For the past two weeks, Paris has been witnessing the spectacle of a former foreign minister, Roland Dumas, appearing in the dock to answer charges of corruption. There is some £6 million sterling in kickbacks and a mistress at the heart of these charges. But what has devastated the French establishment is that Dumas was, at the time of the original accusation in 1997, France's highest legal authority, the president of the Constitutional Council. He finally resigned last year.
What law officer could have dared to initiate and bring to its awful conclusion an investigation targeting the highest legal authority in the land? Well, it wasn't a Frenchman. It was, in fact, a former Norwegian au pair, Gro Eva Farseth, who married into a distinguished French family and then appalled them by transforming herself into the all-powerful investigating magistrate, Madame Eva Joly. As such, she has become the scourge of France's untouchables - the business moguls and political leaders.
It all started more than 30 years ago, when the 20-year-old Farseth travelled to Paris from her home in Oslo to study French. She very soon found a position as au pair in an urban palace by the Luxembourg gardens, home of the Joly family. This was a family that had for generations contributed soldiers, scientists and academics to the glory of their country.
When Farseth was courteously permitted by her employers to dine with them, she became privy to the etiquette that distinguishes such a family of true taste from that of - well, plebeian is too base a concept - let's say the nouveaux riches. But what this condescending family of distinguished lineage did not realise about Farseth was that, while she might be what they would call brute de coffrage (unpolished), she had powerful values of her own. The most deadly proved to be an inherent lack of respect for hierarchy. There is no aristocracy in Norway. Farseth is the daughter of a carpenter, and her family lived at one point in the same apartment block in Oslo as their prime minister.
Seven years ago, Eva Joly (you couldn't go around France calling yourself "Gro") finally made it as a juge d'instruction (investigating magistrate): a legal officer with unlimited powers of investigation and rigorously protected independence. Not even the president of the republic can fire a juge d'instruction. The establishment's one recourse, when investigations become too embarrassing, is to promote him, or her, out of office, normally a very successful ploy creating only minimal criticism. Joly has refused that kind of promotion.
When Dumas, who denies the allegations, was preparing to face the court, I met Joly in Paris. She received me in the new headquarters of the investigating magistrates close to l'Opera etro metro station. Inherently democratic (and still short of staff), Joly herself came down to the lobby to escort me back to her office. She wore a bright, sky-blue suit, very unmagisterial. You would have guessed an executive of a fashionable corporation. She is 57. It is only recently, she confided, that she has had the confidence to discard the traditional authoritarian black garb of the lawyer. She speaks with careful precision, but without the theatrical gravity one expects from lawyers, nor do you get any sense of a lawyer's perpetual calculation. The character that comes through is almost neighbourly - a confident, candid person, but not lacking in prudence.
It's hard to know what the Joly family was thinking of, taking a 20-year-old Scandinavian into a family where there was a 21-year-old son. Aristocratic inattention might explain it. "In opening their doors to me," she agrees, "the Joly family were perhaps playing with fire." Very soon, the scion declared he would marry Gro Eva Farseth. They disinherited him. Values must be maintained.
Initially, the young couple went through the usual impecunious struggle with first one child and then another coming in close succession. He studied to be a doctor; she worked as a secretary in a factory.
In 1973, her husband moved to a new practice in Essonne, to the south of Paris. By then, Joly had a law degree and quickly found work in a psychiatric hospital in the region. Her role was to deal with the legal problems of the mentally disturbed - for instance, a patient who (against Joly's advice) made a generous gift of all his money to his family and then found himself abandoned as his relatives grabbed the money and emigrated to Canada. The hospital had, she says, a congenial atmosphere of dedicated public service. "I received my political education there." But she was still a long way from the Palais de Justice. Being a foreigner, there was little possibility of making her way up the judicial ladder. She would be considered by the establishment as having "an insufficiency of general French culture". In 1981, however, the French government decided to hold a one-off, open competition for entry to the magistrature. French culture would not be crucial. Not only was it an opening to the magistrature, it was an accelerated one for those with 10 years' legal experience, which Joly now had. Suddenly, Joly found herself assistant to the public prosecutor of Orleans. But she left, disenchanted, after two years, convinced that the main preoccupations of her superior "were problems of parking his car".
