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International Herald Tribune
via J. Orlin Grabbe's Homepage
Jan. 8, 1999 unknown
"Lying gets a good press"
PARIS - ''Truths!'' Charles de Gaulle is supposed
to have shouted. ''Did you think I could have created a (Free
French) government against the English and the Americans with
truths? You make History with ambition, not with truths.''
The quote is from a new book by Thierry Pfister,
a French editor, who uses it to illustrate his thesis that for
the French mind, lying in politics is the norm, and that anyone
trying to attach a standard of truthfulness to a politician's
behavior is naive and worthy of contempt. The general, he suggests,
said as much.
This is part of Mr. Pfister's explanation of
why he believes the French, and particularly France's elites,
do not understand how President Bill Clinton could be impeached.
He says that the French elite is terrified by the case's implications
for its privileges, and that this is the reason, much more than
in other democratic countries, that the yearlong reaction here
to the impeachment process has been one of ridicule, self-satisfied
righteousness, and feigned concern for the future of the United
States.
For the French elite, Mr. Pfister maintains,
''there are virtually no consequences for lying. It's O.K.''
Certainly nowhere in or outside the United States
has the handling of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal been held up
as a model of civic procedure. But in France, the circumstances
are seen, Mr. Pfister says, as an ongoing means to contrast ''a
reactionary American puritanism against progressive French tolerance.''
This week, while CNN's commentators were talking
about the solemnity of the opening public proceedings in the Senate,
the anchorman on the France 3 state television news at 11 P.M.
was describing it as ''a lamentable show.'' In a Page One editorial
accompanying the Clinton trial, Le Figaro cried out, ''Wake up,
Tocqueville, they've gone mad. When you look at the distressing
spectacle that American democracy is offering, you say to yourself
that the man who described it best must not be very comfortable
up there in the heavens.''
For Mr. Pfister, who served as spokesman for
former Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy in President Francois Mitterrand's
first Socialist government and as a writer for Le Monde and Le
Nouvel Observateur magazine, there is more political lying in
France than in other democracies because its democratic culture
is weaker. In this context, he said in an interview, a historical
climate of lies involving the reaction of the French to the Nazi
occupation, the French colonial war in Algeria, and the corruption
of the Mitterrand years, makes Bill Clinton's vulnerability for
alleged lying under oath an almost otherworldly matter here.
''That's why the situation is incomprehensible
for French public opinion,'' Mr. Pfister wrote. ''Punishing lies
- what naivete!''
Among its officials, ''France has a cult of lying,''
Mr. Pfister insists.
''With us, lying gets a good press,'' he said.
''Some see it as a Latin characteristic, others as the sign of
a superior civilization.'' He said, ''Attempting to limit its
use makes you look ridiculous. Playing Don Quixote is the equivalent
of confronting standard social usage, discussed from time to time,
but never really brought into question.''
No particular fan of an American model, Mr. Pfister
describes the investigation of Mr. Clinton by Kenneth Starr as
partisan, inspired by the right wing of the Republican Party,
and using inquisition-like methods.
But he goes after the notion that there was some
kind of elegance or refinement in the political circumstances
that allowed Mr. Mitterrand to keep his double family life from
public knowledge, at the same time that he published innocuous
health bulletins that hid his developing cancer. The French were
treated not so much as citizens, but infantile subjects, the writer
said.
If it was fine that the French hardly seemed
disturbed on learning about Mr. Mitterrand's second family after
his death, Mr. Pfister argued ''it is nonetheless unacceptable
that the news was delivered to them so late.''
''The reality is that it is this contempt, this
institutional dissimulating that is being defended by everyone
running to Bill Clinton's defense.''
Mr. Pfister singled out the Socialist president
of the foreign affairs commission of the National Assembly, Jack
Lang, as an example of the French public and media figures who
were expressing shock about a so-called re-birth of McCarthyism
in the United States, while their concerns, he said, were obviously
elsewhere.
''It's not the drift of the American system that
concerns them, but the risk of contamination. Suppose they were
required tomorrow to give explanations?''
''The Americans, British, Germans, Spanish, they
all know that things can turn around against them, and that exercising
responsibilities involves risks. Explanations are demanded of
them, even on their private lives if they become controversial.
That's the price that Clinton is paying because it's the price
of democracy.''
Mr. Pfister's book, ''Lettre
Ouverte aux Gardiens du Mensonge'' (Open Letter to the Keepers
of the Lie) is published by Albin Michel.
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