Letter From Paris Lara MarloweFor four days, the saga of Mr Alain Juppé's fall obsessed the country, filled every newspaper front page, figured in every radio and television broadcast.
Would he keep the promise, made in mid-January, to "leave public life" if he received an "ignominious sentence"? French law left him an alternative: the appeal filed yesterday enables Mr Juppé to continue as president of Mr Jacques Chirac's UMP party, as a deputy in the National Assembly and as Mayor of Bordeaux for perhaps a year while the case is pending.
As the suspense mounted, Mr Chirac pleaded with Mr Juppé not to leave him. The men are political Siamese twins. A source in Chirac's entourage told Libération that the President "could not live" without Mr Juppé.
It is widely assumed that Mr Juppé is taking the fall for Mr Chirac, who could also face prosecution for corrupt party financing when his presidential immunity runs out.
Mr Chirac's voice choked with emotion when he praised Mr Juppé on Monday. "I feel friendship, esteem and respect for Alain Juppé," the President said. "He is a politician of exceptional qualities and competence, of humanism and honesty, and France needs men of his quality."
The Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, angered French judges by expressing his "surprise" at the verdict and noting that it was only "provisional". And, in a development compared to the Watergate scandal, it emerged that the three magistrates who handed down an 18-month suspended prison sentence and banned Mr Juppé from holding political office for 10 years had their offices broken into, received a threatening letter and believed that their phones were tapped.
By yesterday afternoon, most French commentators were predicting that Mr Juppé would resign from all positions except Mayor of Bordeaux. "The sky fell on me when the verdict was handed down," he told 300 UMP deputies at a meeting in the National Assembly. Many of the deputies were weeping as they gave Mr Juppé a standing ovation. He went on to the party headquarters in the rue La Boétie for what many mistook for a farewell drink. Then he went home to prepare for TF1's evening news broadcast, a slot usually opened only for the president or prime minister.
In an amazing tour de force, Mr Juppé managed to transform the 20-minute television interview into a show of strong nerves and determination.
"Throughout the appeal period, I will excercise my responsibilities," he said, confounding those who had predicted his political death.
It was a double or nothing gamble, and possibly the start of Mr Juppé's presidential campaign. If he is acquitted on appeal, the performance might actually make Mr Juppé popular for the first time. In countless calls to Mr Juppé since Friday, Mr Chirac reportedly attempted to persuade him that the French love politicians who have suffered, that the ordeal would actually improve his chances of winning the presidency in 2007.
The verdict had "overwhelmed" him, Mr Juppé said. But three things changed his mind. He thought about the judges saying he had "tricked the sovereign people" and concluded that "I don't deserve that. It's too much." Thousands of French people had expressed sympathy after the verdict, and that too influenced his decision.
Some of Mr Juppé's old arrogance showed through when he was asked whether someone from his entourage could have harassed the judges. "All that is profoundly foreign to me," he sniffed. "How can one even imagine it? What I ask is that the truth comes out."
The three judges who sentenced Mr Juppé felt so threatened that they met in the corridors of the courthouse or in the café across the street to discuss the case. On January 12th, the chief judge, Catherine Pierce, found the ceiling tiles of her office out of place. Another judge had his office broken into last spring and the metal lock on the filing cabinet of a third was broken during the trial. The judges stored the text of the decision they were drafting on diskettes, which they carried in their pockets, and they believe their telephones were tapped. Two of them received a strange letter mixing commentary on the second World War with threats to act if Mr Juppé was not convicted.
When this "affair within the affair" broke out, President Chirac immediately announced that he was forming a commission of inquiry "because, if they are true, these facts are extremely serious".
In addition to Mr Chirac's commission, there are already two police investigations and a parliamentary inquiry into the strange goings-on at the Nanterre courthouse.