She gave up the magistrature and got a position with the CIRI, in the ministry of finance, in Paris. She was already 46, with apparently nothing but a routine future in store. But she entered the ministry at a time when the government was focusing on the industrial reconstruction of France, a noble national enterprise within which many a maggot was to find nourishment. Her job concerned "businesses in difficulties" - i.e. bankruptcies - which were then reaching dizzying proportions in France. "I was given genuine responsibility and this gave me wings," she says.
After three years of desk duty, she was back in the magistrature. Appointed a juge d'instruction concerned with financial crimes, she moved to the Palais de Justice. "It was only seven years ago," she said, "and I was a million miles from imagining what I would discover. I still had confidence in the institutions." She assumed that her resources at the Palais would be as grandiose as that intimidating building. "What I found was a poky little office," she said, "with an old Olivetti typewriter. There was no fax and no Minitel [the French computer system linked to the telephone network]. I had one clerk.
"No one said that you cannot deal with an affair involving great international banks, concerning tens of billions of francs, with one judge in a chambre de bonne, a ballpoint pen and a copy of the penal code. The contrast with the ministry of finance was shocking. I discovered that one of the most serious cases had been on the books for five years. At the CIRI, I had worked with people who could have cleared it up in 10 days." During the course of her investigation into the Elf case, she had to deal with more than 60 lawyers, studying 50 volumes of evidence.
"I dumped the typewriter in a cupboard. My daughter [now a doctor] had a basic computer bought from the supermarket; I borrowed it. I installed the Minitel from my own home. I bought a fax with my own money, not for comfort but efficiency - the penal code permits the use of fax in place of expensive registered letters," she says. "I sold my old car to an architect and then persuaded him to redesign my office. The other magistrates were conquered, amused."
Joly soon discovered the dubious worth of amused admiration: it vanished when she showed her combative side. The only hope for obtaining any real improvement in her working conditions was to go public. She took part in a short TV documentary exposing the farcical lack of resources granted to fiscal investigators. It created a sensation.
Then she gave a long interview to an economic journal, la Tribune, which appeared the very day she descended on Credit Lyonnais with a search warrant. Horror at the Palais! But there was serious panic when the Garde des Sceaux (minister for justice), Elisabeth Guigou, made her displeasure at such publicity tactics known in an unsisterly interview in the newspaper le Figaro. Joly was summoned before the vice-president of the courts and warned that she was overstepping the line.
JACQUES Chirac's government learned of the serious problems at the state-owned Credit Lyonnais in October, 1995. Although the losses, attributed to bad management, were estimated at a staggering £12.8 billion sterling, no one believed there would be a criminal prosecution. Financial mismanagement was not thought to be a criminal offence.
But this was not a belief shared by Joly. The taxpayer had to meet these losses. The bank was headed by JeanYves Haberer, a high-flyer in the financial world and at one time fellow student of President Chirac at the elite Ecole National d'Administration (ENA). Haberer's most bizarre and ultimately fatal decision was, in 1991, to lend a dodgy Italian financier, Giancarlo Parretti, money to buy the Hollywood studio, MGM. After a number of farcical manoeuvres, which included giving Dustin Hoffman a six-figure rubber cheque, Credit Lyonnais had to move in and become a working partner of MGM. It soon had to sell the studio at a huge loss. The bank became known as Debit Lyonnais.
Joly will not, on principle, discuss any of her cases, past or current, but it is known that, after a year of investigations at Credit Lyonnais, when her team was getting uncomfortably close to essentials, there was a mysterious fire at the bank. More than 2,500 files relating to the case were destroyed. This is the kind of setback Joly and her colleagues take in their stride. The Credit Lyonnais case still lumbers on, spawning other investigations that now suggest a presidential cover-up.
