instead. But with Andrew Morton's canny help, she might fare better in the long run, as long as she avoids playboys and too-fast cars.
No, not Monica Lewinsky. The late Princess Diana, of course.
The announcement, earlier this week, that Diana's approved biographer, Andrew Morton, would write Monica's own story for St. Martin's Press/Michael O'Mara books, should come as no surprise to us.
After all, both women alternately tried to conform, then chafed (rather than rebelled) against bewildering expectations of public and private behavior. They found themselves hounded by the establishment and the media, their telephone calls tapped, their love life speculated upon. Both have followed various courses of psychotherapy and counseling. Vast sums of money have been offered to auction off their clothes. Both rated "Vanity Fair" photoshoots. Both spent claustrophobic months cooped-up in their plush apartments, eating TV dinners in front of the tube, reduced to tears at the prospect of a life forever spent under a magnifying glass.
The similarities go much further than the effects of the celebrity machine steamroller. Both Monica and Diana were painfully ill-equipped to deal with adulthood, their barely-adequate schooling (whether at West Heath College or Bel Air Prep School) offering them little opportunity for self-esteem. After managing a single prize over her entire high-school years (for "best-kept hamster"), Diana was so desperately unhappy in the Swiss finishing school she was subsequently packed off to that she dropped out after one term. Monica was the only girl in her class not invited to her classmate Tori Spelling (daughter of "Dynasty" producer Aaron Spelling)' 15th birthday. Diana's first jobs were as cleaning lady and nanny. Monica's were as shop assistant and legal receptionist.
Both girls have unresolved conflicts with more poised, but less scrupulous mothers, who drilled into them unreasonable expectations, and whom they have regularly, if somewhat wistfully, termed [their] "best friend[s]". Diana's "bolted" (the accepted expression, in the English upper classes) from the family home to pursue an affair with a married man, ultimately losing custody of her children. Marcia Lewis-Lewinsky divorced Monica's father California-style, with a settlement including therapy costs for her daughter. "I was brought up with lies all my life," says Monica in the infamous Tripp tapes. "To get money from my Dad I had to tell him a story. My Mom lied about everything ... all the time."
It was her mother - thin, celebrity-focussed, more successful with men - who got Monica her intern's job at the White House. It was Diana's maternal grandmother, Lady Fermoy, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, who eventually pushed her as a suitable bride for Prince Charles; but it was Diana's mother who first encouraged her children to play with the young princes, and used to joke that Diana would marry Prince Andrew. This is the boomers' sense of entitlement gone mad: Windsor Castle or the White House as post-prom playground; as the convenient set for ambitions vicariously vested in their children.
Just as Diana ranted about the courtiers, the "gray men" who tiresomely wanted her to read up on the institutions she carelessly opened, Monica complained about Evelyn Lieberman and other White House staffers who expected of her -- typing skills! correct spelling and grammar! Diana rollerskated down the corridors of Buckingham Palace to the muffled sounds of her Walkman. Monica stalked the East Wing corridors with gifts of pizza and Godiva chocolates. Reproaches of unseemliness were greeted with rolled-up eyes by both girls alike. Even their indiscretions are amazingly similar, down to the expletives. "When I think of all I've done for this f***ing family!" [the House of Windsor] Diana complains to her boyfriend James Gilbey in the notorious "Squidgygate" taped telephone call.
Flareups were frequent: Diana shouted at her secretaries, press assistants, her husband's staff; rang up Camilla Parker-Bowles to tell her she had sent hired killers to her house; dropped her friends dramatically; fired aides, maids, hairdressers, masseuses, therapists. Monica merely screamed at the Secret Service and at the long-suffering Betty Currie. "If I'd know the sort of girl you were, I would never have gotten involved with you," President Clinton is quoted as telling Monica: feelings heartily endorsed by Prince Charles.
Both Diana and Monica have repeatedly described themselves as "insecure" and "vulnerable"; and in both cases, they have been enthusiastically believed when putting forward their cases for public consumption. Diana's stage was the world media, while Monica's, so far, has only been Ken Starr's Grand Jury; but it is interesting to note how well the jurors received her testimony: time and again, evidence of identification and bonding shows through the transcripts. Motherly advice is profferred: ": Monica, none of us in this room are perfect," says one juror at the end of her deposition. "We all fall and we fall several times a day. The only difference between my age and when I was your age is now I get up faster." Diana charmed the historian Paul Johnson and the film producer David Puttnam; Monica has obviously bowled over Larry King, who had repeatedly said on air that "the President did the wrong thing by this young girl."
Andrew Morton, one of the hardened breed of British Royal correspondents, will no doubt find himself in familiar territory when he starts working with Monica. "They clicked very loudly," his publisher Michael O'Mara said last week, describing the first Morton-Lewinsky meeting. "They were making progress on the book before [Morton] even signed." Diana had picked him personally to write the 1992 biography revealing her bulimia and her suicide attempts, and which finally sealed the end of her marriage to Prince Charles. Its serialization in the Murdoch-owned "Sunday Times," raising as it did Britain's Republican sentiments, was seen as high treason by the Windsors. (Diana answered all Morton's questions in a series of tape-recordings in order to be able to deny ever having met him, a cute legalism Clintonites should appreciate.)
There will be talk of midnight binges (Monica, unlike Diana, did not make herself throw up afterwards); of best friends to whom one "babbles." There will be names of heads of State and foreign countries thrown incongruously into a Barbara Cartland recital: Monica accompanying the Defense Secretary to Bosnia and giving her analysis to Clinton late at night; Diana meeting president Sadat of Egypt during her honeynoon and impulsively kissing him.
It should be acknowledged at this stage that both women tried to please according to the rules they were brought up with. Diana, perfectly capable of stalking her men (the married art-dealer Oliver Hoare, who received more than 200 anonymous phone calls traced to her private line; the Pakistani surgeon Hasnat Khan, whom she regularly visited at night in hospital, and whose parents received a surprise visit at their home near Lahore) outwardly cultivated the pure English rose style. Monica, in the Beverly Hills style documented by the late Nicole Simpson and Faye Resnick, "fooled around" at the drop of a beret.
Of the two, Monica got the rawest deal - a $600,000 book contract instead of a $80 million divorce settlement; Monica inflatable dolls instead of Diana Franklin Mint memorial figurines - but it should be said that she was the more sincere of the two. She did love her "Butthead", whom she saw, perhaps accurately, as a lonely, insecure little boy (a description which could easily apply to prince Charles, but which his ex-wife never considered.) Unlike Diana, she never wished to topple the head of State, trying to protect him instead. But with Andrew Morton's canny help, she might fare better in the long run, as long as she avoids playboys and too-fast cars.
© Copyright Chicago Sun-Times & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1998
Monday, March 23, 1998
The French Malaise: Why The National Front Still Does Well In Elections
The French Malaise: Why The National Front Still Does Well In Elections
by Anne-Elisabeth MoutetSpecial to The Wall Street Journal
March 23, 1998.
