Mitterrand: More Trouble

I regret having made this post. For my reasons, and an explanation of why I haven't taken it down, see here.

As if the minister of culture didn't have enough trouble, his name has been associated with a film involving sex and unambiguously underage children. Here is the IMDB entry: note the name of the narrator. If this is not somehow a hoax, I wager that Mitterrand is done, and now the Elysee will have to answer for incompetence: Why was this not discovered before his nomination?

Here's the clip (link removed at request of Philippe Barassat: see comments, and see below for legal link).

NOTE: The link above is to the site fdesouche.com, identified here as "le site phare de la fachosphère" (as the name fdesouche might suggest):

Le site phare de la "fachosphère" (mouvance regroupant blogs et sites d'extrême-droite) ne lâche pas sa proie. Le 2 octobre, il met en ligneMon copain Rachid (vidéo supprimée de YouTube depuis, les droits n'étant pas libres), un court-métrage de Philippe Barassat sorti en 1995, où Frédéric Mitterrand fait la voix off. Le film raconte les liens troubles entre deux jeunes garçons, Eric et Rachid. Une nouvelle preuve, selon le site, des penchants pédophiles de Frédéric Mitterrand.

I hope I haven't been duped here, but my information came from someone who is most definitely on the left, not part of the "fachosphère," and the film appears to exist.

More here. The version of the film with Mitterrand doing la voix off can be seen here.

In view of the note from Philippe Barassat (see comments), I have removed the link to the fdesouche.com Web site and redirected to the legal site he recommends.

Can Sarko Overreach?

Since it seems unlikely that the opposition can defeat Sarkozy on its own, he will have to defeat himself. Might he have overreached in pushing his son forward to take over EPAD? Ségolène Royal, Cécile Duflot, and François Bayrou have seized the opportunity, and not much has brought this much unity to the opposition in some time. Some are comparing Sarko's hubris to Berlusconi's. But there is work to be done here. The opposition will go nowhere if it sticks at anti-Sarkozysme primaire. It needs to develop the indictment beyond nepotism to embrace the Right's whole approach to governance. There is the germ of a winning set of issues here, but the themes need to be multiplied and carefully nurtured.

Around the Internet

Charles Bremner on Mitterrand and le fils Sarkozy.
Bernard Girard on the same subjects.
Gays also divided on Mitterrand affair.
More commentary on these subjects of the week.

Myths

The New York Times has a pretty good article today on an encampment of sans-papiers in the 18th Arrdt. of Paris. Why aren't they expelled, the paper asks? One of the immigrants tells them, correctly I think, that French public opinion won't accept mass arrests. Immigrants are more vulnerable when alone and when expulsions can be carried out from detention centers where those arrested one by one are held for deportation. But the paper then goes on to say this:

And the sans-papiers have had particularly strong support from France’s leftist political parties and powerful labor unions, where populist ideology runs deep.

"Strong support"might be a bit much, but support, yes. On the other hand, "powerful labor unions?" "Leftist political parties?"

These mighty forces live on in American journalistic mythology if nowhere else. They haven't been able to stop much that Sarkozy has wanted to do. If the government hesitates to make mass arrests, it isn't because it's afraid of paper tigers. It is afraid of un lieu de mémoire: les rafles de '42. Today's Right may be décomplexée, but not to that degree. The symbolic forces at work here are more subtle than the Times realizes.