She-whore's lawyer on right.
Posted on 02/07/2004 5:03:17 AM PST by jalisco555
Christine Deviers-Joncour, France's best-known mistress, tells Philip Delves Broughton about her part in a political scandal – and why it's not over.
There is nothing to advertise the Whore of the Republic in the lunchtime crowd in a Paris café. No thigh-high purple boots, rubber dress or blonde wig. She is smoking long, thin cigarettes, her Louis Vuitton organiser is open on the table, and she fiddles from time to time with her mobile phone, much like every other woman in the place. But she is, predictably, pouting.
On paper, Christine Deviers-Joncour, 56, encapsulates all that is most adult about France; everything that makes an Anglo-Saxon feel knobbly-kneed and unsophisticated.
She is best known in France as a mistress. Between 1989 and 1997, she performed this role for Roland Dumas, successively foreign minister and head of France's highest court. Even in his eighties, he remains an archetypal French smoothie, silver-haired, dapper and brilliant, a former Resistance fighter turned lawyer and Socialist power broker.
It might have been just another Parisian affair except that, for four of those years, Deviers-Joncour was being paid by the Elf oil company to smooth its relations with the government, via her lover. According to prosecutors, she received around £7.5 million in salary, expenses and bribes for her trouble. A magistrate called her the "whore of the Republic"z and Deviers-Joncour used it as the title of her memoirs.
Over the course of several highly-publicised trials, she confessed to buying Dumas hand-made shoes for £1,200 and living in an apartment in the most chic corner of the Left Bank, paid for by Elf, a brisk stroll from Dumas's office in the foreign ministry.
Dumas admitted the affair, but denied ever being politically swayed by his mistress. He got off on appeal, prompting every cynic in Paris to say it was all a fix - the politician walked free, the mistress went down. Deviers-Joncour spent six months in jail in 1997 and 1998, and may have to go back for another four months later this year, depending on the ruling of an appeals court.
Just as the Tory scandals of the late Major years underlined one cliché, how nerds become sex fiends when given power and half a chance, so the Dumas-Deviers-Joncour affair confirmed another: that of the older French statesman, virility unsapped by age, taking a young mistress. Their affair mixed sex, money and power - and it fascinated France.
Whether or not she has to return to jail this year, it does seem as though Deviers-Joncour's legal troubles are finally nearing an end. "It has been a seven-year nightmare," she says. "It is very difficult to go back to jail when you know you are being punished to hide the guilty in high positions. This scapegoat is very tired."
After years fighting prosecutors and the tax authorities, she claims to be penniless. "I have no house, no bank account, nothing. I live on money given to me by friends." All of her millions have gone back to the government in fines and tax payments and she still owes more. Her treatment has left her embittered. "I am not French any more. I am homeless, without a country. I should really seek political asylum somewhere."
By way of distraction, she has turned to recording punk-rock songs produced by her son, Fred, and has written a novel, Toi masculin mon féminin. It tells of a professional woman who has given up on love. Then she meets a wonderful man, creative, rich, stupendous in bed - but who likes wearing women's underwear. At first, the woman finds it exciting and they have all kinds of kinky adventures. But, eventually, it gets too weird and she bails. She would rather be wounded and alone than involved with a transvestite.
This classic tale of love going awry has its roots in Deviers-Joncour's life. After all that had happened, the last thing she wanted was another man in her life. "I wanted to tell a love story via a character like me, explain myself through her without going over the scandals again. I also wanted to talk about love to try to turn the page in my life.
"I wanted to describe a woman who worked like a man, very high up. She has suffered a lot and is completely knocked down. She is very feminine. She is weak, like women. But through her work she is made masculine. She is both masculine and feminine. I was without a man in my life for seven years. So perhaps I needed some love. I found it by writing."
She says that she and her novel's protagonist have been made masculine through professional relations with men. "There were no other women doing the work I used to do as a lobbyist," she says. "I was confronted all the time with very strong, dangerous men. I had no time to prepare myself to be strong and at their level. I was forced to look at them and take on the way they managed and talked. The way they killed each other. It was then I lost my femininity."
