It goes without saying that the news that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or D.S.K., as he is called everywhere, the head of the I.M.F., long time French socialist politician and the leading candidate to oppose President Nicolas Sarkozy in next year’s election, has been arrested for attempted rape here in New York—and taken off a plane at J.F.K., at that—has shocked, overwhelmed, and generally bouleverséd all of Paris. (His lawyer has said that he plans to plead not guilty.) “A thunderbolt” and “a political bomb” are among the milder descriptions. It is no secret—or, closer to the truth , an open secret—that D.S.K. had a, well, J.F.K.-like reputation with women; French habits and French libel laws kept the nature and extent of this reputation circumscribed, but much of it came out, and a little more so is now. Gilles Savary, a deputy for the Socialist party in the European parliament, wrote on his blog,
Savary adds that his entourage was waiting for something like this, if not this bad.
As long ago as 2007, the Brussels correspondent of Libération tellingly warned in his blog, apropos of D.S.K., that manners in Brussels, and at the I.M.F., were different than those in France. But there is a difference, obviously immense, between flirtation, seduction, or sex, and rape, and it would be fair to say that while no one in Paris would have been shocked to find him sleeping with a chambermaid, most, if not all, would be stunned if he has really assaulted and attempted to rape one. The notion that France takes these things more lightly is false; adultery has different meanings, and fidelity different rules, but rape is rape.
The larger context, of course, is that D.S.K. was not so much the white knight as the perpetual King Arthur of the Socialist Party, forever spoken of as the man who might come to its rescue without ever doing so. He was seen as the likeliest candidate to win against Sarkozy largely because he had a reputation as a man of sense—odd and ironic, given his other reputation—a rational, pragmatic centrist. His difficulties, though, were more formidable than might have been apparent; there is a great difference between wanting an office and actually campaigning for it, and his role as the head of the “liberal” I.M.F. was not likely to please the militants of the Socialist party, who resemble the Tea Party base of our Republican party in their suspicion of any possible flirtation with the other side’s ideology.
There is also a sense, I gather from a first skim of friends and news reports, that though the presumption of innocence is central, and there might well be another side to this story—some have even raised the possibility of a trap—the arrest is already a source of international shame to France, and thus a disaster in itself, however it works out for D.S.K.
(The hypothesis of a piege, or trap, set by his political enemies is taken surprisingly seriously by some intelligent people, to whom the idea that a man in his position would assault an unknown woman in the middle of the day seems improbable enough to feed a certain paranoia. Of course, the idea that the N.Y.P.D., or a “coached” hotel maid, would have been instruments of such a trap seems improbable, too. And Americans know well that men of power and appetite can act in seeming improbable and self-destructive ways, and in the middle of the afternoon, too.)
The great risk in the French scene is the rise of Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the extreme right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen, and the head of the National Front. Marine Le Pen is far more media-pleasing (and intelligent) than her father was, as much as she shares his views, and she has not been cautious in offering reporters an immediate response to the D.S.K. affair:
Sarkozy has had, on the whole, a Presidency not so much failed as baffling. Given his energy, reformist instincts and appetite for explosions, he has been only fitfully energetic, at moments surprisingly passive, and on the whole unpointed in his program. He is eminently beatable, but of course it takes someone to beat someone. The Socialist Martine Aubry, a kind of more comforting maternal version of the slightly Palinesque Ségolène Royal, and on the right, Sarkozy’s old nemesis, the former foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, will doubtless both be heartened, politically, by this news.
But for lovers of France and French life, there is something deeply depressing not only in the apparent elimination of one of the more plausible alternatives, but by what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life—the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor, matched by an inability to renew the political scene with new faces. The endless repetition of names and places, including D.S.K.’s, has been a feature of French political life for too many years: Alain Juppé, brought in as Foreign Minister in a deus ex machina like move very recently, was the Prime Minister under Chirac (my own first piece from France for The New Yorker, a long time ago, was about his housing troubles and my own) while Martine Aubry herself is the daughter of the former European magus Jacques Delors. There’s too strong a sense right now of a Daumier-like rotation of the same faces and the same weaknesses on the same endless, incestuous merry-go-round, with the paint peeling off the horses by now. (This is of course, partly true here, too: Newt Gingrich and Joe Biden were figures in the eighties. But Obama wasn’t.)
Intellectual legitimacy in France always lies somewhere on the left; but, from Poujade’s time on, popular protest is often on the right. Stasis and, a sense, fair or not, of complacent corruption at the center, always work in France to the advantage of the far right. It’s a depressing spectacle.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn in Zurich, Switzerland, on May 10th. Photograph by Harold Cunningham/Getty Images.