Early in the movie "Primary Colors," there is a scene in which the Clintonesque character campaigns for the Democratic nomination in a run-down New Hampshire factory. A good half of his audience have been laid off and the rest know more downsizing is on its way . "I won't lie to you," the candidate says. "Your jobs are gone for good and you won't get them back." His platform is education, he tells them -- the economy is now global, borders have opened up worldwide, and their old Rust Belt "muscle jobs" have gone to the Third World -- "which is why you must develop another set of muscles, the ones between your ears."
Such a speech (and the applause that greets it; the screenwriters are at pains here to establish the public merits of their character) would be unthinkable when portraying a Left-wing French politician. Or a Right-wing French politician, for that matter. Telling unpalatable truths on the stump? Even once in office? You're more likely to hear assurances to the French that their comprehensive health coverage, fat unemployment benefits, and pay-as-you go pension system is not at risk, even though the simple servicing of its debt takes up one fifth of the nation's budget.
No one dares dispute the Received Canon -- the State can create jobs, working shorter hours can fight unemployment... Our so-called wise men point out to the 1995 six-week transport strike as the fate automatically befalling a French government that tries, for instance, to align State employee benefits on those of the rest of the workforce.
It would be interesting to find out if straight-talking -- which hasn't been attempted since Premier Raymond Barre two decades ago -- would indeed prove fatal to French politicians. For certainly equivocation doesn't seem to have served them. Abstention levels reached unprecedented heights -- close to 47% -- in last week's regional and local elections. Of those who bothered to cast a ballot, over a quarter voted in protest, for extremists or weird lists - 4% for a Hunting and Fishing party, 5% for the Trostkyite Lutte Ouvrière, and of course 15.5% for the racist and xenophobic Front National. The traditional parties, left and right, were neck to neck with about 35% of the vote each. The only clear message sent by French voters seems to be one of mistrust and disenchantment with their politicians.
There is an element of kabuki in the ritual dance performed by French political parties. Only with a very familiar script can the inconsistency of reconducting a Left-wing regime in a right-wing-voting country be durably overlooked. Add up the votes of the FN and of several smaller parties to those of the moderate right, and you reach a solid majority of some 58%. Even with the help of the Greens and the Trostkyites, the Left falls short of anything approaching a quorum.
For even though many of its economic indicators are back in the black -- growth is predicted at 3% this year; the trade balance has record surpluses; inflation is kept below 2%; the budget deficit will be kept below the EMU-required 3% -- France is in a deep funk.
Unemployment stands at 12.2%, with European record peaks for long-term and youth unemployment. (One out of four French people between the ages of 18 and 25 are out of a job.) One full third of the country's workforce is employed by the State (in the civil service, education or State-owned monopolies such as the post office or railway system), with guaranteed job security and perks; while the others struggle in a difficult labor market. Taxes and social levies have reached 50% of income without reducing the health, welfare and pension system's deficit, it is regularly saved from the brink by new "exceptional" taxes that are never rescinded.
Economists have calculated that an amazing 70% of France's FF 8 trillion GDP transit through the hands of the State, two-thirds of which are public spending, and the rest divided between welfare and health payments and State-owned and partially State-owned industries (France still owns 80% of France Telecom (telco), 40% of Renault (cars), all of Aérospatiale (planes and missiles), etc.
This mammoth conglomerate, bound closer than any Japanese keiretsu to the MITI, is ruled by an amazingly homogeneous elite of upper civil servants and former upper civil servants, 80% of whom graduated from only one of two schools, Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA) or Ecole Polytechnique ("X"). The same account for two-thirds of for the private or recently privatised sector bosses -- or for Cabinet ministers of both Left- and Right-wing governments. There are no premiums on original thinking in France.
No wonder that all the government has so far offered as solutions is still more regulations and taxes. The country's bosses are up in arms against the most recent measure, a bill limiting the workweek to 35 hours. Department of Labor inspectors (who traditionally have wide powers with which even the relevant Minister, in this instance Martine Aubry, cannot interfere), have decided the bill should be strictly applied to executives, and recently started clocking raids in various large companies, interrupting executives working late or during meetings with customers.
In one very recent Kafkaesque instance, the Human Resources director of Thomson Radars et Systèmes, the electronics company, was personally fined FF 100 million for contravening working hours regulations -- which the company is forbidden by law to pay for him. The rationale is that companies will be forced to hire more if they stick to the legal 35-hour workweek. It hasn't given rise to much hope among the very people for whom it was supposed to create jobs.
The French awareness of all this can be summed up in one word: lassitude. It's the same discouragement which variedly pushes some to vote for the Front National and others to leave the country. A poll taken last January by the newsweekly Valeurs Actuelles showed an amazing 64% of young French people ready to expatriate themselves to look for a job. (Until very recently, France was one of the lowest emigration countries in the world, with fewer than 2% expatriated citizens: the French used to hate learning foreign languages and changing their comfortable lifestyle.)
The new French brain drain goes well beyond the usual college graduate crop. British hotels and restaurants employ thousands of young French people. (The number of registered French nationals at the Consulat de France in London has trebled to 100,000; in San Francisco it has jumped to 40,000 from 17,000.)
Today, the Front National shines its headlights so brightly on the rabbits of the moderate political spectrum, frozen bleary-eyed on the road to political alliances, that no-one seems to have made the fairly simple calculation that it, too, is a victim of French disenchantment. Its 15.5% score last Sunday is equal to previous results in past years: simple mathematics prove that if FN voters hadn't abstained in equal proportions to the rest of the electorate, the FN ought to have scored much higher. That it didn't could mean it has reached its all-time high for good -- the French are no more ready to believe in its backwards solutions than they trust the old-style politicos. This could be a reason for hope, but only if the rest of the political class seizes the opportunity for real reform.
© The Wall Street Journal & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 1998.
Sunday, March 1, 1998
Le Zippergate
When Harry, the eponymous hero of Woody Allen's latest movie, quips back to his sister who's just accused him of believing only in "cynicism, sarcasm and orgasm" that in France, he could "run on that platform," audiences in packed Paris movie theaters howl in appreciative laughter.
"After all," one spectator joked coming out, with no hint of reproach in his voice, "that was indeed François Mitterrand's unofficial platform."
Deconstructing Harry is tipped for the César of the Best Foreign Film in a few days: we French adore Americans who understand us so well.
At for all the others, those who fuel the Monicagate furore and seem to want to get rid of Bill Clinton for a mere peccadillo, we shrug in Gallic incomprehension. Then sly enlightenment dawns on our faces: once more, in true Gaullist tradition, we'll be able to smugly sock it to the Yanks.
Besides, the French like their leaders to have a sex drive. Widen this to a sensual drive. We like them to eat, drink, and be merry. We prefer by far Talleyrand, with his corruption and womanising, to Robespierre, who lived blamelessly in a tiny walk-up apartment on rue Saint-Honoré, from which he would walk to the Revolutionary Assembly and sentence hundreds of people to the guillotine daily. One of favourite kings was Henry IV, the Religious Wars peacemaker whose second most favourite quote is "Madame, until age 40 I thought it was made of bone."
In a country that thought a good rap on the knuckles would have been amply sufficient punishment for Richard Nixon, "the most brilliant player in world policy at the time," Le Figaro's then foreign editor, Robert Lacontre, used to write the idea of impeaching a leader who presided over a fall of the unemployment rate to 4% (ours is at 12.2%) and the doubling of the Dow Jones index is absurd.
