The Secret Life of France (15 page)

François Mitterrand himself, who swore allegiance to Pétain, was honoured as late as 1943 with the
francisque
(Vichy’s equivalent of the
Légion d’honneur
). He obstinately refused to apologise for Vichy’s crimes and stuck to the casuistic argument that Vichy was an aberration in French history: an illegal regime, which had usurped the Republic. As he put it in 1992, ‘The French nation was not involved in that, nor was the Republic.’ In the end it was Chirac (only a child during the war) who, as soon as he came to power in 1995, stood up and apologised for France’s role in the extermination of the Jews.

Over the past twenty years the business of facing the truth, with all its messy ambiguities, has helped France to recover from the trauma of the Occupation. It has also helped to reveal more positive inconsistencies, hitherto masked by France’s habit of myth-making: the fact, as Serge Klarsfeld points out, that 240,000 people, three-quarters of France’s Jewish population, survived the Shoah, ‘thanks to the compassion and solidarity of countless French people’. When you consider that Serbia killed every last one of her Jews, and Poland, Estonia and Lithuania each slaughtered around 90 per cent of theirs, France – even with the complicity of Vichy – was one of the countries in Nazi-occupied Europe where the largest number of Jews survived. Despite Laval’s ignoble initiative, 84 per cent of Jewish children were saved in France, the highest proportion in Europe.

France’s incurable idealism makes her prone to extremes. She is a nation in thrall to the idea and, as such, highly vulnerable to its grubby relative, ideology. In spite of her best efforts, however – her fascist legions, her nationalism and her racist laws – France made a very poor working partner for the Nazis, who became increasingly exasperated by her inconsistencies. Hitler had always preferred the English to the French, whom he saw as immoral and racially impure. As General Walter Warlimont, of the Wehrmacht High Command, put it, ‘For racial reasons Hitler seemed to prefer the English to the French. He had a view of France’s decadence as something irreversible …’
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After the German invasion, André Gide, himself a Protestant, wrote in his diary: ‘That puritan rigour by which Protestants, those spoilsports, often make themselves so hateful, those scruples of conscience, that integrity, that unshakeable punctuality, these are the things we have most lacked. Softness, surrender, relaxation in grace and ease, so many charming qualities that were to lead us, blindfolded, to defeat.’

Young children in France are swept up by the State from an early age. You can put your toddler (provided that he or she is nappy-trained) into free, full-time education from the age of three, and in some cases two. For me, the temptation to hand my little ones over to the child-catcher that is
l’Education Nationale
was irresistible. By the time Jack was four and Ella nearly three, my days were free between eight-thirty and four. Sometimes, usually when my English or American girlfriends came to stay, I would feel guilty about my children’s forced and premature socialisation.

On winter mornings, as I waved goodbye to them at the school gates when it was still dark outside and watched them disappear into a low, grey building, I would long to run after them and whisk them away to the adventure playground. Then I would remember, there are no adventure playgrounds, only tame, picturesque pony rides in the Luxembourg gardens. I would pick them up at four and my heart would melt at the sight of their little camp beds all in a row, on the pillow of each a cuddly toy – or, as the school Freudian would put it,
un objet de transfert
(transference object). The children would file out of the classroom in pairs, hand in hand, and fetch their coats from their peg in an orderly fashion. Then they would lay their coats on the ground in front of them, feed their little arms into the sleeves and, with an expert motion, flip their coats over their heads. They would only need help with the zip. All this impeccable regimentation made me wonder why the French had made such poor bedfellows for the Nazis.

While Jack was writhing and struggling in the mould and Ella settling comfortably into it, I began my working life. A friend from Oxford sent me off for an interview with the BBC Paris correspondent, Edward Stourton, who had just arrived from the Washington bureau and was looking for a researcher. Political correctness had not yet dawned in France and Edward seemed to welcome the respite from the new puritanism that was sweeping across America. A Roman Catholic himself, he had no difficulty slipping into French working rituals. He shared my view that there was little point in cutting short your lunch break when the whole of Paris only returned to their desks at three, nor was there much point in drinking water over lunch when your interviewee was drinking wine.

Many years later, even now that France has joined the global economy, French businessmen still take a proper lunch break and drink wine with their meal. Laurent and his colleagues, who work in investment banking, testify to the joy or suspicion shown by their English or American investors when they come to Paris on business.
They are surprised by the fact that while they invariably share a bottle of Bordeaux between three, their English guests will often get through a bottle each and the Americans will stick stubbornly to mineral water; to the French the relationship to alcohol seems, in both cases, somewhat excessive.

