Two journalists who allege the Sarkozy regime directed interference in their lives and work construct an unflattering portrait of the French president in their new book
TOWARDS THE END of July last year, as Paris was winding down for the August holiday exodus, the journalist Fabrice Lhomme took a call from Yves Bertrand, a former head of France’s secret service. Bertrand said he had something to tell him, but, as usual, he was reticent on the phone. They arranged to meet in a cafe near Parc Monceau, a short walk from the Élysée Palace.
Lhomme, an investigative journalist for more than 15 years, had known Bertrand for a long time. The ex-spy chief was a close ally of the former president Jacques Chirac and was no friend of Chirac's successor, Nicolas Sarkozy. But Bertrand still had good contacts in the intelligence community, so Lhomme listened when he told him about "worrying noises" he had been hearing. According to Bertrand's sources, journalists driving coverage of sensitive stories, notably at Le Mondeand the investigative website Mediapart, were "in the sights of the president".
“Be very careful,” Bertrand warned. “It’s not a joke. The Élysée is very wound up.” Lhomme felt Bertrand wasn’t bluffing, but it was a vague and not-too-surprising piece of information, so there wasn’t much to pursue. It was only months later, he says, that he thought again about that summer’s day near Parc Monceau.
That July, France was gripped by one of the most dramatic political stories in years. A bitter inheritance battle involving the country’s richest woman, the L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, had grown into a sensational party-funding scandal that threatened to damage Sarkozy and his UMP party badly.
Mediapart, where Lhomme worked at the time, had led on the story, publishing material that set the agenda through the early summer. At one point, it ran an incendiary interview with Bettencourt's former book-keeper, who said she heard about a cash donation to Sarkozy's election campaign. Le Mondealso took a tenacious interest in the story. That month, its reporter Gérard Davet infuriated the government by obtaining a detailed account of a witness's private testimony to a prosecutor that implicated the then labour minister and former UMP treasurer, Eric Woerth, in the scandal. The revelation was embarrassing and awkward for the government; it left Woerth vulnerable just as he was trying to steer Sarkozy's landmark pension reforms through parliament, and meant the Bettencourt scandal was coming uncomfortably close to the heart of power. (Woerth, who was removed from government a few months later, denies any wrongdoing.)
Unbeknown to Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme, they were themselves about to become players in the saga. In September, Le Mondelearned that a senior official in the justice ministry had been identified by the secret service as the suspected source of Davet's information and transferred to a new post in French Guiana. In a front-page story, the paper alleged that the DCRI, the counterintelligence service,had pinpointed the official by obtaining its journalist's phone records illegally.
A few weeks later, on a Friday night in late October, Davet returned to his ground-floor apartment after a busy week and noticed something amiss. He hadn’t realised before then, but his laptop and GPS device were missing and there were signs that someone had forced a window open. “I don’t want to become paranoid – the break-in might have been the work of a petty thief – but in the current context I decided to file a police complaint,” he said.
In the febrile climate around the Bettencourt revelations, news of the break-in dominated the news for days. It also prompted Mediapart to announce that it, too, had been robbed. Two weeks earlier, unknown intruders had entered the website's offices undetected and left with two laptops and tapes related to the Bettencourt story. Le Point,a news magazine, said a laptop belonging to one of its journalists had also been stolen. Police have so far found no trace of the culprits.
“A few months later, my studio in Paris was broken into,” says Lhomme. “They broke a bathroom window to get in. It was my official address, so they presumed I was living there, but I had lent it to my babysitter at the time. It just so happened that my babysitter had a white MacBook like mine. That was stolen, as well as her hard drive. She also had money and jewellery, but none of it was taken. Again, it was the same. No explanation.”
A year has passed, and we are sitting in the canteen in Le Monde'sbuilding on a bright autumn morning. Lhomme has since left Mediapart and rejoined Davet at the daily paper, where he worked from 2000 to 2006. They're in the public eye again, this time for having written a controversial bestseller, Sarko m'a tuer (Sarko Killed Me).
