DSK: American Shame, French Surveillance
DSK: American Shame, French Surveillance
Frank Browning: DSK – American Shame, French Surveillance
French socialists are suffering the blues over the degrading, apparent demise of the most hopeful and intelligent challenger to France?s rightward political drift, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, at the hands of New York?s finest and America?s most shameless hot-flash media. Whatever DSK, a Lothario well known to the Paris press for many years, did to the hapless West African chamber maid at the Midtown Sofitel, itself an established nest of French business tycoons, diplomats, and spies, is not the highly regarded chief of the IMF deserving of at least a superficial presumption of innocence?
For most of my French confreres, the infamous Perp Walk, perfected a century ago in Gotham with the introduction of tabloid flash cameras, displays the brutal difference between la justice française and la justice américaine. Americans, in effect, lynch first and mount a defense later?if they have enough money (which DSK and his TV-star wife surely do)?as the venerable octogenarian founder of Le Nouvel Observateur wrote in his column this week. There is surely merit in the argument. DSK has surely been convicted and sentenced to political death in the court of global public opinion.
But what my French friends, largely of progressive politics, ignore was their utter silence here when the notorious financial pyramid scammer, Bernard Madoff, was subjected to the same Perp Walk two years ago. Madoff was an evil capitalist Ponzi master; DSK is the man who, correctly, turned the IMF, an institution dominated by American bankers, away from market austerity principles to social-minded public investment. Some, who are not normally French nationalists, merely shrugged and said that Madoff isn?t French, as though that should make a difference to quality of justice. What my French friends also seem not to notice is how the European Court of Human Rights, and even France?s Constitutional Council, have denounced France?s own version of pretrial holding procedure: the so-called garde à vue jails. As an example, one friend, himself a high civil servant, found himself thrown into a garde à vue tank, stripped naked, and held for forty-eight hours without access to a lawyer on the strength of a letter of denunciation for personal verbal harassment. The French police say access to a lawyer ?would hinder the search for the truth.?
That is where one of the deepest divides surfaces in the history and practice of la justice française and la justice américaine. The practice of personal denunciation is deeply entrenched in French civil and criminal law, reaching back to the aftermath of the French Revolution?when a denunciation from a sans culotte all too frequently resulted not in a Perp Walk but a direct escort to the guillotine without the slightest hint of cross examination or competent defense. It continued through the notorious anti-Semitic public persecution and military prosecution of the Dreyfus Affair, on through neighborly denunciation of some two million Jews and Resistance fighters by Nazi sympathizers, and then even after the war when domestic spats resulted in more than a few denunciations of innocent victims as German collaborators, a fair number of whom took a one-way Perp stroll to the noose. Recently a weekly newspaper editor out near our country cabin was denounced by a local bureaucrat because the paper questioned whether he was being ?paid more to work less,? to reverse a Sarkozy campaign slogan.
What the French call the ?Anglo-Saxon tradition? has its own originally ecclesiastical story with diabolical denunciations, but more to the point American justice historically concentrated on shame. All through our colonial era and well into the nineteenth century, New England prosecutors threw their victims into public ?stocks,? their hands and feet clamped in place with their backsides left hanging to the wind in the town square. The punishment was surely painful?and could cover anything from tax avoidance to issuing blasphemous statements in private or in public. But more than pain, punishment in the town square stock was all about public shame.
Shame in the Protestant tradition was the prerequisite to penitence and public penitence was the necessary antecedent to reform. The creation of penitentiaries in early-nineteenth-century America grew directly from the principle of penitent shame?but most remarkably it was the French who perfected the model in their own ?pan-optical? prisons, octagon-shaped structures where any possible privacy was denied and the victim was sure that he?and sometimes she?would be under relentless observation. Now in France, as school violence captures headlines, the Ministry of Education demands that all schools be built to provide security agents the same pan-optical surveillance point, so that no student anywhere, anytime, can escape being watched.
