Chirac to the guillotine?

In a small village lost in the wooded hills of Corréze in South-west France, there is a building that looks like a cross between a battery chicken farm and a provincial airport terminal. The building complex contains 15,000 objects of epic eclecticism. They include: a 5ft-long, stuffed, prehistoric fish; a pair of unworn blue cowboy-boots; a porcelain model of a sumo wrestler standing on one foot; a plastic cow; a New York Fire Department helmet; a chess set in which all four bishops are Desmond Tutu ; and a Winston Churchill pen and cigar set (presented by the grateful people of Britain).



The building houses the Musée du Président Jacques Chirac, a tribute to his 12 years as president of France (1995 to 2007) and the permanent resting place for the tons of ceremonial bric-a-brac that he received while in office.

This institution – one of the weirdest and least commercially successful museums in the world – is a perfect monument to the Chirac era. It attempts a bit of everything and it finally takes you nowhere very much.



The museum may also be emblematic of Mr Chirac's career in another way. It relies heavily on subsidies from the taxpayer.

Over the next three weeks, a court in Paris is due to hear evidence that the whole of Mr Chirac's career was subsidised – illegally – by the taxpayers, not of Corrèze (his provincial fiefdom) but of Paris (his political power base). There is a possibility that the trial will be postponed. A last-minute constitutional objection may have to be referred to higher authority.



Only two previous former French heads of state have been placed on trial, Louis XVI in 1792 and Field Marshall Phillippe Pétain in 1945. Beside the charges faced by his predecessors – "treachery against the people" and "treason" – the accusations against Mr Chirac may appear trivial. He is accused of embezzling, while mayor of Paris between 1977 and 1995, about €2m in Parisian taxpayers' money to fund his political party and to give sweeteners to his friends and public figures, including Charles de Gaulle's grandson. This will be a trial with no prosecution and, in a sense, no victim. The public prosecution service concluded last year that Mr Chirac had no case to answer. The main victim, the city of Paris, has withdrawn its complaint after being reimbursed by Mr Chirac's friends and Nicolas Sarkozy's centre-right party.

Even if convicted - far from certain - Mr Chirac will probably get no more than a fine and a suspended sentence. At 78, he is, his friends and wife point out, an infirm old man who does not always recognise his friends and is given to uncharacteristic bursts of bad temper. They ask why he is being tried at all.

The former president is on trial because two sets of independent examining magistrates, who had painstakingly investigated two separate sets of corruption allegations against him, overruled the state prosecutor. They insisted the public interest demanded a trial because the accusations against Mr Chirac pointed to a prolonged and shameless conspiracy to pillage public funds over nearly two decades. As mayor of Paris, they argued, he created and ran a complex system of "embezzlement" to "increase his influence" and finance his rise to power.



In one respect, the museum is not emblematic of Mr Chirac's life and career. Since he was succeeded by his estranged former protégé, Mr Sarkozy, in 2007, visits to the Chirac museum have slumped.

Despite this month's trial, Mr Chirac has never been so popular. Recent polls have made him the most-liked political figure in France, with over 70 per cent approval ratings – much higher than anything that he achieved while in office.

When Mr Chirac attended the annual agricultural show in Paris last month – a rare public outing for him these days – he was mobbed by admirers for 20 minutes. Mr Chirac's popularity is partly a mirror image of Mr Sarkozy's unpopularity. Mr Sarkozy came to power promising to be a kind of "anti-Chirac": more purposeful, more hands-on, more consistent, less hostile to American influence. After nearly four years of Mr Sarkozy's vainglorious and frenetic leadership, many French people – including, bizarrely, many on the left – now look back at Mr Chirac as a rascally, wise and reassuring uncle who did not achieve much but at least had the good sense to oppose the Iraq war in 2003.



But there's also another Mr Chirac: a cynical, calculating and, when occasion demanded, brutal politician. This was the man who: back-stabbed his way to leadership of the Gaullist movement in the 1970s; betrayed President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in 1981; was, successively, a virulent Euro-sceptic and then a flag-waving European; and artfully dispatched all centre-right rivals, until Mr Sarkozy came along. Over the next four weeks, with no help from the state prosecutor, the trial judge, Dominique Pauthe, must decide whether Mr Chirac was also a spider at the centre of a complex web of embezzlement of public funds. The ex-president will not attend. If the trial goes ahead, Mr Chirac will be present from tomorrow until 3 April, in the same courtroom in the Palais de Justice in Paris, which also witnessed the trial of Queen Marie Antoinette in 1793.

Mr Chirac does not risk the guillotine. All the same, his wife has told friends that she is worried.

