Paul from Paris

François Delattre, embroiled in controversy?

How was such a thing possible? I knew François Delattre to be the former French consul general in New York, currently the French ambassador to Canada. A diplomat, levelheaded, not one to court or to spark controversy.

FD, the mayor

It turns out that I’d confused François Delattre with a homonym. I hardly thought the name common, but there is at least one other François Delattre. The other François Delattre is the conservative mayor of Franconville, a city in the Paris area. He’s a rotund fellow, grayer and heavier than his homonym, the diplomat.

François Delattre, the mayor, caused controversy over upcoming regional elections. No one in France seems to know or care what the regions are or do, so the campaigns tend to focus on the personalities of slate leaders (voters choose a slate, generally aligned with a political party but identified by the name or slogan of the slate leader). Negative campaigning is common.

François Delattre, the conservative mayor, made a series of remarks about the labor party standard-bearer in the Val d’Oise district, where Franconville is located. The labor party standard-bearer is named Ali Soumaré, a thirty-something black man, active in local politics. Apparently, Delattre can’t stand Soumaré, and said this about him:

• “At first, I thought he was a player on the PSG reserve team. But he’s actually the party head from Villiers-le-Bel.” (decoding: the PSG is the Paris football/soccer team; Villiers-le-Bel was a center of urban rioting a few years go.)
• “His candidacy is an outrage for democracy.”
• “An experienced recidivist delinquent.”

Ali Soumaré

Delattre, the conservative mayor, produced copies of convictions in support of his characterization of Soumaré as a repeat offender.

The convictions include: aggravated theft, aggravated theft with violence, battery, driving without a license, and rebellion against a law enforcement officer.

Media reports often included an unflattering photo of Soumaré (at left) with this rap sheet.

The initial reaction to these allegations looked, to my eyes, like confusion. Soumaré first said that he needed to talk with his lawyer. Then commentators pointed out that some recent charges were still pending, and that other convictions were subject to appeal. A debate then ensued about how Delattre came to possess copies of court judgments, and whether criminal convictions were confidential or otherwise protected.

Ali Soumaré

Then the truth emerged. Yes, Ali Soumaré had been convicted of aggravated theft, in 1999. A “youthful error”, according to Soumaré, who says he “paid his debt to society”. As for the many other convictions, all were attributable to one or more homonyms: François Delattre had confused Ali Soumaré with others who have the same name and the misfortune of being defendants in criminal proceedings.

The error seems hugely embarrassing to the conservatives. Their standard-bearer, Valerie Pécresse, has been spending time explaining and apologizing for Delattre’s blunders. Watching her, she seems uncomfortable.

For his part, Ali Soumaré (pictured, at left, from his campaign materials) has become a household name. In a campaign where personality and name recognition mean everything, I suspect that labor party officials are jubilant.

INSEE, the French statistical agency, just came out with a report on the earnings of French professionals.

The report confirmed much of what I’ve long thought about the economics of the legal profession in France. The takeaway points:

• Most legal professionals are in the Paris area or on the Mediterranean coast.
• In 2007, average earnings were € 61,000. In the Paris area, the 2007 average earnings were € 70,000.
• In 2007, median earnings were € 40,900. There was significant earnings disparity. The earnings ratio between the third quartile and the median for legal professionals was 2.16, but only 1.37 for private-sector white-collar workers.
• The average age of legal professionals is 44, and 44% of them are women. Among legal professionals under 45, 54% are women.
• Despite the feminization of the legal professions, earnings disparity between men and women is huge: men start out earning more than women, and their earning premium increases over time. After 25 years experience, male legal professionals have multiplied their annual earnings by 2.3; with the same experience, the multiplier for women is 1.7.

INSEE uses definitions that, for me, complicate comparisons. What I call “earnings” are an artificial construct, between a salaried worker’s gross and take-home pay. “Legal professionals” include lawyers, but also notaries (who officiate real estate conveyances), auctioneers, bailiffs, and court reporters.

France long enjoyed a close relationship with tobacco and, for many years, treated smoking liberally.

Attitudes and behaviors have changed. European integration, a hygienic mindset, tax policies, and demographic shifts all contributed to the changes. Today, France counts about 15 million smokers. Arguably, this is a lot for a country with 60 million inhabitants.

Public health authorities concentrate on smoking among youth. Smokers are in the minority among every age bracket, but the proportion of smokers is highest in the 20-25 age bracket, followed by those age 15-19. In order to reach this population, authorities and advertising agency have created several campaigns. Many are banal, ineffective, or insulting. But some are clever.

My favorite is a spot by French director Yvan Attal, which aired shortly before smoking was prohibited in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. The spot –aired on public television in prime time– grabs your attention by depicting a couple having sex in a storeroom. A voiceover warns: “Caroline’s playing with her life. She doesn’t know that she’s contracting a fatal disease.” Then comes the surprise: the disease has nothing to do with sex. Instead, every day Caroline “absorbs toxic substances”, that stay in the air “hours after their emission”, because she works in the nightclub, cleaning up. The spot ends with the tagline: “let’s not take any more risks”.