Our pols can be straight or gay (both the former spokesman of the Socialist party and the Mayor of Marseilles are gay): all that matters is that they're getting some. We want them potent, in every meaning of the term.
Even our Reds are no Puritans: the Communist union leader Henri Krasucki worried comrades and foes alike by staying single and living with his elderly mother until well in his fifties - then everyone heaved a sigh of relief on the day of his marriage. CP historical leader Georges Marchais lived openly with his mistress until the early Eighties - the kind of conduct that could have sent an East German or Soviet pol into disgrace. The only disgrace some can find in themselves to ascribe Clinton is the distressing lack of sophistication of his pants-dropping wooing style. "But does he get results like that?" one bemused, faintly supercilious senior Elysée aide asked me as I explained the alleged circumstances of the Paula Jones incident.
Similarly, the only thing that shocked the French about the Bank of England sex scandal (when deputy governor Rupert Pennant-Rea's career came to an abrupt end after it transpired he was having a torrid affair at his office) were the squalid logistical details. No Frenchwoman would do it on Governor Trichet's Banque de France office carpet (it helps that the Republic provides Trichet with a 9000 sq. ft flat at the Palais Royal, the most beautiful location in Paris.)
Not only do we want our men to have cojones we want our women to have them too. Monicagate managed to raise yet higher, if it was possible, Hillary Clinton's popularity in France. We love Hillary. Hillary could be French: she's razor-sharp, sophisticated, elegant, ruthless if need be, and a lioness to defend her man.
Even for those who understand that the issue is less sex than lying and perjury, the reaction doesn't vary. "But whyever ask him in the first place?" inquires Conservative député André Santini. "Any man will lie if asked whether he has a mistress. It's kinder to everyone involved. Nobody needs lose face over it."
"Wanting to know everything about a man is the mark of the totalitarian mind," the leader writer of the provincial newspaper "Sud Ouest" wrote, echoing André Malraux's famous quote: "What is a man but a miserable little heap of secrets?"
And the right to keep one's own secrets is deeply valued by the French, to the extent that our country, where habeas corpus is unknown and the police enjoy rights unknown in England or America, boasts one of the most extensive laws against cross-referencing electronic databases. We are old Catholics and do not believe in Perfect Man an idealistic, Reformation notion. One of our few favoured Bible quotes is "who aspires to be an angel becomes a beast."
Yvette Roudy, a Socialist député and former (quite militant) Minister for Women's Rights, says those who would accuse Bill Clinton of sexual harassment, be it over Paula Jones or Monica Lewinsky, are doing women a "true disservice. Sexual harassment is a real evil that must be stamped out. It can include loss of job and health, deep depression induced over months of pressure and bad treatments on the workplace. Demeaning the accusation by using it over a case in which Clinton took no for an answer at once; or another on which both parties were major and apparently willing, makes women look ridiculous and hysterical."
Madame Roudy, let's face it, in one of the very few to look seriously at the possible consequences of "Braguettegate" (Zippergate), as it is called here.
Most politicians, commentators, and private citizens are just enjoying the giggle with a vengeance. Early on, the widely popular satirical puppet show Les Guignols de l'Info showed, on prime time, a police line-up of line-drawn penises, one largely tattooed with a saxophone, in which Mss. Lewinsky & Jones had to pick the guilty party. Left- and Right-wing députés who a week before had come to fisticuffs on the floor of the House over the Dreyfus affair, paraded for TV cameras in happy harmony. Newspapers all ran headlines punning on various equivalents of the English verb "blow."
Of late, though, a more thoughtful note has crept into the comments: "The real pity would be if Clinton's little bit of fun affected his foreign policy performance," says Michel Gurfinkiel, the editor of the newsweekly Valeurs Actuelles.
On Friday, after president Chirac (who shares with Clinton a love for food and various romantic links, the latest to the actress Claudia Cardinale) decided to support the US over the Iraqi threat, the Guignols de l'Info puppet anchor blared "Clinton conclusively proves the 'butterfly effect' in chaos theory: Unzipping a fly in Washington causes steel rain in Baghdad."
"After all," one spectator joked coming out, with no hint of reproach in his voice, "that was indeed François Mitterrand's unofficial platform."
Deconstructing Harry is tipped for the César of the Best Foreign Film in a few days: we French adore Americans who understand us so well.
At for all the others, those who fuel the Monicagate furore and seem to want to get rid of Bill Clinton for a mere peccadillo, we shrug in Gallic incomprehension. Then sly enlightenment dawns on our faces: once more, in true Gaullist tradition, we'll be able to smugly sock it to the Yanks.
Besides, the French like their leaders to have a sex drive. Widen this to a sensual drive. We like them to eat, drink, and be merry. We prefer by far Talleyrand, with his corruption and womanising, to Robespierre, who lived blamelessly in a tiny walk-up apartment on rue Saint-Honoré, from which he would walk to the Revolutionary Assembly and sentence hundreds of people to the guillotine daily. One of favourite kings was Henry IV, the Religious Wars peacemaker whose second most favourite quote is "Madame, until age 40 I thought it was made of bone."
In a country that thought a good rap on the knuckles would have been amply sufficient punishment for Richard Nixon, "the most brilliant player in world policy at the time," Le Figaro's then foreign editor, Robert Lacontre, used to write the idea of impeaching a leader who presided over a fall of the unemployment rate to 4% (ours is at 12.2%) and the doubling of the Dow Jones index is absurd.
Our pols can be straight or gay (both the former spokesman of the Socialist party and the Mayor of Marseilles are gay): all that matters is that they're getting some. We want them potent, in every meaning of the term.
Even our Reds are no Puritans: the Communist union leader Henri Krasucki worried comrades and foes alike by staying single and living with his elderly mother until well in his fifties - then everyone heaved a sigh of relief on the day of his marriage. CP historical leader Georges Marchais lived openly with his mistress until the early Eighties - the kind of conduct that could have sent an East German or Soviet pol into disgrace. The only disgrace some can find in themselves to ascribe Clinton is the distressing lack of sophistication of his pants-dropping wooing style. "But does he get results like that?" one bemused, faintly supercilious senior Elysée aide asked me as I explained the alleged circumstances of the Paula Jones incident.
Similarly, the only thing that shocked the French about the Bank of England sex scandal (when deputy governor Rupert Pennant-Rea's career came to an abrupt end after it transpired he was having a torrid affair at his office) were the squalid logistical details. No Frenchwoman would do it on Governor Trichet's Banque de France office carpet (it helps that the Republic provides Trichet with a 9000 sq. ft flat at the Palais Royal, the most beautiful location in Paris.)
Not only do we want our men to have cojones we want our women to have them too. Monicagate managed to raise yet higher, if it was possible, Hillary Clinton's popularity in France. We love Hillary. Hillary could be French: she's razor-sharp, sophisticated, elegant, ruthless if need be, and a lioness to defend her man.
Even for those who understand that the issue is less sex than lying and perjury, the reaction doesn't vary. "But whyever ask him in the first place?" inquires Conservative député André Santini. "Any man will lie if asked whether he has a mistress. It's kinder to everyone involved. Nobody needs lose face over it."
