Patron saint of French Socialists

Next Sunday, as we wander out of our village churches after the Mass (while shaking hands with Monsieur le curé and expressing admiration for the excellence of his sermon) and stroll to the polling booths for the first round of the parliamentary elections, we Socialists must not fail to remember that our party now has a patron saint.

The feast day of Saint Nafissatou is the 14th May. A legendary tale reveals that, on that day in the year 2011, in a humble inn in the village of Manhattan, the Holy Ghost alighted upon our heroine in the bodily form of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, clad in less than the bare necessities. Were it not for all the shit that followed, we French Socialists would have pleaded with Dominique to be our leader.

History will surely confirm that Strauss-Kahn would have accepted our pleas of allegiance. We would have gone into presidential battle behind Dominique's banner. And it's not unlikely that Christians among us would have evoked the celebrated words of the Singing Nun, the tragic Belgian Jeanine Deckers [1933-1985 suicide with her female lover]... without worrying too much about the fact that the French verb niquer means "to screw" (in the sense that an internationally-renowned master of economics might like to screw prostitutes).

Were it not for Saint Nafi (her familiar name among friends), we would have gone into the recent presidential elections as innocent lambs, not knowing that the malefic forces of Sarko had more than enough data on hand to screw our hero and ourselves. And the whole nasty affair would have blown up in the middle of the electoral activities.

Strauss-Kahn seems to have caught a big fish

When he started to talk surprisingly about a conspiracy theory, Dominique Strauss-Kahn went fishing, for reasons that were not apparent. Well, he seems to have caught immediately a big fish. On the occasion of a public meeting at Clermont-Ferrand, in front of a few thousand supporters, Nicolas Sarkozy declared:

I say to Monsieur Strauss-Kahn: Explain things to the justice and refrain from imposing your comments upon the French. I respect profoundly the presumption of innocence. But, when somebody is accused of what he's accused, he might, with a minimum of dignity, have the modesty to keep quiet, to avoid adding to the indignity. Throughout all those scandalous and shameful episodes—New York, Lille, the Carlton, the Pas-de-Calais—it was honorable on the part of the republican right and the center to not get involved. They didn't exploit these happenings. They plugged their noses and didn't comment upon these happenings, because commenting upon such affairs was as if you "accepted them a little". But, in the middle of the electoral campaign, a week after the first round, when Monsieur Strauss-Kahn starts to give lessons of morality, and indicate that I am the sole person responsible for everything that happened to him, I say that too much is too much!

Well said, Sarko. But you're talking through the top of your hat, and nothing you say proves that there wasn't a conspiracy. Besides, the Sarkozian conception of the principle of presumption of innocence seems to be that everything's fine as long as Sarko himself has not decided personally that the accused individual might be guilty. A twisted interpretation, to say the least.

Personally, I've always believed firmly that there was indeed some kind of DSK conspiracy, whose outlines are impossible to trace yet. The whole idea of a successful conspiracy, after all, is that it should remain as fuzzy as possible for as long as possible. N'est-ce pas ?

Voices from the Socialist past

Throughout the coming week, we can expect some spectacular fireworks (akin to the final five minutes in a yet-undecided rugby match) as Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande move towards the final moment of truth, next Sunday.

Their forthcoming TV debate will be followed by everybody in France. I don't imagine that there'll be a "winner" and a "loser", unless one of the candidates has a fit of madness... which is a perfectly serious possibility that must not be excluded a priori. And, even if one guy succeeded in knocking out his opponent, I'm not sure that this would change French voting opinion enormously. I believe that most people have already made up their minds, and it's Bye-bye Nicolas (along with your glitzy watches, your charming kids and your top-model wife).

The only thing I regret profoundly in the inevitable impending victory of the left is that Sarko was an adept of cycling, whereas Hollande is a dull soccer guy. OK, I'm a cycling snob, but I find it hard to imagine the president François Hollande watching with enthusiasm (necessary madness) a mythical ascension of the Ventoux. Unless Hollande can do something about this weakness (maybe there are training courses in this domain), his incapacity to go crazy about pairs of wheels on mountain slopes could well turn out to be a significant political handicap.