A collection of interviews with 27 people who incurred the president’s wrath and paid the price, the book amounts to a stinging critique not only of Sarkozy himself but of the political system and the nexus of politicians, journalists and lawyers that, they argue, creates a culture of impunity at the highest levels of French power and degrades the country’s political culture.
Some of the book’s stories are already well known. There’s the long-time TF1 news anchor and France’s favourite TV personality, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, who believes he was sacked because he famously likened Sarkozy to a “little boy” during an interview. (TF1’s owner is a friend of the president.) Or there’s the prefect who was removed from his post after Sarkozy’s visit to the town of Saint-Lô was marred by whistling protesters.
Other stories cast new light on familiar episodes. In one chapter, Liliane Bettencourt’s former book-keeper reveals that, shortly after she gave the media interview in which she mentioned hearing that €150,000 in cash was being donated to Sarkozy’s election campaign – a claim the Élysée denies – two riot-police vans showed up outside the country house where she was staying. Under detailed questioning from police, she qualified one of the points she made in the interview, only to find that, the following morning, two newspapers reported she had backtracked on her claims.
Through these interviews, the authors construct a starkly unflattering portrait of Sarkozy as a ruthless micromanager who crushes dissent and scorns those who don’t show total loyalty. One former local councillor describes his first meeting with a young Sarkozy in 1986, when the future president was mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, a Paris suburb. “You know, I intend to be president of the republic,” he quotes Sarkozy saying. “Are you going to be with me or against me?”
“Much more than ideology . . . Sarkozyism is above all – and mainly – a method,” Davet and Lhomme write. Part of the problem, they argue, is that the French constitution gives the president immense power, creating a “quasi-monarchical” head of state constrained by very few checks and balances. But have all French presidents not behaved this way, leaving a trail of the shafted and discarded behind them? Did the socialist François Mitterrand not order the secret service to tap journalists’ phones in the 1980s to make sure the story of his secret daughter didn’t get out?
One difference is that Sarkozy takes an interest in everything, Lhomme replies. “It’s not by accident that the people who appear in the book range from judges to journalists to TV personalities. He wants to control who presents the evening news . . . When he takes an interest in the purchase of Paris Saint-Germain [football club],it’s because he is a supporter of Paris Saint-Germain. It’s as simple as that.”
A culture of impunity is fed by a relatively docile media and a legal system closely bound up with politics, they believe. “The people we interviewed were all ejected for personal reasons and, what’s more, with extreme force, and left with the feeling that they had been broken,” Davet adds. “That’s quite characteristic of Sarkozy.”
IN CRITICISING THE president, Davet and Lhomme leave themselves open to the charge that they have come too close to all of this to be considered objective observers. When Davet took legal action over the suspected interception of his phone records, he became a character in the story himself. “I know I’m not exactly the objective observer that a journalist is supposed to be. I am now someone who has lodged a legal complaint, but I did so based on the facts, which are that my telephone was put under surveillance twice by the services of the state. They’re facts.”
"Let's imagine," Lhomme adds, "that tomorrow the police find out it was an ordinary thief who broke into my apartment. We'll write about it." When Le Mondeclaimed last year that spies had obtained Davet's phone records, the claim was ridiculed by senior ministers. "The DCRI is not the Stasi," the then interior minister, Brice Hortefeux, told the National Assembly. "Its aim is not to follow journalists." Last month, however, the current interior minister, Claude Guéant, confirmed for the first time that the intelligence service had requisitioned the reporter's phone records in an effort to trace the source of a leak. Le Mondeclaims this was illegal on two counts, and a judge is investigating its complaint.
The Elysée Palace has strongly denied any involvement, and Davet says he can believe that. “What I am certain about is that Sarkozy gave the order that the leaks in the Bettencourt affair were to stop,” he says. “I don’t believe he said, ‘We need to put Gérard Davet’s phone under surveillance’. ”
For Davet and Lhomme, their projection into the public eye has come at a cost. The stress takes a toll on their families, they say. Both are now blacklisted by many official sources and shunned by unofficial ones who have grown fearful of talking to them.
“Let’s be honest: if the goal of the powers-that-be was to block journalists from investigating, they have a result,” Lhomme remarks. “But we’re stubborn.”