"Wanting to know everything about a man is the mark of the totalitarian mind," the leader writer of the provincial newspaper "Sud Ouest" wrote, echoing André Malraux's famous quote: "What is a man but a miserable little heap of secrets?"
And the right to keep one's own secrets is deeply valued by the French, to the extent that our country, where habeas corpus is unknown and the police enjoy rights unknown in England or America, boasts one of the most extensive laws against cross-referencing electronic databases. We are old Catholics and do not believe in Perfect Man an idealistic, Reformation notion. One of our few favoured Bible quotes is "who aspires to be an angel becomes a beast."
Yvette Roudy, a Socialist député and former (quite militant) Minister for Women's Rights, says those who would accuse Bill Clinton of sexual harassment, be it over Paula Jones or Monica Lewinsky, are doing women a "true disservice. Sexual harassment is a real evil that must be stamped out. It can include loss of job and health, deep depression induced over months of pressure and bad treatments on the workplace. Demeaning the accusation by using it over a case in which Clinton took no for an answer at once; or another on which both parties were major and apparently willing, makes women look ridiculous and hysterical."
Madame Roudy, let's face it, in one of the very few to look seriously at the possible consequences of "Braguettegate" (Zippergate), as it is called here.
Most politicians, commentators, and private citizens are just enjoying the giggle with a vengeance. Early on, the widely popular satirical puppet show Les Guignols de l'Info showed, on prime time, a police line-up of line-drawn penises, one largely tattooed with a saxophone, in which Mss. Lewinsky & Jones had to pick the guilty party. Left- and Right-wing députés who a week before had come to fisticuffs on the floor of the House over the Dreyfus affair, paraded for TV cameras in happy harmony. Newspapers all ran headlines punning on various equivalents of the English verb "blow."
Of late, though, a more thoughtful note has crept into the comments: "The real pity would be if Clinton's little bit of fun affected his foreign policy performance," says Michel Gurfinkiel, the editor of the newsweekly Valeurs Actuelles.
On Friday, after president Chirac (who shares with Clinton a love for food and various romantic links, the latest to the actress Claudia Cardinale) decided to support the US over the Iraqi threat, the Guignols de l'Info puppet anchor blared "Clinton conclusively proves the 'butterfly effect' in chaos theory: Unzipping a fly in Washington causes steel rain in Baghdad."
© Copyright Pittsburgh Post-Gazette & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1998
Tuesday, September 9, 1997
Society writer inspires the French Left
Anne-Elisabeth Moutet describes how Paris has fallen at the feet of a 72-year-old lady bountiful.
A seventy two year-old lady novelist whose couture suits, pearl earrings and shoulder brooches have become ubiquitous on the coolest French television talk shows (such as Canal Plus's Nulle Part Ailleurs) has become the unlikely heroine of the French left. She presides at grand lunches given by French industry for George Soros; and even -- in effigy -- at the front of workers' marches, with banners quoting from her book.
The success of Viviane Forrester's slim essay L'Horreur Economique, which has been on the L'Express bestseller list for one year, selling 350,000 copies since the summer of 1996, must be seen against the background of rising unemployment and political impasse. In the past 15 years every political party has been in power save the National Front; each promising to reduce unemployment, each failing and being voted out in what has been called the "windshield-wiper voting pattern."
L'Horreur Economique is being translated into 17 languages; and there is talk of a Gaumont-backed documentary directed by Marcel Ophuls. Meanwhile Forrester tours the country lecturing. She promises a sequel "to answer the people who have written to me" -- 500 in the first month of publication alone.
Many believe Forrester's ideas played a part in the Socialist party's surprise victory in May's general election. One of the slogans shouted by the striking Belgian Renault workers, recently protesting against the closure of the Vilvoorde plant, was Non à l'horreur économique.
Her thesis is simple to the point of crass. There is, she writes, a conspiracy by "those who control economic power" to "hide from the workers the truth that they are no longer needed by the capitalist economy." These new elders of Mammon regard unemployment as desirable: companies which close down plants see a rise in their share price. Politicians and civil servants collude in producing trumped-up statistics and trompe-l'oeil policies designed to provide fallacious hopes for the jobless. Countries such as Britain and the US, where unemployment has fallen, have achieved this by slashing welfare protection and creating jobs that "import third world conditions into first world countries."
"I do not belong to the power elite, to the establishment," says Forrester, commenting on her unexpected popularity. "I can say unfashionable things. I can speak for the downtrodden." This is disingenuous, to say the least. Forrester is a book reviewer for Le Monde and a member of the Prix Femina jury, which makes her a serious force in the Paris nomenklatura. (When André Brincourt, chief reviewer for Le Figaro, did not like one of her recent novels, he devoted a third of a page, complete with flattering picture of the author, to explain how he felt unable to understand her.) She has published a dozen novels and biographies of Vincent van Gogh and Virginia Woolf. A scion of the Louis-Dreyfus banking family, she wrote an acclaimed memoir of her war years, describing how she and her parents hid from the Nazis. In literary Paris, you mess with such a woman at your peril.
"We are now discovering that there is something worse than being exploited: it is to be deemed unexploitable. In the 19th century, proletarians were expected to stay in their place. Today, they are told that they have no place at all," she says. Her sincerity is not in question. But it is considered unsophisticated in Paris to ask what exactly are Forrester's credentials as a political economist. (Answer, given cheerfully by the author herself: none - although she lists 146 books in her bibliography, ranging from Hannah Arendt to Norbert Wiener.) One of her critics is Alain Minc, the author and Le Monde chairman - a nomenklatura heavyweight himself. "Your book is a talented opinion poll," he recently told her. "It is a publishing success because it plays on people's fears. But it would have sold far fewer copies if it had been signed by [Communist party leader] Robert Hue." Minc argues that the prosperous French workers and their unions have refused to trade some of their benefits for wider employment. "Since 1973, average purchasing power has risen by 40 per cent in real terms in France. If we had accepted a rise of only 35 per cent, there would be 1m more jobs."
Minc's language is very far from Forrester's emotional prose. In beautiful, stream-of-consciousness French, she describes the homeless sleeping in the streets of Paris near luxury shops; compares young French Algerians in their banlieues to Emma Bovary dreaming of the good life; berates the economics Nobel prize winner Gary Becker for suggesting that European governments lower their dole payments to push the unemployed back to work. It is easy and repetitious ("there are fewer jobs" appears, among others, on pages 10, 13, 38, 42, 63, 74, 86, 136) and sterile. "It's not my job to offer solutions," Forrester says.
Forrester believes that "cosmopolitan foreign thought has taken over our familiar world, destroying it"; and repeats variations of this theme throughout her book. For some reason, nobody in France has yet pointed out to the former Viviane Louis-Dreyfus that exactly the same terms are now used by Jean-Marie Le Pen, and were at the core of Vichy ideology. The myth of a defenceless France besmirched by a coven of evil financiers is regrettably familiar in French history.
A seventy two year-old lady novelist whose couture suits, pearl earrings and shoulder brooches have become ubiquitous on the coolest French television talk shows (such as Canal Plus's Nulle Part Ailleurs) has become the unlikely heroine of the French left. She presides at grand lunches given by French industry for George Soros; and even -- in effigy -- at the front of workers' marches, with banners quoting from her book.
