Flustered French parents hurriedly shooed their children away
from the TV last week as a bland discussion program suddenly
turned into a torrid description of cruising for gay sex in Asian
brothels. "I got into the habit of paying for boys," one of the
participants read from a text. "All these rituals of a fair for
the sale of Adonises, of a slave market, excite me enormously.…
The profusion of very attractive and immediately available boys
puts me into a state of desire which I no longer need to restrain
or conceal.… Western morality, guilt and shame shatter to pieces.
And the rest of the world can go to hell."
The reading was from an autobiography baldly entitled
La Mauvaise Vie ("The Bad Life") by
Frédéric Mitterrand, the French government's new minister of
culture. It was being read by Marine Le Pen, a leader of the
right-wing National Front party, who was attacking Mitterrand for
his passionate defense of Roman Polanski.
When Swiss police arrested Polanski in Zurich Sept. 26 at
the request of U.S. authorities on charges of raping a
13-year-old girl in Los Angeles in 1977, one of the first to fly
to the film director's defense was France's minister of culture.
He was "horrified" by the way a French citizen and a major artist
was being treated, "thrown to the lions because of ancient
history… a frightening America has just shown its face." It was
an astonishing statement by a high official of a government
theoretically friendly to the U.S.
Many in France were uncomfortable with Mitterrand's
emotional justification of an avowed pedophile rapist. But Le Pen
was one of the few to show up his brazen hypocrisy. "Does
belonging to the showbiz caste exonerate its members from
respecting laws and authorize them to escape prosecution for 30
years?" she asked. Then she began quoting from Mitterrand's lurid
account of his experiences as a sex tourist buying young men in
Thailand and Indonesia, enjoying smiling kids trying to escape
poverty by sweet-talking a middle-aged Frenchman who liked to
hear them say in broken English, "I want you happy." She
concluded with a call for his resignation as being unfit to serve
in a government that actively campaigns against sex tourism.
Touché!
But Le Pen had done more than denounce France's twisted
position on Polanski. She had called attention to Mitterrand's
sordid past, shocking those who had not seen fit to read his 2005
autobiography -- meaning most of France, including members of the
government and your correspondent. Until now Mitterrand has been
known -- if he was known at all -- as a lightweight radio and
television personality who also happened to be the nephew of the
late socialist president François Mitterrand.
After his election in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy picked him to
head the French Academy in Rome, a sinecure with artistic
pretensions. Though Mitterrand had no visible qualifications for
the post, the move was part of Sarkozy's policy of
ouverture, including leftists in his
administration as a way of defanging the opposition. Mitterrand
had never been active in politics, but his name was synonymous in
the public's mind with 14 years of socialist government.
When Sarkozy discussed the new job with Mitterrand last
summer during a cabinet reshuffle, Mitterrand says he asked the
president whether the autobiography might be a problem. He now
claims Sarkozy replied, "No, I found it courageous and talented."
That seems an unlikely comment from a man not known for his love
of literature. A more likely explanation for the choice, many
here believe, is the influence of Sarkozy's wife, Carla Bruni,
who has been coaching him in the finer things. A card-carrying
member of the showbiz/arty set, she is credited with considerable
influence over the president. She counts Mitterrand among her
friends.
It didn't take long for the socialists to seize on the
issue that their virulent adversaries, the National Front, had
raised, seconding Le Pen in calling for Mitterrand's head. "We
can't have a minister who represents France encouraging the
violation of our international engagements to fight sexual
tourism," said one socialist leader calling for his portfolio to
be revoked.
France does indeed consider itself in the forefront of the
fight against sex tourism, but Sarkozy's team danced around this
in trying to defend Mitterrand. "He hasn't said anything against
France's position on that," said an obviously embarrassed Henri
Guaino, the president's special counsellor, completely begging
the question of his fitness for the job. The justice minister,
Michele Alliot-Marie, philosophised that "There are difficult
periods and shadows in everyone's life." The one word that no one
uttered, either government members or media commentators, was
that great taboo in sophisticated, post-Christian France:
morality.
Mitterrand may have felt he could hide behind that, as well
as the reluctance of the French media to report on politicians'
private lives. His uncle, after all, had maintained a secret
second family, with mistress and illegitimate daughter kept at
public expense, about which the complaisant press reported
nothing. But possible sexual abuse by a minister was pushing even
French tolerance too far.
Sensing that he was losing the battle for public opinion,
Sarkozy -- who has made no public statement on the affair as of
this writing -- huddled with his counsellors early Wednesday
morning and decided Mitterrand should go on TV to explain
himself. His appearance is not his trump card: with his fleshy,
pendulous lower lip, hang-dog eyes, and soft, purring,
insinuating voice, Mitterrand, 62, is perfectly cast as a sex
tourist on the prowl through the boy brothels of Bangkok. Not the
sort you would like to see scoutmaster of your son's
troop.
In an interview on a prime time nightly news program
Thursday, he bobbed and weaved, trying to deflect questions about
his ethics and making fine distinctions between his homosexuality
and pedophilia. Visibly upset, he admitted to sex tourism but
denied buying sex from minors, while saying, "Yes, I had
relations with boys." Asked to clear that up, he explained that,
in his personal vocabulary of perversion, he habitually refers to
the male prostitutes he has frequented as garçons
or boys, and sometimes as gosses, or
kids. In fact, he maintained, the prostitutes were about his
age.
He condemned sex tourism -- belatedly, some might find --
and pedophilia, "in which I have never participated." Polls show
only about one-quarter of viewers found him convincing. As of
today, Mitterrand still has not said exactly what he did in those
Thai and Indonesian brothels, or how he knew that the "slaves" he
abused were actually adult. And the basic question in all this
remains unanswered: How can a man of his past and proclivities --
a former sex tourist -- be the official
personification of French culture?
Besides the stain on the face of French culture, the other
loser in l'affaire Mitterrand is Nicolas
Sarkozy's presidency. When the socialist opposition is exhibiting
more moral clarity than the supposedly conservative government,
you know something is rotten in the state of France. Sarkozy came
into office two years ago promising to repair the moral damage
done by the 1968 student revolt and resulting relativism of
values. Now his relations with the traditionalist and
conservative voters who brought him to power are seriously
compromised.
If the letters columns of newspapers and the comments on
their websites are any indication, a great many French citizens
feel disgusted with their government over this. Some are taking
to the streets: when Mitterrand inaugurated an art exhibit in
Bordeaux over the weekend, he was jeered by protesters pushing
baby carriages and carrying posters saying, "Don't touch our
children. Mitterrand resign!"
topics:
Roman Polanski, Frédéric Mitterrand, Marine Le Pen
