French See Case Against Strauss-Kahn as American Folly
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: July 3, 2011
PARIS — The stunning reversals in the criminal case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a putative French presidential candidate, have reawakened a dormant anti-Americanism here, fueled by a sense that the raw, media-driven culture of the United States has undermined justice and fair play.
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There was shock in France after the arrest of Mr. Strauss-Kahn in May and intense criticism of the manner in which he was displayed in handcuffs, pulled unshaven into a televised court session and stuffed into a Rikers Island cell under suicide watch. There was confusion and criticism over the glee with which the New York tabloids in particular highlighted every humiliation and turned to clichés about the French — “Chez Perv” and “Frog Legs It” — in the coverage. And there was a sense that it was not just Mr. Strauss-Kahn who was being so jauntily humiliated, but France itself.
Now, with the case appearing to collapse over questions about the credibility of the hotel housekeeper from Guinea who accused him, and Mr. Strauss-Kahn freed from house arrest, the French are feeling a kind of bitter jubilation of their own, and renewing their criticisms about the rush to judgment, the public relations concerns of elected prosecutors and the somehow uncivilized, brutal and carnival nature of American society, democracy and justice.
Former Prime Minister Lionel Jospin said Friday that “he was thrown to the wolves” in the American system; a former justice minister, Robert Badinter, called Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s treatment “a lynching, a murder by media.”
In an editorial this weekend, Le Monde wrote that “the least one can say is that the vagaries of the American procedure” had “condemned Dominique Strauss-Kahn before even the start of a serious inquiry.” Criticizing the “media-judicial machine,” the paper said the costs to Mr. Strauss-Kahn were heavy, including the loss of his job and his political future. The paper said that with the American system of an elected prosecutor dependent on the voters and the way it functions with the press, with police leaks and “terrible photos illegally transmitted to the press and then also illegally reproduced by certain newspapers — everything was done to place Mr. Strauss-Kahn in a situation of extreme weakness before even the beginning of an inquiry.”
Noëlle Lenoir, a former European affairs minister, said many French felt insulted. “People were shocked by the media circus,” she said. “They thought the prosecution was making common cause with the tabloids. So there is a bit of revenge for what is seen as very anti-French behavior.”
Though it was the American prosecutors who revealed the housekeeper’s various fabrications about her background, her asylum application and her taxes, the turnabout “does wake up this slumbering anti-Americanism, and the great losers are American justice and the New York police,” said Dominique Moïsi, a longtime analyst of French-American relations who has studied and taught in the United States. “The case does damage to the image of America and recreates negative stereotypes that existed before.”
Even in the 1990s, “when we were so close, when the cold war was over and before the second Iraq war, we were divided along the line of the death penalty,” Mr. Moïsi said.
“There is a sense in Europe that you can’t be fully civilized with the death penalty,” he said. “Now this feeling is reinforced — that the United States is not a fully civilized country with a police that behaves like that, that wants to humiliate,” he continued. “There is a sense that it’s a dangerous country.”
These cultural differences, highlighted by the brashness of the American news media coverage, prompted the indulgence in cultural clichés on both sides of the Atlantic, reminiscent of the period when France refused to support the Bush administration’s war in Iraq and some Americans responded with “freedom fries” and called the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”
The French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy, an outspoken friend and defender of Mr. Strauss-Kahn, was ubiquitous, writing and speaking of his continuing anger at the “pornographic” nature of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s treatment and the “obscene” press conference that the accuser’s lawyer held detailing her physical injuries as he tried to rescue her status as victim. Writing for The Daily Beast, the American media Web site, Mr. Lévy criticized the black-and-white handling of the case, “the cannibalization of justice by the sideshow.”
He accused the United States of having a simplistic moral and political compass, saying that the housekeeper, “because she was a poor immigrant, was inevitably innocent, and Mr. Strauss-Kahn, because he was powerful, was inevitably guilty.”
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With Each Twist in Strauss-Kahn Case, City Sees Further Reflections of Itself (July 4, 2011)
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How Now-Shaky Case Against Strauss-Kahn Once Seemed So Solid (July 4, 2011)
Times Topic: Dominique Strauss-Kahn
He demanded that Mr. Strauss-Kahn be fully exonerated on the charges against him, which include felony counts of committing a criminal sex act, attempted rape and sexual abuse.
And Mr. Lévy scolded the United States from a particularly French intellectual height. “America the pragmatic, that rebels against ideologies, this country of habeas corpus that de Tocqueville claimed possessed the most democratic system of justice in the world, has pushed this French Robespierrism, unfortunately, to the extremes of its craziness,” he wrote, invoking the ideological bloodletting of the French Revolution. “All this calls, at the least, for serious, honest, and substantial soul-searching.”
More broadly, the French news media, which had kept track of every anti-French insult in the New York media — Le Monde, for instance, had an article called, “Trash — the D.S.K. affair as told on the front pages of The New York Post” — was full of astonishment this weekend at “The U-turn of the American Media,” as The Journal du Dimanche said, suddenly attacking the housekeeper with the same tabloid breathlessness.
Ordinary French people have been left with unease over the American handling of the case and the anti-French sentiment that came with it. Kevin Benard, 28,a real estate agent, said the initial treatment of Mr. Strauss-Kahn had given the impression that he was guilty before the investigation had even begun. “America has a very harsh justice system,” he said. “We believe in people being innocent before they are proven guilty, and not the other way round.”
Patrice Randé, 50, who was visiting Paris from Bordeaux, said that if Mr. Strauss-Kahn turned out to be innocent it would reveal “the colossal error” made by the American justice system — and, he feared, stoke more anti-Americanism. “For French-American relations it would actually be better if he was proven guilty,” Mr. Randé said.
Marc Placet, 30, said he had been in New York a week ago, and was struck by the anti-French sentiments there. “I think that the D.S.K. affair has woken up a form of French bashing in the U.S.,” he said. “In New York, people in bars or on the street would make fun of me being French.” They would invariably bring up Mr. Strauss-Kahn “and call the French ‘perverse’ and things like that,” he said.
Emilie Destot, 26, a student, was ambivalent. “I was shocked when I saw those pictures of Strauss-Kahn handcuffed, not shaven. But I guess it’s the way things work there, and even if it is too spectacular, it sometimes proves to be quick and efficient.”
Some political observers said that fears of an anti-American backlash were exaggerated and harmful. Arlette Chabot, editor in chief of Europe 1 radio, said, “I’ve always thought the talk of French anti-Americanism was overstated,” citing the French love for Presidents Obama and Bill Clinton — but not their visceral contempt for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
Mr. Moïsi thinks that Mr. Strauss-Kahn, whose next hearing is set for July 18, may end up politically ahead. The Socialist Party wants to win at all costs, he said, and they may decide that Mr. Strauss-Kahn has a new cachet. “If D.S.K. returns triumphantly as a victim of American justice that may change everything,” he said.