Actually, France has been starving for just this over the past few years. High-level government corruption trials don’t cut it. They’re so common and tiresomely complicated, after all. So what if the president of the constitutional court who used to be the foreign minister allegedly put his mistress (or one of his mistresses) on the payroll of an oil company where she supposedly got kickbacks on defense contracts? The French shrug: “That’s politics.” Then the whole thing gets thrown out of court? Well, that’s entertainment.
But this summer all the ingredients are on hand for a delightful break. The strikes that have disrupted public transport aggravate only those commuters who persist in commuting at all. And these are gentle protests; nothing like 1992, when farmers and truckers blockaded France’s cities and many vacations had to be postponed! (The Army broke the siege at last, and a grateful nation hastened to the shore.) Best of all, this summer there’s a scandal worthy of the name. When talking about it over that glass of rose or while contemplating the clouds above the topless beach, one hardly knows where to begin.
Most of the French first took notice last month when Dominique Baudis, head of the government agency that sets the rules for television and radio programming, took to the air himself. The allegations that he’d attended sadomasochistic orgies along with other officials were patently untrue, he said. It was all a plot. He’d tried to ban porn from French TV (good luck!), and the porn industry was out to get him.
Baudis was a news anchor and TV correspondent in the 1970s before becoming mayor of Toulouse, where his father had been mayor before him. So he should have known better than to provoke so many questions, so publicly. In the event, few who heard his denial focused on the alleged conspiracy. Everybody wanted to read about the orgies. Then came word of alleged murders to cover up the alleged orgies. The key witness says he murdered a prostitute and a transvestite to shut them up. But who told him to do that? The mysteries keep multiplying. On front pages and magazine covers, the allegations get more salacious, however dubious the sources.
Baudis’s main accuser is one Patrice Alegre, who’s serving life in prison for five murders and six rapes. A former coke addict, hashish smoker and alcoholic, he’s violent, he’s moody–he’s not, in other words, your most credible witness. Two prostitutes, Patricia and Fanny, told their tales to police: Alegre, they said, was pimping street kids to some of Toulouse’s more distinguished citizens. The cherry on the cake, as the French say, came when a transvestite claimed he’d actually seen Baudis at the infamous orgies. But, then, he said he’d seen Tony Blair, too. It turned out the transvestite just wanted to raise money from a TV network for his sex-change operation, and hadn’t seen Baudis at all, much less Blair.
Who to believe? The latest poll shows 57 percent of the French say they may never know the whole truth. But what fun would it be if they did? Now they’ve got the whole summer to speculate. Pass the rose, s’il vous plait.