Shortly after I began working for the BBC Paris bureau, the French war criminal Paul Touvier was arrested in a monastery in Nice after forty-five years on the run. A devout Catholic and member of the
Milice
, Touvier had been hiding with his wife and two children in various monasteries across France ever since the war. The monks had pleaded ‘right of asylum’ as their reason for harbouring a man accused of crimes against humanity, and for some of them this was probably true, but for many it was clearly ideological compatibility that drove them. Anticommunism and anti-Judaism – strains that were still rife in the Catholic Church – made certain clerics take a lenient view of Touvier’s crimes.

In those days (before John Birt and financial accountability) the BBC seemed to have endless resources. Documentaries were shot on very expensive 16mm film, generally by intense young men and women who dreamed of directing feature films. These films could take a year to make, from the research period (which might take six months) to editing and post-production. I remember having to find one hundred homing pigeons to provide a single shot for the Touvier film, a fifty-minute documentary
made for Religious Programming that went massively over budget. This lavish approach meant that the researcher had plenty of time to go out and find the story. As a freelance researcher I was low down in the BBC pecking order, but working for ‘Auntie’ carried huge kudos in France, where her reputation for quality and impartiality opened many doors, some of which remained closed to French journalists. The stories I researched brought me into contact with the underbelly of French society, a world peopled with judges, politicians, delinquents, terrorists, cops and spies. Some of them became friends.

The eclectic friendships that I made during my years as a stringer for the British press stand as a measure of my incompetence as an investigative journalist. I now realise that by the time my career got under way, I had become irrevocably contaminated by the French cult of the
jardin
secret
. Instead of proceeding as any self-respecting Anglo-Saxon reporter would do – by teasing the story from your source and then running with it – I found myself staying for coffee and cigars and listening to spooks, spies and investigative magistrates, for the sheer pleasure of learning. It became clear that with my menial status within the hierarchy of the BBC – and later, as a lowly stringer for the
Sunday Telegraph
– I could get away with filing anecdotal, ‘colour’ stories that hovered on the edge of a scoop, without ever betraying the implicit, though unstated request that my sources made of me to be discreet.

When the children were at school I would do my job –
which meant researching the stories that interested me (at the time, terrorism, espionage and organised crime) while keeping my employers in London happy but without blowing my contacts in France. Pusillanimous as this may sound to British journalists, this is very much the French approach to reporting. As everywhere else in French culture, the values of the press are fundamentally Catholic: take your pleasure – within the bounds of reason – and be discreet about it.

So it was that in my working life, I found myself constantly torn between my Anglo-Saxon impulse to find out the truth that lay behind things and a growing French tendency to keep it to myself.

Were I a true Brit, I told myself, my cosy evenings in a dining club in the sixteenth arrondissement with French counter-intelligence chiefs and their buddies from the French atomic agency would, by Monday morning, be on the front page of
The Times
. But then, I thought selfishly, they would never talk to me again. For these men and women, like all French people, love to talk. They cannot keep secrets. They have to flaunt their knowledge, their insights and their perspicacious overview. I would drink up their words and then go home to Laurent and sit up in bed with him and tell him all the things that I had learnt about his strange country – among them some of the reasons for her (as I saw it) rather contrary foreign policy.

I am sitting with Yves, retired head of French counter-intelligence, and his wife, Michelle, in their large, bright
kitchen. The view is of a Normandy garden in winter: manicured lawn, poplars, Madame Bovary fog, limp but enduring roses.

Yves’s wife cuts the
galette des rois
, a kind of almond cake that is eaten all over France in the first half of January. The
galette
testifies to the persistence of France’s dual Roman and Catholic heritage. The Feast of the Kings, as it is known here, refers to the three kings from the Nativity story, but it is a Christian rehash of the rather more debauched, week-long festival of Saturnalia, during which, apart from going completely crazy, the Romans would send each other cakes. The French
galette
is made with very buttery, flaky or crusty pastry, depending on the region (here in Normandy it is flaky), and filled with a creamy frangipani.

Michelle cuts the cake into four large slices, one for each of us and one, as tradition dictates, for
le pauvre
, the vagrant who might show up at the door and need feeding. Hidden in one of the portions is a tiny porcelain figure known as
la fève
. It is either a religious symbol (the Black Madonna, one of the three kings) or a secular one (the Eiffel Tower, a sheep, a loaf of bread). The person who finds the
fève
in their slice becomes King (or Queen) and puts on one of the two gold paper crowns that the
boulanger
has provided with the cake.

‘The tradition was banned during the Revolution as monarchistic,’ Yves explains as I bite down on the
fève
.

‘Well done!’ Michelle exclaims. ‘What is it?’

We all conclude that it is a shepherd.

