Our parents’ maxims stick with us all our lives. For me, there
was my father’s “Stay right and you’ll never go wrong,” when I
was learning to drive. Later, when I was boxing in college, it
was “When you send a punch, send it special delivery.” But one
that has proved especially useful over the years is, “Watch out
for the little guys, they’re the meanest.”
That one, like other samples of homespun American wisdom,
doesn’t exist in the debonair language of Molière. If it had,
maybe Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin would
today be contemplating a bright political future in his beloved
France. Instead, he’s now facing another long, torturous trial
for slander that will likely prevent his ever holding elective
office.
The inconvenient trial is just the latest episode in a
très French duel to the political death between the
56-year-old Villepin and the 55-year-old Nicolas Sarkozy,
officially President of the Republic. Serving as ministers in the
same Jacques Chirac government some years ago only sharpened
their antagonism. Ostensibly belonging to the same conservative
party does nothing to lessen their enmity — an unconcealed,
bare-knuckled, feral hatred that provides solemn cover stories
for news magazines and giggles for Paris dinner parties.
The protagonists in this Shakespearean drama could not be
more different. Villepin, foppish, perennially tanned, languidly
aristocratic, sees himself as the savior of an idealized,
grandiose Old France. His basic antipathy to American values
showed when he was a counselor in France’s Washington embassy in
1988. And he it was who, as foreign minister in February 2003,
sonorously lectured the U.S. from the noble podium of the United
Nations against ridding the world of Saddam Hussein. His visibly
high opinion of himself and disdain for “Anglo-Saxon” mores make
him, as one French editorialist puts it so felicitously, “A De
Gaulle in a Cerutti suit.”
As such, he openly despises the pint-sized, pushy, parvenu
Sarkozy, whom he contemptuously calls “the dwarf.” A mere
descendent of Hungarian-Jewish ancestors who wants France to
abandon its high-flown pretensions and become more efficient and
businesslike? You can easily imagine the patrician raised
eyebrows, the disgusted little moue — quelle
horreur!
Sarkozy returns the loathing, in spades. For one thing,
there are claims that Villepin may have spread rumors a few years
ago about Sarkozy’s private life, contributing to the collapse of
his second marriage to Cécilia. And he’s not about to forget
Villepin’s subsequent dig, “A man who can’t keep his wife can’t
expect to keep France.” Then there was the Clearstream
affair.
That began in 2003, when they were both Chirac’s ministers
and jockeying for position as his favorite (Villepin won, a
dubious distinction). A bogus list was circulated of prominent
French political and business figures who allegedly had received
kickbacks from French arms sales in the 1990s. The list,
including Sarkozy’s name, purported to be of individuals who
stashed their dirty money in secret accounts at Clearstream
International, a financial clearing house in Luxembourg.
An investigation showed the list was fake. But Villepin,
then prime minister, declined to make that interesting fact
public, keeping Sarkozy in the hot seat. When that became known,
Sarkozy and dozens of other civil plaintiffs sued Villepin and
four others for slander. The motive of the alleged defamation,
Sarkozy contends, was Villepin’s desire to derail his rival’s
quest for the presidency. It didn’t work, but his election
victory did nothing to cool Sarkozy’s choler. “The guy who did
this to me,” he vowed with his usual elegant periphrasis, “is
going to end up on a butcher’s hook.” The Paris prosecutor,
Jean-Claude Marin, demanded Villepin be sentenced to 18 months in
jail and a $60,000 fine.
After five years of investigation and a trial in which the
judges heard 112 hours of evidence, the court issued a 326-page
decision at the end of January clearing Villepin for lack of any
evidence of dirty tricks. Curiously, nearly everybody else
involved was found guilty, with three others, including an old
pal of Villepin’s, taking the rap. (A journalist who simply broke
the story was cleared.) Sarkozy pocketed a token $1.35 in damages
and plotted his next move, though his office issued a curt
statement saying he would pursue the case no further.
Villepin, his sweeping silver coiffure more dashing than
ever, pranced and preened. “I now turn to the future to serve the
French people,” he declared grandly, “and contribute, in a new
spirit of unity, to the recovery of France.” But he reckoned
without the implacable, bulldog tenacity of the little
guy.
French justice moves in mysterious ways its wonders to
perform. How could it not in this case, with the prosecutor under
the thumb of the justice minister, who owes fealty to the
president? Villepin had hardly taken his victory lap when the
Paris prosecutor, cheekily scolding the judges for finding
Villepin innocent, announced he would appeal. “We haven’t heard
everything about this affair,” Marin declared theatrically on a
popular morning radio show. “There’s still room for the truth to
emerge.” Some in this town swear on their mother’s head they
glimpsed the shadow of a diminutive, hyperactive figure pulling
strings behind him.
The appeal will take at least another year. A year in which
Villepin will be destabilized and hobbled in his attempt to split
the Gaullist UMP party in his favor before the next presidential
elections in 2012. As Le Monde editorialized, “The shady
Clearstream affair will now keep on poisoning French political
life.”
The appeal, with its implication of vindictive obsession,
could also poison Sarkozy’s chances of re-election in 2012.
Villepin has already begun building a political machine and
making public appearances, posing as the victim of a vicious
personal vendetta. It’s a telling argument, especially with
Sarkozy’s numbers in the doldrums after a series of unpopular,
tone-deaf gaffes like trying to put his 23-year-old son at the
head of a large Paris business district. Unlikely to win —
initial polls give him around 10 percent of the vote in a
presidential election — Villepin as spoiler could siphon off
enough conservative votes to unintentionally throw France back
into the eager arms of the Socialist Party.