She continued with her campaign for better facilities, and suddenly one evening the president of the courts paid a visit to her chambre de bonne. "He had probably never been in that part of the building," she says. Fellow magistrates had expressed approval for her stand, but none of them turned up for the confrontation with the president. "Magistrates prefer more velvety tete-atetes." By this time, Joly had a valuable new colleague, another juge d'instruction, Laurence Vichnievsky. If the men chose diplomatic absence, the two women were not intimidated in their confrontation with the president.
From that day everything changed. "Suddenly, there was nothing more urgent than to create a financial centre." And changes were already taking place in France that help explain Eva Joly's success. Following the economic crisis of the 1980s and the increase in bankruptcy frauds, a new law on bankruptcy was passed. The role of the courts was re inforced. There was a new breed of lawyers, and there was also a new generation of better-informed police.
The main facts of the Elf case are now in the open. There are many strands. The former French foreign minister is not only accused of accepting kickbacks indirectly from the bagman of the affair, a former director of Elf-Aquitaine now said to be in hiding in the Philippines, but is also accused of having inexplicably (at the time) reversed a government embargo on arms sales to Taiwan and encouraged the sale of frigates to go through (which involved generous commissions for some).
Elf was also involved in this affair. And so was Christine Deviers-Joncour, Dumas's mistress and Elf's favourite lobbyist. Elf allegedly gave her a company credit line of £20,000 sterling a month and a £1.7 million sterling apartment on the Left Bank for entertainment. Joly and Vichnievsky allege that she passed on expensive "gifts" to Dumas. The 53-year-old Deviers-Joncour has now become a notorious performer on French TV, following the publication of her memoirs, The Whore Of The Republic.
Joly says that the intrinsic problem is that high-class financial crimes "were not really considered a crime". There was also the undermining tradition that those at a certain level of power and influence were above the law. "The great fiscal frauds involved very powerful and respectable people who were convinced - and still are - that they are entitled to be above the law . . . "But I realised I would have to treat financial scandals like any other crime. Someone robs a petrol station. He is pursued methodically; the culprit is caught, his home searched and he is sentenced to 10 years. But when the head of an organisation steals 100 million, justice surrounds itself with precautionary luxuries. There are prolonged preliminary inquiries, interviews, interminable strings of `experts'."
Joly was determined, so far as possible, to speed up the process. "We investigated," she said, "put a tail on people and searched premises, no matter whose." In the past year alone, Joly took part in 40 searches. In five years, she has dealt with 200 cases.
There were indignant articles in the press about the cruel treatment of wealthy offenders whose "poor health" became a major issue. Dumas succeeded in putting off his court appearance for months on these grounds.
Then the attacks took a more sophisticated and deadly turn. "They began to say that the independent powers of the juge d'instruction were an attack on liberty, that the judges were dangerous. There was a public debate, which totally falsified the issues. It nearly succeeded."
How supportive was the media in these affairs? I asked. For the first time, Joly becomes extremely guarded. She is only too well aware that taking on the press can be a losing game. She hints at disappointment, not just with the popular press (although in France they are not as muckily "popular" as British tabloids)but also with the more responsible papers. She rarely responds to such attacks, but when one newspaper, alluding to prosecutor Kenneth Starr's investigations into the Clinton/Lewinsky affair in the US, carried the headline, "Eva - our Starr in stilettos", and Joly felt it implied that she had suspects beaten up, she fought back. "I felt I must answer. It was the messenger they wanted killed."
So, are the media more supportive now? All she would say to this is: "The newspapers still don't adequately cover this issue."
What does her family-in-law now think of little Gro Eva Farseth? There appears to have been something of a reconciliation. "They think it is funny that I am a judge, but some of the family still think it is not right that a Norwegian-born person should be judging French people."
Joly is under no illusion as to how successful this fight against global financial crime can be. She says only a tiny fraction of the crimes are being dealt with. "The one achievement is that it is now more difficult to suppress cases . . . But we are still like sheriffs in those westerns, where you chase the bad men to the Rio Grande and they just ride across the river and we can't follow." Global crime, she believes, requires a global force. To create one will be her next crusade.
Notre Affaire a Tous, by Eva Joly, is published by Les Arenes, 33 rue Linne, Paris 5005, Fr99