Paul from Paris

I’ve seen this several times but had the presence of mind to take a photograph only once.

It’s the upside-down mannequin in a storefront window.

Upside-down mannequin!

It isn’t a work-in-progress but part of a creative, fully envisaged shop display window.

To give credit where credit is due, this window belongs to a store named Scotch & Soda, in Paris on the rue Vieille du Temple.

Activia yogurt

Danone (known in the USA as Dannon) makes high-quality yogurts. It’s a big company that plays by the rules.

I was surprised to read, buried in a press release on a promising first quarter, that Danone had withdrawn requests pending before a European authority to make health claims about two of its dairy products.

EFSA is the European Food Safety Authority. EFSA “was set up in January 2002, following a series of food crises in the late 1990s” as an impartial, pan-EU regulatory agency. One of EFSA’s missions is to review nutrition and health claims.

Danone is committed to “nutriceuticals” or “probiotics” and has a history of making claims about health, or that suggest healthiness:

Bio brand yogurt

• A line of dairy products was long named “Bio”. In French, “bio” is shorthand for “organic”. Danone’s product was not organic. The producer said the name was derived from “bios”, Greek for “life”. But why wasn’t the name then “bios”, and why was the product name was displayed on a green background?
• Danone subsequently chose a new name for the Bio line: “Activia”. In the name, there’s “via”, “life”. Much of the product advertising has centered around “feeling better” and improved digestion.
• Danone also introduced “Actimel”, a drinkable fermented milk product. Actimel is compared to a “fortifier” in French product advertising.

Actimel product

Danone has withdrawn its applications to make health claims about Activia and Actimel before the EFSA because, the company says, the regulator’s criteria are “unclear”.

I’m torn: I’d prefer straightfoward health claims to veiled allusions (which is how I’ve understood Danone’s past product advertising), but I’d want a European regulator to apply strict rules on health claims (such as vegetable sterols that help manage cholesterol). I’m not sure whether or how the two aims can be reconciled.

“Money for nothing and chicks for free”
Dire Straits, “Money for Nothing” (1985)

The story, first reported in The Times of London, quickly gained coverage in conservative media outlets: Antonio Tajani (I’m told that, in Italian, the “j” is pronounced like a “y”), vice-president of the European Commission with the portfolio for industry and entrepreneurship, affirmed at the European Tourism Stakeholders Conference that “traveling for tourism is a right” and that the “right to be tourists” will be at the heart of his policies throughout his mandate.

Tajani also stated that the EU plans to subsidize travel by youth, retirees, and others too poor to afford vacations, which irks conservatives and sounds like a spoof from a Euro-skeptic’s parody of Brussels bureaucrats.

My reaction is fourfold:

• It’s true. It’s for real. It’s change you can believe in. Tajani is a longtime associate of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and a seasoned player in European policies and politics. He held the transport portfolio in the previous European Commission (Barroso I) and was promoted in the current Commission (Barroso II).
• The policy proposal –subsidizing leisure travel– is grounded in a belief in a multiplier effect: for every X euros disbursed by Brussels, economic activity in an amount greater than X will result. Tajani also seems keen to encourage off-season travel, to flatten the effects of seasonality on employment and economic activity. For my part, I’m skeptical whether a multiplier effect exists, and I’m inclined to see this as wishful thinking.
• I won’t cast stones at Tajani for qualifying vacation travel as a right. In the classroom, in reply to the question, “What is Europe (or the European Union)?”, I’ve offered as a possible answer: a place where people travel for leisure or fun. This is a norm, an expectation, perhaps a right.
• Tajani’s pronouncement confirms my low expectations for the Borroso II Commission. Is this initiative really at the heart of policies for the Commissioner in charge of industry and entrepreneurship? Is it absolutely necessary that the Commissioner’s web page feature (as of this date) prominently a photo of a lovely beach, with parasols and chaises longues? Isn’t this far removed from industry and entrepreneurship?

Do you remember Marilee Jones? She used to be dean of admissions at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Hers was a long and noteworthy career. Jones started as an admissions officer and ended up in charge of admissions at an elite, selective school. MIT honored Jones with several, prestigious awards. Jones wrote a book on the admissions process for students and their families that won praise from reviewers. By all accounts, Jones was particularly good at her job.

In 2007, Jones left MIT after it became widely known that she had lied on her resume, adding academic degrees that she had not, in fact, received.

