Madame la Ministre de Justice Elisabeth Guigou

     While I sit in solitude at my desk staring out at the quiet hills and redwoods, David Pike mingles with the great and powerful in that noisy center of the world, Paris. He reports:
     "Our guest today at lunch at the Anglo-American Press Club in Paris was Elisabeth Guigou, Garde des Sceaux and Minister of Justice, and in the eyes of many, the future Prime Minister of France. Despite her position, she never took a degree in law: her major academic interest was in English and American literature, so there were plenty in Parliament ready to dismiss her as a second Edith Cresson (the ephemeral former prime minister) when Guigou first arrived on the job. The skepticism has melted like snow: even her opponents see her as brilliant. It is normal at our press luncheons to allow the guest first to eat a little, and then to give an address. Guigou spurned both: no hors d'oeuvre and no address, throwing it open to questions. Even our press members were for a moment taken aback. I select a few of the questions and her replies.
     John Morris, Life Magazine's famous photojournalist from D-Day times, brought up the question of the right of press photographers to take and publish photos of people arrested and in handcuffs, a right denied in France. Guigou's position: the right of the individual to the privacy of his image takes precedence over the right of the press to publish and hence invade this privacy. She took pains to point out that she was speaking only of a person in detention and subject to the humiliation of being shackled.
     On the question of criminality, Guigou spoke not of one mafia but of many, of the proliferation of mafias. While the largest remained the mafia based on drugs, an important contender is now the mafia based on the simple movement of money, including money deriving from new sources of high revenue such as the exploitation of emigration in various parts of the world: the clandestine and often fake assistance given to applicants.
     In the fight against drugs, says Guigou, French policy is to go for the traffickers, including the little traffickers 7 or 8 years old. For the consumers, medical treatment, not more prisons, is the answer.
     No unified system of European law is on the horizon, at least for fifty years. The differences among national systems defy any attempt to standardize. A major area of difficulty: custody fights between divorced parents of different nationalities.
     Asked for her position regarding the feminization of titles in France, Guigou agrees with other French women ministers in insisting on being addressed as Madame la Ministre and no longer Madame le Ministre, and she questions the continuing practice in the Academie Francaise, which now includes women, of addressing the members "Messieurs les Academiciens" rather than "Mesdames et Messieurs les Academiciens." Guigou would nevertheless leave other decisions on feminization to the Academie Francaise rather than let it turn into a political or gender squabble.
     "Boy, is she ever cold,' said a new member of the club after the lunch. "I wonder how she'll do on the campaign trail." That young journalist could be new to French politics and society. Guigou is not glacial but cerebral. Intellect in a woman is unbecoming, Richelieu once said, but France has changed since the 17th century,


     My comment: Apparently she did not mention her worst headache, the reform of the judicial system. It's a big story, too long to tell here.

Ronald Hilton - 2/21/00