Scandals tarnish France’s revered diplomat service

French diplomacy has been a source of pride and grandeur since the Renaissance. With 161 embassies, France’s diplomatic service is the third largest in the world, after the US and China.

Widely known by its location on the Quai d’Orsay, or simply as “the Quai,” the ministry was long impervious to criticism.

But this month, investigative journalists revealed an institution that is at the same time penny-pinching and profligate, worm-eaten by privilege, political favouritism and impunity.

Vincent Jauvert, a highly regarded reporter at L'Obs magazine, spent two years interviewing close to 100 French diplomats, active and retired, for a 300-page book, The Hidden Face of the Quai d'Orsay. On April 20th, France 3 television broadcast an hour-long documentary, Our Very Dear Embassies.

As part of its drive to save taxpayers’ money, the Quai encourages ambassadors to rent out their state-owned residences for receptions. They are supposed to give the money to the foreign ministry.

Jauvert recounts the story of Bruno Delaye, the white-maned former “golden boy of French diplomacy,” known for his elegant clothes and friendships with writers and movie stars.

As ambassador to Madrid, Delaye lent his sumptuous residence to luxury companies including Vuitton, Balenciaga, Moët et Chandon and Rochas.

Between 2008 and 2011, the companies deposited €91,000 in his personal account. The ambassador never informed the Quai of the rentals.

Scandal

After the ministry’s inspectors received an anonymous package documenting Delaye’s behaviour, his influential friends – artists, intellectuals, politicians and Freemasons – pleaded with then minister Laurent Fabius to amend the report.

Delaye personally pleaded his case with president François Hollande, and eventually escaped with a reprimand. Last June, two years after the Canard enchaîné revealed the scandal, Delaye was invited to the Élysée for a state dinner for King Felipe of Spain.

An ambassador to Luxembourg, who served expired food to guests and pocketed some €10,000 in entertainment expenses, was treated with similar indulgence.

The consul general in Hong Kong, expelled by Chinese authorities for stealing expensive bottles of wine from clubs and restaurants, was merely suspended for six months, then appointed head of the Quai’s crisis centre.

In one case the FBI sought a French diplomat on assignment to the UN in Manhattan on suspicion of paedophilia. The UN fired him, and the diplomat was whisked out of the US via Montreal, for fear he might be arrested at Kennedy airport.

Recent foreign ministers have become infamous for gaffes and conflicts of interest. Philippe Douste-Blazy – known as “Douste Blabla,” “Condorsay” and “Mickey d’Orsay” – stunned his entourage by asking, at the Yad Vashem memorial to Holocaust victims, if Jews had been expelled from second World War Britain.

Politician Bernard Kouchner’s wife, the journalist Christine Ockrent, was appointed to head French foreign broadcasting (TV5 Monde, RFI and France 24) while he was minister. Her salary and perks reportedly cost the French government €750,000 a year.

Opaque budget

Kouchner’s successor, Michèle Alliot-Marie, spent her 2010 Christmas holiday with a close associate of then Tunisian dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. When the Arab Spring started in Tunisia two weeks later, “MAM” told the National Assembly that France should offer its “savoir-faire” to keep the dictator in power.

The journalists are most critical of the Quai’s opaque budget, and managed to obtain the secret list of “residence indemnities” which comprise the greater part of an ambassador’s salary, much of it tax free. The ambassador to Beijing, for example, gets €30,000 a month – double the salary of the French president and triple the foreign minister’s.

Twenty-five ambassadors without countries have been given titles such as “ambassador for the fight against anti-personnel mines”, “ambassador for sports” or “ambassador for the mobility of high-level cadres”.

There are, of course, many excellent French diplomats. The Quai is still prestigious. “But if we are not careful, if no one determines to change certain practises, this institution in decline risks being definitively sidelined, for want of ideas and new blood,” Jauvert concludes.

He wants the Quai to follow the example of the British Foreign Office and the German Auswärtiges Amt. Britain publishes detailed accounts of payments to ambassadors, down to the last bottle of wine served to foreign guests. The German foreign ministry has demonstrated the ability to question its own role, and organises public debates on foreign policy.