On 13th July, the public prosecutor in Paris decided to open a criminal investigation into the activities of Clearstream, an international clearing house based in Luxembourg. It is alleged that this financial institution, part of the prestigious Deutsche Börse group, has allowed a number of senior French politicians and businessmen to use its services to launder money. The public prosecutor and his examining magistrate both feel a major international investigation is justified, but at the moment their only evidence seems precarious. It comes from anonymous letters. Two anonymous letters, in fact, and a CD-Rom. While the evidence they give is detailed - the CD-Rom lists 16,121 accounts - it lacks the authority of a witness willing to stand up and be questioned. But several investigations which have unearthed some of France's biggest corruption scandals have been initiated by such letters. The investigation into the corrupt funding of François Mitterrand's Socialist party, which led to successful prosecutions, started with a letter complaining about the owner of a supermarket. The political career of Roland Dumas, former foreign minister and president of the constitutional court, was effectively ended by anonymous letters. The first informed the examining magistrate that the truth about the Elf affair would be found at the sumptuous flat of Christine Deviers-Joncours, a highly paid employee of the oil company. The letter said that Deviers-Joncours was Dumas's mistress and alleged she was employed by Elf to persuade him to overcome his objections to selling French frigates to Taiwan. The magistrate received 20 other anonymous letters and phone calls about Dumas, giving details of his bank account and alleging that another of his mistresses, an air hostess, was ferrying this money abroad. "Thank goodness for anonymous letters!" the magistrate said to Dumas, "otherwise we wouldn't get anywhere."
The vintage years for anonymous letters were during the occupation. As the elderly men in my village told me, "It wasn't the Germans we were afraid of, but our neighbours, who wanted to settle old scores or get hold of a piece of our land." According to historian Ian Ousby, the Germans were "surprised at how ready the French were to betray each other." In 1943, a German-backed production company made Le Corbeau, a film about anonymous letters circulating in a small French town, inspired by real events in Tulle between 1917 and 1922 when a young woman, aided by her mother and her aunt, wrote 1,000 poison pen letters accusing her neighbours of immoral acts. She was finally unmasked by a graphologist, who set a long dictation including all the words misspelt in the letters. But the director of the film, Henri-Georges Clouzot, adapted these events to make a contemporary story. The film was condemned by the Vichy government, the communist resistance and the Catholic church before being banned in October 1944 by the liberating forces. Some members of the cast were imprisoned and Clouzot was blacklisted until 1947. Now considered a masterpiece, the film was released on DVD earlier this year. Cocteau's play, drawn from the same events at Tulle, La Machine à Ecrire, was banned after very few performances in 1941.
Anonymous letters still touch a nerve among the French. When I asked local officials whether they had ever received any, they shook their heads - an unconvincing denial, since in conversation both the chef de brigade of my gendarmerie and my friendly work inspector referred to written directives on how to deal with them. It is true that in the past the principal raison d'être of anonymous letters was denouncing what went on between a neighbour's sheets. In a country where entire books are published about the president's extra-marital adventures, this no longer arouses the same opprobrium. Nevertheless, where money is concerned such letters still carry weight. The multitude of laws about who may work, for how much and for how long are a gift for anonymographes. My mayor had perhaps forgotten that a couple of years ago my neighbour, a retired blacksmith, was taken away by the gendarmes for continuing to do odd jobs "for friends," something only someone in the village could have known. Working people feel such denunciations are justified because they fund the retired and unemployed through their high compulsory contributions.
When he was minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy was shocked by the nature of the anonymous memos, or "white notes," floating around his ministry. They were used abundantly by the Renseignments Généraux (undercover police) to inform their seniors about the behaviour of certain politicians, journalists and businessmen. After reading speculation in one about the possible divorce of a ministerial colleague and in another about the sexual predilections of a senior lawyer close to Jacques Chirac, Sarkozy signed his own memo insisting: "I want notes containing sensitive information to be identified and dated."
Anonymous letters, as Roland Dumas wrote in the account of his trials, are base and cowardly. Yet they do have one great advantage, as another Dumas, the writer Alexandre, said: "they're the only letters you don't have to reply to."
