Secrets and spies of French politics

One day in 1985, the principal of the Lycee Henri IV, the elite Paris state school that is attended by the top performers of the French education system, received a strange call.

He was asked to go to a secret meeting at the Elysee presidential palace the following Monday. There, he was told to provide a place in his school for Mazarine Pingeot, the illegitimate daughter of President Francois Mitterrand, and whose paternity must never be made public. Oh, and while he was about it, would he please enrol Mazarine's pal, Virginie, as well?

Shocked? Well, don't be, because the French aren't.

Manipulation of the education system to help a presidential bastard doesn't even show up on the average citizen's radar screen of outrage and indignation.

The reason is that, for decades, French politics have been drenched in far deeper scandals. They range from the overthrow of Third-World regimes, political assassination and the Rainbow Warrior affair to huge fraud, corruption of the judicial system and routine gagging of the press.

"For the past 50 years, France has had one scandal after another," says French journalist and author Jean Guisnel. "It's a monarchical republic in which no one controls the President."

Guisnel is co-editor of a book to be published next week, Histoire Secrete de la Ve Republique - a dictionary of the many dirty tricks that have been practised since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958 in what many view as a de-facto coup by de Gaulle.

His position legitimised by a referendum and election, and strengthened by a constitution that set down a virtual rubber-stamp parliament, de Gaulle set up a system where he held all the main levers of power.

France's foreign intelligence agency, its domestic security agencies, armed forces and its state firms, especially those in oil, armaments and nuclear energy, all became harnessed to the presidential whim.

When the system was coherent, swift to respond and skilfully used, it could help free hostages, advance French economic interests and establish a different voice in the polarised Cold War world.

But many times, it was abused or fooled, leaving no one accountable for the mess other than the taxpayer.

Some of the worst offences have been in Africa, supporting whichever despots suited France's interest, says Guisnel. The skulduggery includes the assassination of Moroccan dissident Ben Barka in 1965 and the supply of arms via Israel to fuel the attempted secession from Nigeria by Biafra in 1968-69, a war that left two million dead. Military intervention has overthrown or backed governments in Chad, Congo, Zaire, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, the Comoros and elsewhere.

In one episode, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, President from 1974 to 1981, helped install Jean-Bedel Bokassa, leader of the Central African Republic, as emperor of the dirt-poor, uranium-rich country.

Bokassa was a former corporal in the Free French forces and considered to be safely loyal to France rather than tempted by the Soviet bloc or the "Anglo-Saxons", as Britain and America are called. He was crowned as Bokassa 1st on a gilded throne and wore a grand uniform with a fur-trimmed train imitating that of Napoleon.

Giscard paid NZ$22 million for the ceremony, sent a French military brass band to provide the ambience and gave Bokassa a Napoleonic sabre and an antique clock as a sign of France's friendship.

Within two years, Bokassa had looted the country of about $275 million and his troops had used mortars to quell protests by schoolchildren, killing around a hundred. After planting stories in the French press that Bokassa was a cannibal who dined on the flesh of children, France sent in troops to oust him.

Bokassa took revenge by leaking documents to the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine, revealing that he had given diamonds and ivory tusks to Giscard and alleging that members of the presidential family had signed lavish business deals when they went game hunting in his country.

Roger Delpey, the Canard journalist who broke the story, was shortly afterwards arrested by the domestic security agency, the DST, as he emerged from the Libyan embassy. He was accused of abetting a "foreign power" in a plot to destabilise the state; he was released without trial 202 days later.

Giscard was also famously suckered by the "sniffer plane" affair, a delightful fraud in which a bogus Belgian count and fake Italian scientist conned the President, Prime Minister and state-run oil company Elf into believing the pair had a device that could miraculously sniff out underground oil deposits from the air. France paid more than $850 million to secret bank accounts in Switzerland, Panama, Lichtenstein and Vanuatu for the worthless boxes.

Like Giscard, Mitterrand and his successor, President Jacques Chirac, are no strangers to accusations of fraud, financial sleaze and cronyism. "Corruption literally exploded under Mitterrand," says Guisnel.

All three have reputedly been, "chauds lapins" [hot rabbits] - inveterate womanisers, who sired children out of wedlock.

Mitterrand's illegitimate daughter, Mazarine, was only revealed to the public at his funeral in January 1996. Until then, her existence was retailed at dinner parties, but the media omerta that surrounds the presidency meant that the gossip was never published.

Giscard, according to a 2003 book by journalist Daniel Carton, fathered a son with an aide. In the style of the Sun King, Giscard arranged for his mistress to have an income by securing her election as a European member of parliament in a safe constituency, says Carton.

Chirac is variously said to be the father of a child in Japan and of another in Morocco, although he does not score well as a lover ("three minutes, including the shower," according to one woman who was clearly marked by the experience).

Jean-Paul Fitoussi, a professor at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris, says that the dark picture of political impunity has lightened in recent years, thanks to tougher laws governing party financing and reforms that seek to make the judiciary independent. But two core problems remain, he said.

"One is the complete domination by the elite, a small political class with too much solidarity between members who all graduate from the same schools, and the other is the constitution," he said.

"The parliament kowtows to the government, which means the checks and balances are not done."

With a press that is too often acquiescent or compliant, it is left to disgruntled former lieutenants to blow the gaffe. They follow the principle memorably set down by the Duc de Villeroi, an aide to Louis XV: "Hold the chamber pot for the ministers but after they have left office, remember to tip it over their heads."

But the sensation of imperial arrogance, cronyism and lined pockets at the paramount regions of French politics is pervasive. And this explains the weariness with which the French public shrug their shoulders when the latest "affaire" erupts.