The success of Viviane Forrester's slim essay L'Horreur Economique, which has been on the L'Express bestseller list for one year, selling 350,000 copies since the summer of 1996, must be seen against the background of rising unemployment and political impasse. In the past 15 years every political party has been in power save the National Front; each promising to reduce unemployment, each failing and being voted out in what has been called the "windshield-wiper voting pattern."
L'Horreur Economique is being translated into 17 languages; and there is talk of a Gaumont-backed documentary directed by Marcel Ophuls. Meanwhile Forrester tours the country lecturing. She promises a sequel "to answer the people who have written to me" -- 500 in the first month of publication alone.
Many believe Forrester's ideas played a part in the Socialist party's surprise victory in May's general election. One of the slogans shouted by the striking Belgian Renault workers, recently protesting against the closure of the Vilvoorde plant, was Non à l'horreur économique.
Her thesis is simple to the point of crass. There is, she writes, a conspiracy by "those who control economic power" to "hide from the workers the truth that they are no longer needed by the capitalist economy." These new elders of Mammon regard unemployment as desirable: companies which close down plants see a rise in their share price. Politicians and civil servants collude in producing trumped-up statistics and trompe-l'oeil policies designed to provide fallacious hopes for the jobless. Countries such as Britain and the US, where unemployment has fallen, have achieved this by slashing welfare protection and creating jobs that "import third world conditions into first world countries."
"I do not belong to the power elite, to the establishment," says Forrester, commenting on her unexpected popularity. "I can say unfashionable things. I can speak for the downtrodden." This is disingenuous, to say the least. Forrester is a book reviewer for Le Monde and a member of the Prix Femina jury, which makes her a serious force in the Paris nomenklatura. (When André Brincourt, chief reviewer for Le Figaro, did not like one of her recent novels, he devoted a third of a page, complete with flattering picture of the author, to explain how he felt unable to understand her.) She has published a dozen novels and biographies of Vincent van Gogh and Virginia Woolf. A scion of the Louis-Dreyfus banking family, she wrote an acclaimed memoir of her war years, describing how she and her parents hid from the Nazis. In literary Paris, you mess with such a woman at your peril.
"We are now discovering that there is something worse than being exploited: it is to be deemed unexploitable. In the 19th century, proletarians were expected to stay in their place. Today, they are told that they have no place at all," she says. Her sincerity is not in question. But it is considered unsophisticated in Paris to ask what exactly are Forrester's credentials as a political economist. (Answer, given cheerfully by the author herself: none - although she lists 146 books in her bibliography, ranging from Hannah Arendt to Norbert Wiener.) One of her critics is Alain Minc, the author and Le Monde chairman - a nomenklatura heavyweight himself. "Your book is a talented opinion poll," he recently told her. "It is a publishing success because it plays on people's fears. But it would have sold far fewer copies if it had been signed by [Communist party leader] Robert Hue." Minc argues that the prosperous French workers and their unions have refused to trade some of their benefits for wider employment. "Since 1973, average purchasing power has risen by 40 per cent in real terms in France. If we had accepted a rise of only 35 per cent, there would be 1m more jobs."
Minc's language is very far from Forrester's emotional prose. In beautiful, stream-of-consciousness French, she describes the homeless sleeping in the streets of Paris near luxury shops; compares young French Algerians in their banlieues to Emma Bovary dreaming of the good life; berates the economics Nobel prize winner Gary Becker for suggesting that European governments lower their dole payments to push the unemployed back to work. It is easy and repetitious ("there are fewer jobs" appears, among others, on pages 10, 13, 38, 42, 63, 74, 86, 136) and sterile. "It's not my job to offer solutions," Forrester says.
Forrester believes that "cosmopolitan foreign thought has taken over our familiar world, destroying it"; and repeats variations of this theme throughout her book. For some reason, nobody in France has yet pointed out to the former Viviane Louis-Dreyfus that exactly the same terms are now used by Jean-Marie Le Pen, and were at the core of Vichy ideology. The myth of a defenceless France besmirched by a coven of evil financiers is regrettably familiar in French history.
© Copyright Prospect & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1997
Thursday, October 31, 1996
The crown prince at the House of Rothschild
Anne-Elisabeth Moutet profiles banker David de Rothschild as he moves to take the reins of the family's British merchant bank.
The European, 31 October 1996
Few French banking insiders are surprised by the announcement that David de Rothschild, head of the Paris-based Rothschild & Compagnie Banque, is to be brought even closer to the heart of the London-based N M Rothschild & Sons.
He was appointed by his cousin Sir Evelyn Rothschild as head of the global committee to co-ordinate Rothschild investment banking around the world, confirming him as Sir Evelyn's heir apparent, four years after he had been made deputy chairman of N 11/21 Rothschild.
Under David, 54, son of Baron Guy de Rothschild, head of the French branch of the family, Rothschild & Compagnie Banque had established itself as France's second most active investment bank, behind the legendary Lazard Freres - a respectable result for an operation created from scratch 12 years ago.
When the French Socialists nationalised the old Banque Rothschild in 1982, together with the rest of the French banking system, Baron Guy was outraged to be turned out of the family business - and the legendary building his ancestors had worked from for over a century on Rue Laffitte, employing such bright young men as Georges Pompidou, the former French president.
He was leaving France for good, he vowed in a famous Le Monde article, in which he thundered: "I was a Jew under Petain, now I'm a pariah under Mitterrand. I've had enough!"
Barely two years later, he and his son David were back, using the Ffr400 million ($77m) compensation they had been paid at the time of the nationalisation to set up a small investment bank under the name Paris-Orleans Finance. Two years later, under the first collaboration between then prime minister Jacques Chirac and President Mitterrand, they were allowed to use their own name again, and the name was changed back to Rothschild & Compagnie.
By then it was obvious that the nationalisation had proved a thinly disguised blessing.
Nationalisation compensations had been calculated on the share price over a five-year period, which usually produced much higher valuations that the 1982 bear market price. Rothschilds were rid of an inefficient, overstaffed retail banking network.
By 1987, David de Rothschild was luring to his company such whizzkids as Jean-Charles Naouri, former chief of staff of minister Pierre Beregovoy, and the man widely credited for the Paris Bourse "small bang" and the complete opening up of French financial markets. Naouri almost immediately created his own, Rothschild-backed investment fund, Euris, which is now valued at more than Ffr10bn.
In 1989 David poached Jean-Claude Meyer from Lazards: year and a half later, Meyer closed the Ffr23bn deal in which Philip Morris acquired Jacobs Suchard.
A subsequent uneasy, truce between Lazards & Rothschild was ended in 1994 when the Rothschilds hired Christian de Labriffe, a Lazards partner. In the meantime, Rothschild & Cie had hired Wasserstein-Perella' s international celebrity Yves-André Istel, in 1992, as vice chairman in charge of development of the United States branch, Rothschild Inc; and offered jobs to Gerard Worms, the former chairman of Compagnie de Suez, and to Nicolas Bazire, former chief of staff of Edouard Balladur, who had become prime minister.