‘People took no notice of the ban of course,’ Yves goes on. ‘And in true French style, Napoleon authorised it again.’

‘You have to choose your King,’ Michelle says with a smile.

I put the paper crown on the ex-spymaster and we all dig in.

After tea, Yves and I and his new golden retriever, Voyou (Rogue – I presume as in State), move into the study. I want him to tell me about his insights and experiences, not because I haven’t heard them before but because this time I wish to write them down.

Yves Bonnet, former head of the DST (
Direction de la
Surveillance du Territoire
, French counter-intelligence), is a freethinker, a rare species in France. Protestant on both his mother’s and father’s side, he is, like many Huguenots, a passionate Anglophile, a sceptic and an iconoclast. Among his most recent ideas is a campaign to rehabilitate Pierre Cauchon, the collaborationist bishop who burnt Joan of Arc.

‘He made a sensible decision,’ he argues. ‘The English would have done a much better job of ruling France than the imbeciles who came after that lunatic Charles VII. Just imagine, Lucy. With the Plantagenets at the helm, ruling Britain and France as one, what a great nation we would have made.’

As a spymaster operating towards the end of the Cold War, Yves says that he came to depend heavily on the
English. He refers to
La Six
(MI6) as ‘still by far the best agency in the world’. Mistrustful of his sister house, the DGSE – which still, three decades after the
Rainbow
Warrior
fiasco, drags around a reputation for incompetence – he quickly got into the habit of applying to the English for foreign intelligence.

‘My external service is MI6,’ he told a commission of inquiry investigating the lack of coordination between France’s intelligence services. ‘If I need to know anything, in China, in Pakistan, I’ll call the English.’

‘Do you know what you’re saying?’ the investigator asked him.

‘Perfectly. If you want to work properly in this field, you work with the English.’

Yves recalls with satisfaction MI6’s station chief in Paris, Kenneth Wright.

‘With his perfect French, his
finesse
and his Cambridge-style distinction, the man seemed to have walked straight out of a John Le Carré novel.’

Yves notes that this was often the profile of agents working for
La Six
, which, as he puts it, employs a ‘better calibre’ than MI5. Despite his affection for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Yves did work closely with MI5 on ‘the Irish’.

‘We went very far for the English over Ireland. We were MI5’s annexe in Paris, intercepting arms for them, tapping phones. The Irish work took up thirty to forty French inspectors all year round, paid for by the Republic,’ he adds. ‘We’re not a big agency so this was no small thing, but we were happy to do it.’

Ever since his time as head of the DST, Yves will not have a word said against British intelligence, which he believes offers ‘in an imperfect world, a model of conduct, due to the simplicity of its structures, its coherence and its checks and balances’.

It must be said that Yves’s experience of the United Kingdom dates back to the early eighties and was limited to his brief visits to The Travellers Club on Pall Mall, courtesy of Colin Figures, then head of MI6. When I mention some other, more contemporary aspects of British society, he stops me, as if reluctant to have his idyll marred.

‘I know, I know.
Les Hooliganes
,’ he says quaintly. ‘It seems that in Britain the very best coexists beside the very worst. France does not have such contrasts. I suppose if I had to,’ he concludes, euphemistically, ‘I would choose the civilisation of the grape to that of the hop.’

A former Prefect and centre-right MP, Yves was nominated to head the DST by the socialist president François Mitterrand because he knew that this Protestant maverick would carry out vitally needed reforms to a sclerotic service without bowing to pressure from any faction. Yves remembers entering Mitterrand’s study at the Elysée for the first time and discreetly craning his neck to see who was occupying the only photo frame on the president’s desk. To his amusement and admiration it was not his wife, Danielle, or his daughter, Mazarine, but … Ronald Reagan.

Separated by their politics, Yves and his president were
united by a common mistrust of orthodoxy. Champion of the underdog, Yves’s alliances are broad and eclectic. A friend, like Mitterrand, to the Serbs and the Iraqis, he has always fiercely opposed sanctions, which he calls ‘the rich man’s terrorism’. He has been a loyal friend to the Algerian military regime since their intelligence service (SM) helped him organise the release of Gilles Sydney Peyrolles, one of the first French hostages to be taken in Lebanon.
*
Yves has dined twice with Saddam Hussein, whom he described as ‘logorrhoeic’, and believes that Iran, a regime he despises, not only already has nuclear capability, but is perfectly entitled to it.

At this point, I tell Yves that I find it difficult to listen to him talking about geopolitics with that paper crown on his head.

‘We are at war with America,’ Mitterrand said in an interview with journalist Georges-Marc Benamou in 1995. ‘A permanent war, a war without death. They are very hard, the Americans – they are voracious. They want undivided power over the world.’