For French, Arrest Forces Some Questions of Identity
Ms. Cottavoz, a Frenchwoman who owns a health food store on the Upper West Side, said Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest exposed a “slippery slope” in France between what she called “chauvinist behavior” and something more aggressive, like the sexual assault of a hotel housekeeper that Mr. Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, has been accused of.
In New York, she has felt respected as a woman in a way she might not have been in France, where, she said, “Frenchmen get away with too many sexual advances.”
“We know in France that the general culture makes it comfortable for men to take liberties with women, and in America it’s not like that,” Ms. Cottavoz, 49, said.
“In America, if they take liberties, there will be consequences.”
The Strauss-Kahn case has gripped the city’s French-American community of roughly 70,000 as few other recent events have. It is the talk of restaurant workers, academics, wine importers and the Frenchmen in Bryant Park who daily play the horseshoes-like game of pétanque.
The episode has forced many native French people to tease out what part of them has evolved into an American and what part has never left France, which coined the word “chauvinism” in the patriotic sense. (Nicolas Chauvin was a soldier fanatically loyal to Napoleon.)
French-Americans, said Thomas Bishop, director of the Center for French Civilization and Culture at New York University, do not integrate into the American mainstream as easily as other ethnic groups, retaining stronger feelings for their homeland.
The devotion extends to their passion for French politics. Rather than dismiss Mr. Strauss-Kahn with tabloid descriptions of him as a “frisky Frenchman,” they may view his fall from power as that of a man with “a tragic flaw” who thought he could “get away with anything,” Mr. Bishop said.
And Ms. Cottavoz, who was raised in the Gascony region, said her French blood boiled at some of the ways the police and the news media treated Mr. Strauss-Kahn, particularly how he had been paraded in handcuffs before a crush of photographers. Americans, she said, may see a “perp walk” as a deterrent, but in France it is illegal and considered an unfair humiliation for someone who has not been convicted. Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s defense team has suggested that he and his accuser had a consensual sexual encounter.
Still, French-Americans believe the case has “tarnished our image,” said Marie-Monique Steckel, president of the French Institute Alliance Française, which promotes French culture and language. When she heard news of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, she said, she found herself “extremely emotional,” adding, “My Frenchness came to the fore with more force than I would have thought.”
And although some French-Americans may think Americans react too prudishly to the sex scandals of their leaders, Ms. Steckel said, “There is a difference between a womanizer and rape.”
“A womanizer is more acceptable in France,” she said. “It’s kind of considered good health and vigor, which is different from Americans, who are more puritanical. But violence against women is very different.”
Seeing conspiracy is another matter that divides Americans and French — and that raises issues of identity for French-Americans. Ms. Steckel, who said she had lived in the United States for 40 years and decided to become a citizen only after President Obama’s election, a testimony to what she characterized as this country’s openness, said many French-Americans found it difficult to talk to friends in France who suspect the arrest was a plot by Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s political opponents.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn was widely expected to be the Socialist candidate for president. French people who have lived in New York for a long time, she said, have moved beyond seeing the world in such a conspiratorial fashion. “The French adore the idea of plots,” she said. “They see plots everywhere. French-Americans become more factual.”
Nevertheless, some French-Americans evidently still see such schemes. Michael Touchard, 36, manager of Tout Va Bien, a Hell’s Kitchen bistro, said it was hard to believe that “a man with as much power and so much to gain would try something like this.”
Mr. Touchard, who came to New York as a child from Brittany with his restaurateur parents, does not consider it out of the question that Mr. Strauss-Kahn was framed by opponents aware of his history with women. Mr. Strauss-Kahn was rebuked by the I.M.F. in 2008 for an affair with a married Hungarian subordinate.
“If you want to take down your enemy, you have to know his weakness,” Mr. Touchard said.
There is no single French neighborhood here in the way that Astoria is known to be heavily Greek, but many French-Americans are scattered on the Upper East Side — close to the Lycée Français de New York — and in suburbs like Montclair, N.J., and Larchmont, N.Y., home to the lower division of the French-American School of New York.
The 2005-9 American Community Survey estimated that New York City had 15,164 people born in France and a total of 70,600 who claimed French ancestry. In the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania metropolitan area, it found a total of 20,385 French-born residents and 160,439 of French ancestry.
Many of them work for French restaurants, French banks and enterprises specializing in perfume, high fashion and luxury goods. They often prefer French newspapers, where the idea that Mr. Strauss-Kahn was the victim of a setup has been frequently discussed.
Still, Mr. Bishop of N.Y.U. said, French-Americans are aware that in France, similar charges embroiling a powerful politician might have been “swept under the rug” by a justice system he said was more susceptible to political intrigue. The more scrupulous American justice system is something the French here grow to appreciate, he said.
“The system doesn’t always work perfectly,” Mr. Bishop said, “but people cannot just walk away from something.”
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