Lawyers against the Law
French court lawyers all look like abstract sculptors who have been practising on their own hair. They are often interviewed on TV about a case as their client enters or emerges from the courtroom, and they all look like the last person you would want to defend you in a court of law. Unshaven, vaguely psychopathic, totally untrustworthy.
But in fact they are often very astute operators, because they are experts at manipulating French secrecy.
In the British legal system, solicitors are officers of the court and as such are duty-bound to produce any relevant documents in their possession, even if they are harmful to their client. But French lawyers have no such obligation. So what if their client filmed himself hacking his business partner to death? No one else knows about the home slasher movie, so they can plead not guilty. At the same time, these lawyers are more than happy to review all the evidence into a forest of TV and radio mics and then claim that their client cannot possibly get a fair trial because the media keep reporting the case. The moral is, what better person to defend you than someone capable of such beautiful hypocrisy?
The Law in Inaction
The French police are divided into a variety of semi-independent bodies – the police nationale, who are run by the Ministry of the Interior, the gendarmerie nationale, who are part of the Ministry of Defence, the CRS (the gladiator-style riot police), the police judiciaire, the GIR (rapid intervention force), and others. But in French minds, they are more meaningfully divided into the ones who look silly and the ones who don’t.
The ones who look silly include certain gendarmes who have to wear the old kepi, and the gangs of hickish beat cops who wander the streets of Paris looking as if they’ve failed the audition to become New York policemen because of their sloppy uniform. Even the CRS look quite silly before they put on their body armour, because of their shiny blue catsuits that zip up from the crotch.
These silly-looking units have a bad public image. The common perception is that the CRS do nothing but bludgeon students and union activists, and that the gendarmes and uniformed beat cops bumble about, allowing major crimes to disappear unsolved into a quagmire of paperwork.
But in fact, the less-than-serious cops are there to deflect attention from the more discreet ones. There are often brief stories in the newspapers about huge networks of fraud, internet crime or prostitution being cleared up. No fuss, lots of arrests, the suspects deported or sent to rot in jail. Individual crime may not concern the French police very much (if you get burgled, that’s your headache), but give them a whole network to dismantle and their intelligence services spring silently into action. If the network involves influential people, it may not be dismantled quite so quickly, but that’s a different problem.
The uniformed cops get their dramatic crime-busting operations, too, but they tend to net slightly smaller fish. Every weekend, there are crowds of French police on the Italian border, confiscating fake Dior T-shirts, cheap plastic imitations of Louis Vuitton bags and other counterfeit luxury items. These aren’t being smuggled in by dealers, just by locals who nip over to Italy to get a chic brand-name jacket for a hundredth of the genuine price. The gendarmes stop cars that have been seen parked at Ventimiglia market by spies who are on the payroll of the big brands involved. The spies phone in the car registration numbers to the gendarmes, and the shoppers are stopped and dispossessed as soon as they cross back into France. On top of this, whole coachloads of naïve daytrippers are searched and relieved of their contraband.
They are absurdly easy pickings. And while this is going on, you could smuggle through a carload of white slaves, rocket-propelled grenade launchers or heroin – as long you are not a big enough fish to interest the secret services, of course. And as long as you’re not wearing a fake Cartier watch.
Argent? What Argent?
One subject that the French feel uncomfortable talking about in polite society is money. Or rather, their money.
If you’ve got it, you shut up about it. Only the poor and the vulgar discuss how much they paid for something or how much they earn. And only the nouveaux riches wear huge watches and drive silly red sports cars.
This, though, is less out of polite discretion than fear.
France has a wealth tax that applies to everything you own, from your house and car to your post-office savings account. And it kicks in at a very low threshold. If you own a family-sized apartment in the centre of Paris, you really ought to be paying the impôt sur la fortune (ISF). I was once at a dinner party at the home of a Paris family who’d just had a lift installed in their building near the Seine. They were on the fifth floor, so the value of their apartment had gone up by at least 20 per cent, almost certainly taking it over the ISF threshold. An English woman at the party asked how much the place was worth now. The hostess blanched and went into etiquette shock. She felt that she ought to be polite and answer her guest, but at the same time it was an unspeakably blunt question for a dinner party, rather like asking how many lovers the hostess currently had on the go. I intervened, told the hostess
