An Atlantic Divide over DSK

There was shock in France after the arrest of Strauss-Kahn in May and intense criticism of the manner in which he was displayed in handcuffs,pulled unshaven into a televised court session and stuffed into a Rikers Island cell under suicide watch. There was confusion and criticism over the glee with which the New York tabloids in particular highlighted every humiliation and turned to clichés about the FrenchChez Perv and Frog Legs Itin the coverage. And there was a sense that it was not just Strauss-Kahn who was being so jauntily humiliated,but France itself.

Now,with the case appearing to collapse over questions about the credibility of the hotel housekeeper from Guinea who accused him,and Strauss-Kahn freed from house arrest,the French are feeling a kind of bitter jubilation of their own,and renewing their criticisms about the rush to judgment,the public relations concerns of elected prosecutors and the somehow uncivilised,brutal and carnival nature of American society,democracy and justice.

Former Prime Minister Lionel Jospin said on Friday that Strauss-Kahn was thrown to the wolves in the American system; a former justice minister,Robert Badinter,called his treatment a lynching,a murder by media.

In an editorial this weekend,Le Monde wrote that the least one can say is that the vagaries of the American procedure had condemned Dominique Strauss-Kahn before even the start of a serious inquiry. Criticising the media-judicial machine,the paper said the costs to Strauss-Kahn were heavy,including the loss of his job and his political future.

Noëlle Lenoir,a former European affairs minister,said many French felt insulted. People were shocked by the media circus, she said. They thought the prosecution was making common cause with the tabloids. So there is a bit of revenge for what is seen as very anti-French behaviour.

Though it was the American prosecutors who revealed the housekeepers various fabrications about her background,her asylum application and her taxes,the turnabout does wake up this slumbering anti-Americanism,and the great losers are American justice and the New York police, said Dominique Moïsi,a longtime analyst of French-American relations who has studied and taught in the United States. The case does damage to the image of America and recreates negative stereotypes that existed before.

Even in the 1990s,when we were so close,when the cold war was over and before the second Iraq war,we were divided along the line of the death penalty, Moïsi said.

There is a sense in Europe that you cant be fully civilised with the death penalty, he said. Now this feeling is reinforcedthat the United States is not a fully civilised country with a police that behaves like that,that wants to humiliate, he continued. There is a sense that its a dangerous country.

These cultural differences,highlighted by the brashness of the American news media coverage,prompted the indulgence in cultural clichés on both sides of the Atlantic,reminiscent of the period when France refused to support the Bush administrations war in Iraq and some Americans responded with freedom fries and called the French cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

The French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy,an outspoken friend and defender of Strauss-Kahn,was ubiquitous,writing and speaking of his continuing anger at the pornographic nature of Strauss-Kahns treatment and the obscene press conference that the accusers lawyer held detailing her physical injuries as he tried to rescue her status as victim. Writing for The Daily Beast,the American media Web site,Lévy criticised the black-and-white handling of the case,the cannibalisation of justice by the sideshow.

He accused the United States of having a simplistic moral and political compass,saying that the housekeeper,because she was a poor immigrant,was inevitably innocent,and Strauss-Kahn,because he was powerful,was inevitably guilty.

More broadly,the French news media,which had kept track of every anti-French insult in the New York mediaLe Monde,for instance,had an article called,Trashthe D.S.K. affair as told on the front pages of The New York Postwas full of astonishment this weekend at The U-turn of the American Media, as The Journal du Dimanche said,suddenly attacking the housekeeper with the same tabloid breathlessness.

Ordinary French people have been left with unease over the American handling of the case and the anti-French sentiment that came with it. Kevin Benard,28,a real estate agent,said,America has a very harsh justice system, he said. We believe in people being innocent before they are proven guilty,and not the other way round.

Patrice Randé,50,who was visiting Paris from Bordeaux,said that if Strauss-Kahn turned out to be innocent it would reveal the colossal error made by the American justice systemand,he feared,stoke more anti-Americanism. For French-American relations it would actually be better if he was proven guilty, Randé said.