For the past six years, the bank has proven one of the main players on the French and international scene. It advised Trust House Forte in its winning bid for Meridien Hotels against Accor, counselled by Lazards. It was the French, government's adviser in the privatisation of Renault and Thomson. It also advised Lyonnaise des Eaux when it acquired Northumbrian Water and sold PFG.
The bank's latest recruits have pulled their weight: Worms was instrumental in the rapprochement between Credit Communal de Belgique, while Bazire oversaw the setting up of a strategic alliance between Compagnie Generale des Eaux and British Telecom.
Rothschild & Cie employs 160 people whereas NM Rothschild's City teams number 600. The group employs 2,200 people worldwide wide. This helps explain the policy for both independent houses to work together "whenever possible".
A degree of specialisation has also taken place: London tends to do telecoms and natural resources, while Paris makes agribusiness and food a speciality. But mostly the French bank, following its London cousin's tradition, has become an expert at privatisations.
Rothschild & Cie's progress comes at a time when its older rival and neighbour Lazard Freres is suffering from transformation pains. Lazard's "elephants", Antoine Bernheim, Bruno Roger and Jean Claude Haas, all pushing 70, are said to be unhappy with the promotion of Michel David-Weill's brash son-in-law, Edouard Stern, 41, as heir-apparent, and with Stern more adventurous strategies. This explains the recent haemorrhage of younger partners.
Younger French Rothschild family members have been painlessly eased into Rothschild & Cie: Edouard de Rothschild, David's half-brother, is a full partner while their stepbrother Philippe de Nicolay works in the asset management department.
Eric de Rothschild, their cousin. son of Baron Guy's late brother Alain, who until now was in charge of the family's Bordeaux wine, Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, has also joined the bank. Although there are so far no expectations of seeing Swiss-based cousin Edmond de Rothschild's Compagnie Financière Edmond de Rothschild join the family group at this stage, Edmond's son Benjamin might come and work for Rothschild & Cie, say bank insiders.
The suicide this summer in Paris of Amschel Rothschild, 41, son of Victor and brother of Jacob, who was in charge of Rothschild Asset Management, rocked the bank. Amschel had just attended a normal working lunch with the Paris asset management team.
That evening he walked back from the bank's Rue Rabelais's offices to his hotel, the Bristol, and hung himself with his bathrobe belt from a towel rack in the bathroom. He had been, friends said later, depressed.
Paris Rothschild sources were quick to dismiss rumours that he had been shattered by the prospect of being elbowed out of Sir Evelyn' s succession by David.
"Amschel just wasn't terribly good at what he did, and he'd known it for years," one source said. "David had been made vice-chairman four years ago. This was no longer an issue."
Certainly David's latest promotion confirms his position as the anointed Rothschild crown prince. "Evelyn is still going strong at 64," insiders protest. "And he has children in their teens. They will inherit ultimately, there's no doubt about that."
But it is the French cousin who may find himself steering the House of Rothschild, more united than at any time for the be part of a century, into the new millennium.
© Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 1996
Tuesday, August 27, 1996
The LBO Artist As Movie Star: Reinventing Bernard Tapie
Filmmaker Claude Lelouch Reinvents Bernard Tapie: from business tycoon to movie star, writes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet
The European, 27 August 1996.
In one of the early shots of Claude Lelouch's new film, Hommes, Femmes: Mode d'Emploi ("Men, Women: Instructions for Use") starring Bernard Tapie, the 53-year-old bankrupt businessman, Eighties icon and ex-minister of François Mitterrand, the camera glides past a Crédit Lyonnais branch on Place de l'Opéra. This triggers some nervous giggles in the audience. Crédit Lyonnais is of course the bank that financed Bernard Tapie's wildest business ventures throughout the Eighties, and, being still owed 1.3 billion francs, forced him into bankruptcy a year and a half ago.
Asked about the shot, Claude Lelouch claims he didn't even notice the Crédit Lyonnais sign while filming. Neither did he plan a subtle reference to Bernard Tapie's tax-dodging shell company for his corporate jets (and his yacht), which resulted in an 18-month prison sentence currently under appeal one of several when he shows Benoît Blanc, the fictional character played by Tapie, flying his own helicopter inscribed "Air Blanc".
One is inclined to believe Lelouch, if only because movieland is a vastly different world from the financial and political one inhabited until now by Bernard Tapie. In the latter, people know all about the companies Tapie bought (Wonder, Look, Terraillon, Testut, Adidas), the bankers who gave him unlimited credit (Pierre Despessailles of SdBO, Jean-Yves Haberer of Crédit Lyonnais), the judges who have charged him with corruption, tax evasion, misappropriation of company funds, intimidating witnesses (Eric de Montgolfier, Eva Joly, Thierry Philipon), the politicians who supported his meteoric career (François Mitterrand et al.)
It's an impressive cast list, with intricate ramifications and hundreds of episodes. Tapie's own life isn't a two-hour feature film, it's an Aaron Spelling series spread over the years, and true addicts in Paris know every little plot turn.
But Claude Lelouch, who has clocked some 30 movies since his famous A Man And A Woman, churning out at least one a year, isn't that kind of an addict. Twenty-seven years ago, he came across the young Bernard Tapie, who had taken to rent his screening room every Thursday night not to show pictures but to give motivational sales talks. He was, Lelouch recalls, "riveted" and asked Tapie if he had considered acting. The former car salesman and budding business leader, who five years earlier had cut three singles in an attempt to break into the pop music scene, answered he wasn't interested. In 1972 Lelouch followed up on his instinct and called Tapie, offering him a part in L'Aventure, c'est l'aventure, opposite Jacques Brel and Lino Ventura. He didn't have time, Tapie said.
Lelouch called again ten years ago, in the middle of the go-go Eighties, when Tapie had become a star on the Bourse, in the evening news, as chairman of Olympique de Marseille football club. His latest project was a monthly TV programme entitled Ambitions, in which he interviewed, in front of a studio audience, young people who had plans to set up a business, and solicited phone-in financing pledges. He was proving a first rate television personality. "I told him I didn't know whether, in ten years' time, he would sit in the Elysée Palace or in jail, but both would be interesting to watch would he let me follow him around with a camera for a documentary?"
Still Tapie turned Lelouch down. But when, last year, having been declared bankrupt, his house and his furniture repossessed, threatened with expulsion from his seat in the Assemblée Nationale and jail, he received yet another telephone call from Claude Lelouch, he knew the filmmaker was in earnest, not trying to score easy publicity points. "He was in the pits," Lelouch recalls. "Nobody else was calling apart from his lawyers. He said yes."
"We knew perfectly well it would be no use making me an idealist hero, a knight in shining armour," Tapie says. "Nobody would have believed it. So Claude chose the only option he made me into an even worse bastard than expected."
This is disingenuous. Benoît Blanc, the shady, high-powered lawyer whom Tapie portrays in the film, is fallible but engaging, capable of great charm (like Tapie) and vulnerability (much less like Tapie), a persuasive talker (like Tapie) who can argue about religion and philosophy quoting Pascal or St Augustine (totally out of character). Tapie's quick, instinctive intelligence is there, but not his essential brutality and ruthlessness. "I was not interested in these aspects of his personality", Claude Lelouch told me, a little wary. "You have to remember this is a fiction film. Benoît Blanc is not Bernard Tapie. He is a character I wrote up, and then offered to Bernard because I thought he would be ideal. If he'd turned me down I would have offered the part to Jean Yanne."
