L'Omerta Française [French]

By Sophie Coignard

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: French
• ISBN: 2226110313
• ISBN13: 9782226110312
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: ALBIN MICHEL
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.9" x 1.2" x 5.7"

Customer Reviews

fascinating, dense, and very challenging

This is a look at the ways that secrets are maintained in the modern French democracy. It involves corruption, intimidation (legal, employment/career, and physical), and simple standard operating procedure that allows the elite to (apparently literally) get away with murder. The authors refer to "the chokers" (les etouffeurs) who maintain this apparatus that pays them off, employs them, and keeps them in power without too many irritating questions. It is indeed an extremely bleak assessment of modern France as in thrall to an interlocking "nomenclatura" of polticians, bureaucrats, and the press. Anyone who talks is intimidated and crushed - in most cases.For example, in the mid-1980s, when it became apparent that blood provided to hemophiliacs (to enhance their blood clotting factor) was tainted with the AIDS virus, it was known that the bureaucrat in charge was in cahoots with the blood companies. Together, they had refused to use an available technology to superheat the blood, thereby destroying the virus, for business reasons and simple laziness. The top journalist - of Le Monde - was directly in the pay of this group (for PR services) as a supplement to his income, apparently a standard practice among French journalists that is akin to the "speaking engagements" that some American mega-journalists do. The legal apparatus was afraid to touch the issue, and meanwhile thousands more were inflected via transfusions. Finally, some people spoke and it became one of the biggest scandals of post-war France. This is a truely shocking and horrible story.Similar stories can be told about Mitterrand's secret second family (housed at taxpayer expense in a chateau), Giscard's diamonds (from the cannabalistic dictator Bokassa), a long-ignored though well known ring of sex abusers of chidren in Provence, and payoff scandals like that of the recent Elf trial. Of course, what the reader wonders is what stories don't get told and what impact it all has on the political process. It is a very ugly picture.If you are not quite sure what events the above paragraph refers to, you are forewarned about the knowledge level required for this book. Hundreds of recent events are referred to with little explanation - I was educated at one of the top political science schools in Paris and not even I was certain what such phrases as the "Balladurian debacle" should evoke. In the same way, names of media and political personalities are reeled off in such rapid succession that it made my head spin. Thus, you must have read the French press regularly over the last 30 years or so. That limits the audience, to say the least, but it is very very interesting indeed. I gained a completely different perspective on a country I know very well (and love and hate), including how the institutions work and how people manage their careers, often those of individuals that I watched on TV and whose books I read.That being said, there is a relentless quality about the outrage i