Bernadette Chirac, who is still a local councillor in Correze, was a main mover in the creation of the Chirac museum in Sarran as a monument to his elusive legacy. She is said to be fearful that – whether her husband is convicted or not – his legacy will be forever tainted by the odour of corruption.

















Here are photos of the usual suspects who blog here not that they should go to the guillotine. But we still haven't figured out that strange affliction to Dan's ears.

Cara - Tuesday on the book road

a Vichy past

Yrsa's at the Frankfurt Bookfair. Seems her hotel doesn't have Wifi - how unGermanic - but asked me to jump in for her today. Next week here at Bouchercon I'm looking forward to the bar and seeing fellow blogmates Yrsa, Tim and Stan and I hope some of you.

A few months ago I posted about meeting Serge Klarsfeld, the lawyer, historian and Holocaust survivor in Paris. We met in his office on rue la Boétie, as you see above. In this photo he's holding a newly discovered Vichy document titled "Law Regarding the Status of Jews" just days ago after it was donated anonymously to the Holocaust Memorial in Paris. The document marked "confidential," in many places shows what experts have authenticated as Pétain's own handwriting.
The really chilling thing, if you look closely, are the red pencilled notes in Petain's hand in the margins. In a section defining the professions and activities Jews were to be banned from, Pétain crossed out the exception for "descendants of Jews born French or naturalized before 1860." This, Klarsfeld says, proves Pétain was responsible for toughening up repressive legislation and ensuring it would be applicable to all Jews — a role that disproves the old arguments in France that Pétain and his Vichy government actually worked to mitigate the Nazis' anti-Semitic acts as much as possible.

"People have said Petain was just an old man who was manipulated as a figurehead of the Vichy state," says Klarsfeld, also president of the Association of Sons and Daughters of French Deportees. "This document shows Pétain not only intervened to push legislation against Jews further than proposed, but created an entire anti-Semitic outlook and framework that — in 1940 — was even harsher than what the Germans had adopted."

Now almost 70 years from the day it became law marks another major step in France's re-examination of its World War II history. For decades the world viewed France largely as a victim — and resistant — of Nazi Occupation, with only a minority of French people becoming collaborators, efforts to challenge that version of the past began in earnest in July 1995. Then President Jacques Chirac broke with long-standing contentions that Vichy was an illegal aberration that did not represent France and apologized to Jews for "the criminal insanity of the occupying power was assisted by the French state."

Chirac's address in 1995 came during a memorial service at the site of the former Vel d'Hiv, the bicycle racing stadium where thousands of Jewish familes, who had been rounded up by French police for deportation to concentration camps, were held for days. The stadium was torn down and now houses a branch of the Interior Ministry.
But Chirac's speech was the real landmark in the beginning of France's acknowledgment of it's shadowed past of collaboration.
Since then, France has worked towards returning real estate, artwork, and myriad possessions stolen from Jews during the Occupation. Last year, in an attempt to help with the process of paying damage claims to victims, France recognized the wartime state's responsibility for rounding up and deporting some 77,000 Jews from 1942 to 1944. Years too late, say some.

One of the families deported in the Paris 'Vel d'Hiv' roundup in 1942 were my friend Sarah's grandmother, grandfather and aunt. Family she never met whose only trace remains in their names carved on the wall of Remembrance at the Jewish Memorial.
I've walked on the street where they once lived and where they were rounded up in the early July morning by the French police. Imagined where the buses, Paris public buses comandeered by the police, waited to take them across the river to the Vel d'hiv. Then to Drancy, the holding camp outside Paris which you pass on the train coming in from Charles de Gaulle airport. Then the long train ride to Poland. I know their convoy number, the date they arrived in Auschwitz. After that the traces go up in smoke.


This touches me right now because that's the story I told in my first book, Murder in the Marais. Tried to. It hits even harder since I'm revisiting the book for it's reissue next year. My book came out in 1999 when collaborationist revelations were coming to light in Paris. Strikingly now, with even more of the lingering dark spots in France's memory of its Nazi history: the question of whether World War I hero Pétain was a figurehead who had been manipulated into representing the collaborationist Vichy regime or a firm believer and active player in its anti-Semitic activities alongside the Nazis.


Klarsfeld says "These October 1940 French laws prepared the ground for the deportations of French Jews as part of the German Final Solution. When you see documents like this showing Pétain and his colleagues had already adopted a clear and harsh anti-Semitic outlook beforehand, it isn't surprising that Vichy provided the police that were needed to round up and deport French Jews when the Nazis requested them."
Pétain — who was in his mid-80s when he took the top Vichy post — was tried and sentenced to death for collaboration after the war. That sentence was commuted to life in prison by de Gaulle — in part due to his WWI heroism, and arguments that the elderly Pétain had little real influence in the Vichy regime. Pétain died in 1951. In prison.

Cara - Wednesday