It should be said at this stage that Hommes, femmes, mode d'emploi is a very good movie, and that Bernard Tapie is a brilliant actor in it, unexpectedly understated: but then the entire cast is superlative, from Fabrice Luchini, who plays a plainclothes cop whom Tapie befriends in a hospital waiting roomwhen both have to undergo tests for stomach cancer, to Anouk Aimée as a charming black-crepe-wreathed confidence trickster working Paris cemeteries in search of rich widowers. Lelouch has been known to be uneven, but this is one of his best efforts a wistful fable about playacting on stage and in life, about human relationships and death.
To a French viewer, the sub-text of Tapie's personal history adds obvious depth to his character. (It's probable some of the on-screen coincidences came unconsciously to Lelouch.) But Tapie's performance is such that Gillo Pontecorvo insisted that the film should open the Mostra at Venice next week, asking Lelouch "Who is this new actor you have cast? He is remarkable." Now there is talk of two parts being offered in America (including one, possibly, as Che Guevara), and although Tapie isn't talking, he admits that he has been brushing up on his English. "There's a strong buzz about him," Lelouch confirms. "People in Hollywood have their ears to the ground. Bernard has a serious career ahead of him."
To dedicated Tapie-watchers, there are strange similarities with Bernard Tapie's previous incarnations. Whenever he bought up a new company or started in a new enterprise, he was, he assured the audiences that invariably flocked to see him, a changed man. When he ran for the House, in 1988, he said he would put all his businesses into a blind trust. (He didn't.) When he acquired Adidas in 1990, he swore it was the culmination of his career, that he would run it for decades (He flogged it off two years later.) Earlier he variously vowed he would devote his entire energies to cycling (he sponsored a team including Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault in the Tour de France for three seasons), to football (he bought Olympique de Marseille in 1986 and sold it in 1993). Even Lelouch had a few private butterflies before he started: he shot the 53-million-franc film in 39 days last winter, having worked out a supertight schedule "because I couldn't be sure Tapie's interest in the whole exercise wouldn't flag. But it didn't. He never came late, not even once, and he always knew his lines."
"Can cinema save Tapie?" asked the headline on the cover of thre newsmagazine L'Express last week. The answer, roughly, is "no". On the day the movie was released, Tapie formally resigned from his seat of Député, explaining in radio interviews that he couldn't lead a political and an acting careers at the same time. This had been nicely timed to ensure additional media coverage for Lelouch's film. It was also untrue: Tapie jumped because he was about to be pushed in a matter of days rather than weeks. He has already been given separate suspended jail sentences adding up to over eight years, only part of which are suspended; these, together with his bankruptcy, make him uneligible for elected office; he isn't even allowed to vote anymore. He hasn't given up his EuroMP seat, however the invalidation procedure there is much more arduous, and Tapie needs the job and the 70,000 francs a month pay, his only source of income these days. "Brussels is different," he says unconvincingly. "You don't have to give up your professional activity to be a MEP." But soon, when all the appeals have run out, Tapie will in all probability have to do time one or two years at the very least. It is, say intimates, a perspective that terrifies him.
Bernard Tapie was born in 1943 in North Paris, in a working-class family, and grew up in Le Bourget. He doesn't even have his baccalauréat (although he has at times to have an electrical engineering degree). But at school, at the army or on a hadball field, he was from the start the boy around whom all the others clustered. After the army he worked as a car salesman, then started a business selling TV sets. From this (and after his brief attempt to become the next Johnny Hallyday, under the name Bernard Tapy) he graduated to creating a commercial consumers' association that obtained discounts in big stores for its members.
He had a partner there; he left under a cloud. More can't legally be printed: Bernard Tapie, until two years ago, had a clean criminal record; it is actionable under French law to mention whatever got amnestied in the past. There followed an unsuccessful attempt to create an emergency heart disease ambulance service; then a first buy-out of an ailing newsprint company, the harbinger of countless LBOs throughout the Eighties. But Tapie first impinged upon the national consciousness in 1979, when he announced grandly he would buy up the castles belonging to the deposed Central African "emperor", Jean-Bedel Bokassa. The deal eventually fell through, but Tapie became a star, getting his first taste of being interviewed by every television channel.
He had vowed he would become an industrialist. What he really became was an asset-stripper. His technique was always the same - he'd buys up a practically bankrupt company for one symbolic franc, file a winding-up petition, then got the receivers to agree to a 12- to 24-month freeze of all its debts. Next came ruthless downsizing, while Tapie convinced hard-pressed creditors to let him buy back the company's debts for a small fraction of their face value between 10% and 30%. Publicity he took care of himself. Usually management and employees at first welcomed this forthright, smiling, charismatic character who swooped down upon them flying his own plane, haranguing them on the shop floors, vowing that he'd make the company great again. But Tapie's problem is that he is no industrial strategist and he can't resist a quick franc. The plane costs were billed to the companies he visited, for instance. New products were long in coming. He announced profits when there were none.
In the mid-Eighties it was impossible to miss Tapie in the media. He had his own TV programme. He said he would start "no-nonsense" business schools designed to train good salespeople. He bought an 18th century townhouse in the grand Faubourg Saint-Germain from the couturier Hubert de Givenchy, and said he was filling it with priceless antiques. (When they were seized by Crédit Lyonnais two years ago, it turned out many were fakes.) He sailed the biggest yacht in France, the Phocéa. He gobbled up companies with proud old names, such as the 84-year-old Madame Grès's couture house. And thoughout, he was bankrolled by SdBO (Société de Banque Occidentale), a Crédit Lyonnais subsidiary, with gay abandon.
Tapie says today many more people share the responsibility for Crédit Lyonnais's appalling losses (estimated at some 100 billion francs) but he's the only one whose name comes back again and again: the establishment figures get away with it. He has a point: a former Crédit Lyonnais chairman, Jean-Maxime Lévêque, for instance, whose own small private bank, IBI, was bought out by the Lyonnais, lost them 8 billion francs, 6 times as much as Tapie. Yet the man in the street doesn't know Lévêque's name. But this is a poor excuse and it doesn't start to cover such convictions as corrupting players from the Valenciennes football team to throw their match against Olympique de Marseille, or Tapie's numerous tax dodges.
Still, when he acts in a film, Tapie doesn't cheat anyone. All he is contracted to do is there to see on the screen; there are no disappointments, no funny surprises. Rather than being paid up front for Hommes, Femmes, Mode d'Emploi, he has decided to get a percentage of the box-office results: after the first 35,000 tickets are sold, he is to receive 2.85F on each ticket price. (That way the money won't be confiscated too soon by the Lyonnais). If the movie does well, he stands to make several million francs. As it is, his letterbox is filling with scripts every morning.
© Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 27 August 1996
Thursday, March 28, 1996
Credit Lyonnais bought a studio but loses script
Anne-Elisabeth Moutet looks at the hubris of a French bank that overreached itself
The European, 28 March 1996
THE persistent rumour in Paris is that Jean Peyrelevade, the chairman of Credit Lyonnais, is seriously thinking of jumping ship and joining Lazard Freres as a senior partner. It surprises no one.