Meanwhile, we've just heard Dominique Strauss-Kahn informing us that his affair in Manhattan was some kind of Sarkozian setup.

Frankly, for the moment, I can't figure out why DSK chose the present crucial moment (between the two rounds of the presidential elections) to make this disturbing revelation. Is there method in his madness? For the moment, it's impossible to say... But who gives a fuck (apart from DSK, who's apparently good at giving that kind of thing)?

As for the opinions of the former presidential candidate Lionel Jospin, they're easier to understand.

Jospin claims that Sarko was using "the weapon of lies" in suggesting that 700 Muslim mosques in France had proclaimed that their flock should vote for François Hollande. Personally, I've never found it difficult to believe, nor even alarming, that Sarko and his friends might be tempted, from time to time, to play around with the truth.

I'm not saying that being a socialist in France today is a permanent cure against telling political lies... but it seems to help at times.

Pumping

The erotic operation that English-speaking people designate curiously as blowing is generally looked upon, in France, as sucking.

It's also referred to as pumping.

And that brings me to one of the most celebrated anecdotes in France... which I heard for the first time from a professor during a class at the Institute of Political Science in Paris, many years ago. Most French people are aware of the exceptional circumstances in which the life of the 58-year-old president Félix Faure was brought to a joyous end. He had a 30-year-old friend, Marguerite Steinheil, known as Meg, the wife of an artist. On 16 February 1899, the president phoned Meg and suggested that she might drop in at the Elysée Palace towards the end of the afternoon. Well, they were engaged in a hot pumping session on a sofa in the Blue Room of the presidential residence when Meg was alarmed to discover that her lover had suddenly gone limp. Not just his organ, but all over. Clearly, Félix Faure had suffered some kind of major attack, and Meg was convinced that her man was dying. So, she called for help, while scrambling to get her clothes back on and preparing to abandon the palace before all hell broke loose. The president's staff arrived on the scene immediately, as depicted in this stylized magazine illustration:

The anecdote that has gone down in history is a bit hard to translate into English. It concerns the arrival of a priest who asked timidly, before being ushered into the room where the president lay dying: "Has the president retained his consciousness?" A secretary, imagining that the priest was referring to the young lady who had spent the last hour pumping sublime consciousness into the president, replied: "No, Father, she took off immediately down a side staircase as soon as she realized what had happened."

In French, the words for "pump" and "pomp" (as in "pomp and circumstance") are identical. And the everyday expression for an undertaker's activity is "pompe funèbre", literally funeral pomp. So, it was inevitable that people, aware of Meg's active role in the passing of the president, would get around to giving the young Angel of Death a charming nickname: the "Funeral Pump".

Today, if I was reminded of this historical event, it was no doubt because of the news that Dominique Strauss-Kahn would be spending the night at Lille in a police station, where he is being questioned about libertine evenings in a local luxury hotel, the Carlton.

For the moment, he hasn't been charged with any offense whatsoever, but anything could emerge from the intense ongoing investigations. A perspicacious journalist made an interesting observation. Let's suppose that DSK had never become involved with Nafissatou Diallo in a Manhattan hotel, simply because he had decided to leave for France instead of staying in New York. In that case, there would never have been a DSK Affair, and it is highly likely that Strauss-Kahn would have become, as planned, the presidential candidate of the French Socialist Party. Carrying our "what if" scenario one step further, we might conclude that the Lille affair would have still blown up. So, France would have been totally shocked this morning to learn that the popular candidate DSK was being held officially for questioning in a police station in Lille. In these circumstances, it is likely that DSK would have been obliged to abandon his presidential candidacy this evening. So, from a retrospective viewpoint, it was thanks to Nafissatou Diallo in Manhattan that the French Left avoided a catastrophic waste of time, energy and enthusiasm. We lost our illusions in time, well before they caused us to lose ourselves.