Dominique Strauss-Kahn left his temporary residence in Tribeca on Saturday.Days after the revelation that the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn was on the verge of collapse, France reacted with a mix of Gallic indignation at the American justice system, fevered speculation about his political rehabilitation and visceral anger by some feminists that the former head of the International Monetary Fund was now being cast as a victim.
The almost overnight transformation of D.S.K. — as Dominique Strauss-Kahn is widely known in France — from alleged sexual predator to seeming victim of an unscrupulous accuser has riveted and divided the country. The news that the Sofitel maid who had accused D.S.K. of rape had repeatedly lied to prosecutors has also spurred talk of a political comeback for the one-time French presidential contender that only weeks ago was deemed impossible.
Citing a Harris Interactive poll in the French daily Le Parisien, Le Monde noted Sunday that 49 percent of the French people surveyed favored D.S.K.’s return to politics while 45 percent opposed it. Le Monde reported that despite the renewed support for D.S.K., only 43 percent wanted the Socialists to delay primaries to allow Mr. Strauss-Kahn — who cannot travel outside the United States because of the charges against him — to re-enter the race. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent.
“Let’s all stay calm,” Gérard Le Gall, a public opinion expert and a Socialist, said hours before a court in Manhattan changed the terms of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s bail, freeing him on his own recognizance. “The version of the story has changed before and could change again. It’s too early to draw any conclusions.”
Jean-Francois Cope, the secretary-general of the ruling center-right UMP party of French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Sunday that the return of D.S.K. to French politics was a matter for the Left, the newspaper Liberation reported. But Mr. Sarkozy’s sports minister, Chantal Jouanno, was less diplomatic, insisting that Mr. Strauss-Kahn had undermined France’s image globally. “He has not given a very positive image of France in recent days, between his appetites for luxury and other things,” she said dryly.
Leading the charge of those seeking to rehabilitate D.S.K. is Bernard-Henri Levy, the French intellectual and darling of the Left in France, who was eviscerated by feminists in the aftermath of the arrest for defending a man accused of being a sexual predator. Mr. Levy has now cast D.S.K. in the role of a modern-day Dreyfus, insisting that he had been unfairly maligned by a frothing-at-the-mouth American media that he characterized as obscene to the point of being “pornographic.”
Writing in The Daily Beast, Mr. Levy said that there were five lessons to be drawn from the incident, which he said would soon be known as the “Strauss-Kahn non-affair.” Calling for the restoration of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s honor, along with his freedom, Mr. Levy said that justice in the case had been cannibalized by a grotesque sideshow during which the former banking chief had been globally humiliated, subjected to a perverse “perp walk” and denigrated by the media for a crime that had yet to be proved.
“The ‘shame on you’s’ that greeted Dominique Strauss-Kahn as he arrived for the hearing on June 6th, shouted by battalions of hotel chambermaids who knew nothing of the actual case and whose protest had been orchestrated and scripted, were obscene,” he wrote. “This vision of Dominique Strauss-Kahn humiliated in chains, dragged lower than the gutter — this degradation of a man whose silent dignity couldn’t be touched, was not just cruel, it was pornographic.”
Warming to his theme, Mr. Levy contended that D.S.K. had been dehumanized and transformed into a global hate figure in the same manner that Maximilien Robespierre had been demonized during the French Revolution.
“America the pragmatic, that rebels against ideologies, this country of habeas corpus that de Tocqueville claimed possessed the most democratic system of justice in the world, has pushed this French Robespierrism, unfortunately, to the extremes of its craziness,” he said. “In this case, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was no longer Dominique Strauss-Kahn. He was the symbol of arrogant France. He was the emblem of the world of the privileged, odiously sure of their own impunity.”
He noted that the D.S.K. affair had laid bare the grievous temptation the world over to sanctify the words of victims. He insisted that one of the biggest victims in the case was the very principle, in the United States, of the presumption of innocence.
“He was crushed, then, by that fraction of the American judicial apparatus that, by putting Dominique Strauss-Kahn in stocks, by humiliating him before the entire world, by ruthlessly pursuing him, has probably ruined his life,” Mr. Levy wrote. Invoking George W. Bush’s notion of pre-emptive war, he said that Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney who had pursued the case against D.S.K., had pioneered a new concept, scarcely less horrifying, of “pre-emptive penalty.”
Indeed, Mr. Vance’s conduct was subjected to scrutiny in the French media over the weekend, which reported that the Manhattan district attorney now faced the same media backlash that only days before had been directed against Mr. Strauss-Kahn.
An article in Le Figaro noted Sunday that now that the case had turned in Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s favor, Mr. Vance faced the ire of a voracious media. “The D.S.K. affair should have been the case of his life. Instead, it could prove a fatal blow to his career,” the paper said.
While some French critics attacked the American media and judicial system over the affair, others continued to expound the theory that Accor, the French hotel group that owns the Sofitel Hotel, was somehow linked to Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest. Francois Loncle, a Socialist member of Parliament, criticized the Accor Group, implying that its owners, had played a role in the arrest. “Not all is clear about the role of Sofitel’s management and the group Accor,” Mr. Loncle said, adding that there may be unspecified “links” between Accor and certain underground French political forces. The French media have reported a close connection between Accor’s owners and Mr. Sarkozy’s center right UMP Party.
Also underlying the debate in France has been whether the new revelations about Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s accuser have undermined the cause of feminism in France. Many Frenchwomen have been outraged by the speed with which Mr. Strauss-Kahn has been once again embraced as a possible candidate for President, while the felony charges against him remain.
At a meeting of French feminists over the weekend near Paris, many of those gathered said that the contention that the maid was a liar changed nothing. “If journalists think that this moment of political theater changes our way of seeing things, they are wrong,” Caroline de Haas, one of the assembled, told Le Monde. “Why did the DSK affair have to happen for the political class and the media to discover that there are 75,000 women in France raped each year? That professional inequality is the rule? That equality is an illusion?”