Until a year ago, his bank was commonly known as "Discredit Lyonnais" , and it sometimes seemed as though there was no loss-making venture in Europe in which Credit Lyonnais was not involved. However, Peyrelevade was recently able to announce that the bank was in the black for the first time since 1991; although he was not expecting wild praise, he did hope for some modest kudos.
The bank posted token 1995 profits of Ffr13 million ($2.5m) for an overall gross banking income of Ffr43 billion - the latter down by five per cent from last year. Provisions still stood at almost Ffr6bn, encouragingly down from Ffr14bn last year. Overheads were down by 3.4 per cent.
But few French analysts or fellow-bankers were in anything but a scathing mood, pointing out that even after the biggest bail-out in French banking history, estimated at Ffr45bn by the European Commission when it gave it a reluctant go-ahead, 1996 projections were so sombre that it was unlikely that Credit Lyonnais would stay in the black.
Peyrelevade forecast that the fall in French interest rates would cost Credit Lyonnais an additional Ffr1bn to finance its loan to CDR (Consortium de Realisation), the state-backed body established last year to administer much of its debt.
Privately, most Parisian experts believe the cost of this loan will be closer to Ffr2bn. CDR borrowed Ffr145bn from Credit Lyonnais at a variable rate, while Credit Lyonnais refinanced it at a fixed rate on the markets.
THE Credit Lyonnais saga has occupied, and fascinated, the French political and banking scene for almost five years, although measures to contain what may eventually amount to a Ffr100bn catastrophe started only on 10 November 1993, when Jean-Yves Haberer, the bank's chairman since 1988 and the main architect of its all-out expansion, was finally sacked by Edouard Balladur's government. In the meantime, the bank had posted Ffr1.8bn losses in 1992, and was about to announce Ffr6.9bn losses for 1993.
That Haberer stayed so long in office has everything to do with the French system of governance of stateowned enterprises. Credit Lyonnais' boss, like his France Telecom or Thomson counterparts, is appointed by the Cabinet, and usually plucked from the small, incestuous ranks of the upper French civil service, bred in elite schools, mostly ENA (Ecole Nationale d'Administration, Haberer's alma mater); and sometimes Ecole Polytechnique. As the losses mounted and the scandals surfaced -- bankrupt Credit Lyonnais creditors from Robert Maxwell to Giancarlo Parretti made world headlines -- it was distasteful for ministers who had themselves graduated from the same exclusive establishments to throw a colleague to the dogs.
Haberer belonged to ENA's creme de la creme, the Inspection des Finances, a state body that creams off only the five best out of each 120-strong ENA class annually. He had then headed the French Treasury during the presidency of another Inspecteur des Finances, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, before branching out into the private sector and chairing Paribas. Cross the Inspection des Finances with the senior ranks of the Treasury's alumni, and you find a list of a couple hundred men -- and few women -- who are the most powerful figures of France.
Haberer's fantastic ambitions for Credit Lyonnais become clear from a list of its major fiascos. In 1990 it financed, to the tune of $1.3bn, Giancarlo Parretti's takeover of MGM studios, through its Dutch subsidiary Credit Lyonnais Bank Nederland. During the 1994 National Assembly parliamentary inquiry hearings into Credit Lyonnais, it emerged the decision to go ahead with the MGM deal was taken in half an hour by the Credit Lyonnais executive in charge of foreign subsidiaries, Georges Vigon.
Vigon, who had not even consulted his direct boss, Alexis Wolkenstein, had previously been forbidden by Haberer in writing to grant any new loans to Parretti. But this did not prevent him from stepping in after Time-Warner withdrew from a similar deal a few hours before the projected closing. Episodes like this were common under Haberer.
Such was the bank's gung-ho culture at the time that Vigon was congratulated rather than sacked. Parretti has since been declared bankrupt by American courts, while his Credit Lyonnais-financed partner, Fiorino. Fiorini's Swiss company SASEA, now insolvent, is the object of a Swiss judicial inquiry. Credit Lyonnais still owns the loss-making MGM, which it has unsuccessfully tried to sell off ever since.
In 1990 Credit Lyonnais also bought, for Ffr250m, a controlling interest in the indebted International Bankers bank from its owner, Jean-Maxime Leveque, another Inspecteur des Finances and Haberer's predecessor as Credit Lyonnais chairman. A flamboyant right-wing establishment figure, Leveque, having chaired French bank CCF before its 1982 nationalisation, fancied himself a banker; and it would have been bad form for a fellow inspecteur to deny him. Not only did International Bankers specialise in risky property financing it turned out that several of its top executives had been receiving illegal commissions to extend loans. International Bankers is now in receivership, with few of its Ffr8bn debts expected to be recovered.
Since 1977 the maverick businessman, politician, film actor, and football impresario Bernard Tapie had enjoyed a special relationship with SdBO (Societe de Banque Occidentale), a wholly owned Credit Lyonnais subsidiary specialising in financing buyouts of bankrupt companies.
BASICALLY an asset-stripper, Tapie outreached himself with the buyout of Adidas in 1990, which Credit Lyonnais forced him to sell two years later to a consortium headed by former Saatchi & Saatchi chief Robert Louis-Dreyfus for Ffr1.6bn, as his outstanding debt to SdBO stood close to Ffr2bn.
Since Peyrelevade's arrival, the Tapie affair has degenerated into a blood feud. Peyrelevade, a born Marseillais of modest origins, resents Tapie's political ambitions in Marseille as well as his flamboyant, Credit Lyonnais financed lifestyle. He ordered that Tapie's 18th- century town-house and antique furniture be publicly repossessed in the summer of 1994.
Tapie is suing Credit Lyonnais. He claims that he was forced to sell at a loss; Adidas was successfully floated on the Frankfurt stock exchange last year, and stands at a Ffr11bn market capitalisation.
Credit Lyonnais' nose for a bad loan was unrivalled; its poor customers include Eurotunnel and the developers of Canary Wharf, Novalliance venture capital and the Jacques Fath couture house. If Credit Lyonnais was not top of the list of French banks hit by the property crisis, it is partly because losses sustained by other banks were even better publicised. In fact, the Lyonnais shared the property disaster, mostly with the developer Michel Pelege.
Pelege, like La Défense developer Christian Pellerin, is still afloat -- entirely propped by Credit Lyonnais, which feels it would stand to lose more in bankruptcy proceedings. SdBO is stuck with an unsaleable property portfolio -- the "assets" unsuccessfully stripped by its stable of dubious 1980s turnaround specialists, such as the disreputable Pascal Jeandet, who was bankrupt when he died two years ago, costing SdBO Ffr1bn.
The European Commission gave its agreement to the government bail out on condition that Credit Lyonnais sold 35 per cent of its foreign banking network. This leaves Credit Lyonnais with a reduced income basis at a time when even sound banks find it hard to make money in commercial activities. Haberer's ambitions of creating a German-style universal bank are dead: Credit Lyonnais has also been forced to shed most of its industrial portfolio.
Reduced to the state of a chronically unprofitable rump, Credit Lyonnais is short of expectations, and bereft of hope. It is hard to fault Peyrelevade for thinking of jumping ship.
© The European & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 1996
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