I like the spot because Attal managed to put a positive spin on the smoking ban by borrowing a page from safe sex campaigns and by directing concern to others.

Attal has just put out another anti-smoking spot. It’s equally creative. Set in a management meeting, it presents a problem: how to dispose of 60 tons of toxic waste? One manager suggests waste treatment, rejected as too expensive. Another suggests burying the wastes in a vacant lot, rejected as outdated and sure to incur political wrath. Another suggests dumping the waste abroad, rejected out of hand by the boss, now irritated, who asks whether anyone has an idea that’s “simple, economical, and efficient”. Then another manager speaks up: dispose of the waste by having people swallow it. The boss expresses skepticism. But the manager explains that marketing people can persuade youth that this is a great idea. The clincher: this won’t cost the company a cent, because young people will pay for this scheme.

I like the spot because Attal plays on the cynicism teens harbor towards the adult world, shown here to be worse than they had feared. Just as the earlier spot drew on safe sex themes, the new spot draws on strongly negative attitudes towards toxic waste.

I met Mademoiselle George in a cemetery. While visiting Père Lachaise, I passed by a marker that read “GEORGE”. This probably wasn’t a first name, which the French write “Georges“, with an “s”. I thought George was Mr. George and tried to look him up. Then I found that George was actually Miss George, a woman who led a remarkable and fascinating life.

Mademoiselle George was born on 23 February 1787, in the  French city of Bayeux. Her father was German; her mother was French. Drawn to (or into) the theater as a child, Mademoiselle George made her début at the prestigious Comédie Française while she was a teenager. Her career as an actress spanned a remarkable length, from the revolution (1790s) to the Second Empire (1850s). Hers was a household name, known to all literate society.

Mademoiselle George’s exceptional good looks overshadowed her acting abilities. Comparing her to another actress, a contemporary wrote, “Mademoisele Duchensois is so good that she seems pretty; Mademoiselle George is so pretty that she seems good…” (quotation in Roselyne Laplace’s biography, Mademoiselle George, published by Fayard in 1987).

Her beauty won Mademoiselle George a lot of attention from men. In a manner reminiscent of French first lady Carla Bruni today, she had many boyfriends. The men in her life tended to be wealthy and powerful, such as Napoleon Bonaparte, whom she described as the “master of the world”.

Mademoiselle George fascinates me particularly because, towards the end of her life, she wrote her memoirs, which are today in the public domain and easy to consult (in French) on the web. I’m struck by her theatrical tone. Mademoiselle George’s recollections always mention clothing and jewelry (costumes), settings and furniture (sets). She writes stunning set pieces about intimate meetings with her lovers –often described as playful (in other words, as I read her, they were equally actors in their public lives)– but manages to preserve some privacy while exciting or toying with her reader’s imagination (one lover kisses her hand, she spends a night with another “talking”).

Mademoiselle George also intrigues me because she sought out independence, and wrote insightfully about this quest. She was attached to her family but remained unattached (and childless). Her career as an actress gave her the freedom to travel throughout Europe and brought her into proximity of people –artists and political leaders– who interested her, but kept her at the margins of society. She sought out and enjoyed the company of master-of-the-world class men, but fretted about becoming a “toy” or “plaything” (which leads me to ask who was playing with whom). Huge sums of money travel across her orbit, and sometimes passed through her hands, but always had a casino-chip unreality, here today and vanished tomorrow.

Imagine: your firm plays by the rules, does everything it is supposed to and more, because it holds itself to the highest standards in the industry. Your firm has happy customers and satisfied workers. Then, one morning, you find that your firm has been blacklisted, held up as a bad example by the labor ministry; the news, including your firm’s name, is carried prominently by the media, and is visible to all on a dedicated, government web site.

This really happened, in France, last week.

Labor minister Xavier Darcos, a card-carrying conservative, has been working on a national plan on stress in the workplace. In one initiative, the labor ministry sent firms that employ more than 1,000 people –there are about 1,500 such firms in France– a questionnaire about stress prevention. The questionnaire asked only whether the firm had set up a committee to discuss the issue with unions or labor representatives; it did not ask about measured stress levels or what firms actually did to change working conditions.

About 600 firms did not return the questionnaire. (That corresponds to a 40% rate of no response.) These firms, together with those that did reply but answered that they had not set up a committee, were lumped into a red list. By comparison, firms with committees looking into the matter were placed on an orange list (the middle light on a French traffic signal is orange, not yellow); and firms that had signed some kind of agreement with unions or employee representatives won a spot on a green list.

The labor ministry posted all three lists to the web, to an official, government site. In one day, more than a million visitors consulted the lists, according to Le Parisien. As abruptly as the lists went up, the labor ministry then pulled down the red and orange lists.

The lists had been exposed to public view for about 24 hours, but that was time aplenty for “redlisted” firms to suffer a public relations setback by being labeled as bad workplaces: a red light means “stop”.