In France, where I live, the potential consequences of falsifying a resume are not always clear. If a candidate invents professional qualifications –as a doctor, a lawyer, a surveyor– his employment can be terminated. If a candidate invents past performance –employment at a specific firm, or achievement of specific results– her employment can be terminated, if the the misrepresentation concerns an essential point, without which the employer would not have offered the position to the candidate, and if the falsification is discovered fairly soon. By contrast, a candidate who lands a job with a falsified resume, and who performs well in the position, probably cannot be fired for the falsehood.

Marilee Jones’s case was not contested before courts in the United States –maybe legal defenses were open to her– and of course it did not reach a French court. So I will not go so far as to pronounce a legal difference in employment rules in France and the United States. But I am struck by a difference in expected response to resume fraud.

American commentators on the Jones affair accepted the justice of Jones’s departure. Hers was an original sin, repeated in each iteration of her resume. She deliberately made a false statement in order to obtain employment. She lied. This suggests dishonesty, unreliability, a penchant towards fabulation.

But does it, really?

I’m not sure. By all accounts I’ve seen, Jones was not only competent, but a star performer in her chosen field. Does schooling done (more than) 25 years earlier have any bearing on what she had accomplished and was doing in 2007? I think not.

By contrast, French commentators on hiring practices seem to be moral relativists. Employers and candidates all accept that the resume should be truthful. But all seem to expect –or accept– embellishment. Many employers are complicit in “made up” (the French term, maquillé, refers to make-up that women wear, not the act of invention) resume entries because they do not verify new hires’ resumes.

Do the French tolerate what are just white lies?

I’m not sure. Shouldn’t a candidate be hired for what she can do, instead of where she has already been? Are degrees awarded really so important? Are honors and distinctions received in the past really good predictors of future performance? Is exaggeration or self-flattery to gain an edge over other candidates in a hypothetical pile of resumes truly unrelated to character?

Loïc Sécher, an out-of-work agricultural laborer, was tried and convicted in 2003 of raping an adolescent girl in 2000 in La Chapelle Saint-Sauveur, a town in the Loire Atlantique (the area of France where the Loire spills into the Atlantic Ocean). Sécher was sentenced to 16 years imprisonment for this grave offense.

On 7 April 2007, Sécher’s victim retracted. She told her lawyer that Sécher was innocent and that she could no longer bear the thought that he was imprisoned. Sécher’s lawyer informed the authorities of the retraction.

On 13 April 2010, the Court of Revision (Cour de révision), a panel of the Cour de Cassation, the highest judicial court in France, annulled the verdict entered against Sécher.

As a matter of policy and the sort of society in which I’d like to live, I’m profoundly disturbed by these developments. Here’s why:

• The decision and its media coverage reinforce suspicion that women fabricate rape charges. (A challenging variant of the problem is set out in Genesis chapter 39, involving charges brought against Joseph by Potiphar’s wife.)
• French convicts serving long prison terms mostly have been convicted of murder or rape. Given the gravity of these offenses, few would contest the justice of lengthy incarceration. But if retraction (by the victim, by witnesses) can cause a conviction to be vacated, isn’t there a risk that witnesses will be pressured to retract? And isn’t this risk of pressuring greatest for those whose testimony leads to the longest prison sentences, in other words those most dangerous to society? Doesn’t retraction present dangers long after the criminal has been convicted and exhausted all appeals?
• Sécher will be put on trial, again. In his case, this makes no sense: his conviction reportedly hinged on the testimony of his putative victim. Without her accusation, there really is no case against Sécher. There is no new evidence. And if it been collected, would forensic evidence have been stored ten years after the fact and seven years after conviction? Even if evidence had been collected and conserved, could a prosecutor ethically make a case against Sécher today?
• Instead of vacating a sentence –in other words, recognizing that a court decided wrongly– wouldn’t it be preferable for Sécher to be pardoned? Or, failing that, for his sentence to be commuted? Grave crimes are the only preserve, in France, of trial by jury. I’m uncomfortable with the prospect, years after a verdict was reached, and outside the channel of an appeal (in other words, the usual means for correcting error), of judges countering a jury verdict, because doing so eats away at the perceived ability of a jury to decide rightly.
• What is the statute of limitations for perjury, and will the accuser now be tried for false statements she made (while a minor)? I would argue that, where the proper administration of justice is concerned, it is more important to punish those who bear false witness than to exonerate those who have been wrongly convicted.
• In France today, a victim enjoys the status of a secular saint. The French justice system often seems to under-compensate victims, but it probably over-sympathizes with them. The Sécher case, I would argue, shows that a criminal defendant urgently needs defense counsel, especially when he is an unappealing, down-and-out suspect.