Frank Browning: DSK: American Shame, French Surveillance

Frank Browning is a longtime correspondent and contributor to NPR, resident of France, and co-author of The American Way of Crime.

French socialists are suffering the blues over the degrading, apparent demise of the most hopeful and intelligent challenger to France’s rightward political drift, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, at the hands of New York’s finest and America’s most shameless hot-flash media. Whatever DSK, a Lothario well known to the Paris press for many years, did to the hapless West African chamber maid at the Midtown Sofitel, itself an established nest of French business tycoons, diplomats, and spies, is not the highly regarded chief of the IMF deserving of at least a superficial presumption of innocence?...

That is where one of the deepest divides surfaces in the history and practice of la justice française and la justice américaine. The practice of personal denunciation is deeply entrenched in French civil and criminal law, reaching back to the aftermath of the French Revolution—when a denunciation from a sans culotte all too frequently resulted not in a Perp Walk but a direct escort to the guillotine without the slightest hint of cross examination or competent defense. It continued through the notorious anti-Semitic public persecution and military prosecution of the Dreyfus Affair, on through neighborly denunciation of some two million Jews and Resistance fighters by Nazi sympathizers, and then even after the war when domestic spats resulted in more than a few denunciations of innocent victims as German collaborators, a fair number of whom took a one-way Perp stroll to the noose. Recently a weekly newspaper editor out near our country cabin was denounced by a local bureaucrat because the paper questioned whether he was being “paid more to work less,” to reverse a Sarkozy campaign slogan.

What the French call the “Anglo-Saxon tradition” has its own originally ecclesiastical story with diabolical denunciations, but more to the point American justice historically concentrated on shame. All through our colonial era and well into the nineteenth century, New England prosecutors threw their victims into public “stocks,” their hands and feet clamped in place with their backsides left hanging to the wind in the town square. The punishment was surely painful—and could cover anything from tax avoidance to issuing blasphemous statements in private or in public. But more than pain, punishment in the town square stock was all about public shame....