She describes her life up to meeting Dumas as utterly normal. She worked briefly as a model while at university in Paris, married a politician, ran an art gallery and a small PR business, had two sons, now 26 and 30, divorced, and married a businessman, by which time she was in her early forties. She got to know Dumas when he hired her to work on a political campaign in which he was up against her ex-husband. Elf subsequently employed her when Dumas became foreign minister in 1988, to act as a lobbyist. Talking about this time, Deviers-Joncour drops her coquettishness and her voice becomes hard.
"Listen to me," she says, smacking her fist into her hand. "The work I did was very important, optimising relations between Elf and the ministry of foreign affairs. Why did I have this job? Public relations and lobbying was my job. Because Roland Dumas was a friend of my family and me, the doors of the foreign ministry were open to me. So it was very interesting for Elf. But I did the job. After that, I had a love story with this man.
"Say it had been you, not me," she says, grabbing my arm. "You're close to Dumas and you have this job in PR. They wouldn't call you a prostitute. Unless Roland Dumas was gay and you, too. But a woman? Badaboom. They mixed everything to hide the scandal of the frigate sales to Taiwan."
In 1991, France agreed to sell six high-tech frigates to Taiwan. Deviers-Joncour, who had links to the French company Thomson, which built the frigates, urged Dumas to support the deal - which he eventually did. The murky nature of the deal prompted the investigations that brought Deviers-Joncour to public attention. Dumas was cleared of acting under pressure from his mistress. But what was never explained was why Taiwan had paid so much for the ships.
Last week, a French prosecutor's report estimated that Taiwan paid £400 million in kickbacks and bribes as part of the deal, much of which went to French businessmen and politicians. Now that France is cosying up to China, Taiwan wants its money back and is ready to humiliate France to get it. Deviers-Joncour's long-held claim that her affair was used as a smokescreen to hide the frigates scandal may be proved true after all.
"There is only one way to survive in France and it is to be a politician, because they can kill, they can steal, they can do anything, and justice protects them," she says. After receiving violent threats in 2000, she wore a bullet-proof jacket for 18 months. "Once I decided to tell the truth, I had no political protection." She believes she was seized on, not because of her affair, but because of the money she was making. "The French cannot bear people having money. In America, the problem is sex. In France, it's money. If it's a woman earning money, it's worse.
"I am ashamed of my country. It is a fantastic country with fantastic people. But the political class is not up to the standard of the rest of the country. I hope that, one day, the clean people will have the power."
It is a relief, after this, to get back to the art of being a mistress. I ask her to tell me about the "cinq à sept". "You do not have this in England?" she asks. No, I say. "A cinq à sept is when a bourgeois woman goes to meet her lover between 5pm and 7pm and then comes back home to have dinner with her husband. This happens everywhere, even in England."
But we don't have a term for it. "You have not cinq à sept? What do you do at this time?" Have tea, usually. "Well," she says, her mind cogitating, "we don't have tea-time. We have to do something."
She-whore's lawyer on right.
J'aime la belle France, and I love zee Fraaansh peepul, but eet ees zay who are unsophisticateed! Zay can not even recognize zee propaganda een zair own newspapairs!
Your argument suggests: Even a broken country is right twice a century.
I agree. But who are the courageous individuals in the French political class? Who in that class is willing to publicly denounce a government that supports tyrants and opposes the liberation of oppressed people? Who will dismantle the corrupt Corporate State that France has become?
Sure. Yeah. Right. "Knobbly-kneed (whatever the hell THAT means) and unsophisticated". Gotcha.
Can you say.........."not even close"??? I knew ya could.
BZZZZZZT. Wrong. France was not attacked recently by America. America was.
Thereafter, France encouraged terrorists outside of its borders.
Thereafter, France encouraged rapes of all and murders of Jews in its borders by French Islamic terrorists.
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