The Bettencourt Affair by Tom Sancton

Author:Tom Sancton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

FILTHY RICH

The publication of the illicit recordings in June 2010 was devastating for the image of Liliane Bettencourt. Once admired as the main shareholder and a board member of the world’s leading cosmetics firm, a philanthropist via her family foundation, the wife of a government minister, and an elegant grande dame perched at the top of France’s social ladder, she now appeared as a senile old lady with more money than she knew what to do with. That unflattering view was embodied by “Mamie Zinzin”—Nutty Grandma—a marionette featured on the popular satirical show Les Guignols de l’info. Created in 1988 by the Canal+ network, the Guignols took the form of a mock news broadcast that pilloried politicians and celebrities to the delight of its millions of daily viewers. Starting in the summer of 2010, the figure of Mamie Zinzin emerged as a gaga octogenarian handing out banknotes with cheerful abandon—mostly to President Nicolas Sarkozy.

One skit showed Sarkozy’s allies ringing the Bettencourt doorbell dressed in Halloween costumes. When Mamie Zinzin answers the door, grinning hideously and trembling with palsy, they shout “trick or treat.” She thrusts wads of €500 notes into their hands, squealing, “Aren’t they cute!” Sarkozy meets his henchmen at the street corner and grabs the cash. “That’s for my 2012 campaign,” he says, and sends them back for more. “Mamie Zinzin will forget you were there two minutes ago.”

Such skits were a not-too-subtle stab at Sarkozy’s alleged campaign gifts from the Bettencourts. But the main target was Liliane herself, for reasons that say a lot about French attitudes toward wealth. American audiences might sympathize with an elderly woman who is expropriated by unscrupulous plunderers. To the popular French mind, though, such a figure is more likely to be the object of scorn precisely because she is rich. Money is traditionally a taboo subject in France. Those who have it try to hide it, or at least be discreet about it, while those who don’t tend to resent and envy those who do. Even within the Bettencourt family, the subject was avoided. “At home, we didn’t talk about money,” said Françoise Meyers. “It was not a word we pronounced easily.”

In stark contrast to the United States, where John Kennedy could ride into the White House on his father’s money and a billionaire real estate mogul named Donald Trump could tout his personal fortune as a qualification for the presidency and win election, French politicians have traditionally sought public favor by denouncing wealth as antidemocratic and money itself as a source of corruption. “My only adversary, and that of France, has always been money,” the conservative Charles de Gaulle famously declared in 1969. At the other end of the political spectrum, the Socialist François Mitterrand unleashed his most eloquent indignation against “money that corrupts, money that buys, money that kills, money that ruins and rots the conscience of men.” François Hollande solidified his popularity among leftist voters by bluntly telling a TV interviewer in 2006: “I don’t like the rich.

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