In France the Clinton Tragedy—no longer too strong a word, in English or French—has prompted commentators to try out every possible variation on the theme of American puritanism. For years I’ve been attempting to convince my friends in France that Americans are collectively quite as broadminded as the French. In fact, the tenor of public opinion in respect to our president's sex life has proved the point that Americans are generally as tolerant as the French in matters like lust and its capacity to unhinge otherwise reasonable human beings. What the French don't possess is the equivalent of the American South, where a strain of Protestant fundamentalism is so maniacal that one of its archetypal zealots, Kenneth Starr, has been able to really dismantle the presidency because of a gawky and fumbling sexual dalliance. No wonder that the French, along with much of the rest of the world, view Clinton's Tormentor as the embodiment of America's terrifying puritanical spirit.
Absent too from the French scene is a media with fangs bared to go to work on the presidential throat. Newsweek’s early rooting about for dirt in the Lewinsky affair would not have found a French equivalent. Nor would a French paper have printed a preposterous headline about Clinton's wretched little liaison such as that which ran above Peggy Noonan's column in The Wall Street Journal: “American Caligula.”1 While the French press is as celebrity-sodden and, in certain ways, as prone to sensation-mongering as our own, and while its members can behave like attack dogs in political affairs, almost all journals have continually honored the privacy of those in high office; their restraint has helped them avoid the sins of their American counterparts, some of whose indecent prying helped lay the groundwork for Clinton's ghastly public denuding at the hands of Kenneth Starr.
In May of 1981, on the day of François Mitterrand's inaugural, I stood amid a small circle of people gathered near the new president in the bush garden of the Élysée Palace. Mitterrand had a fondness for writers, and I, along with Arthur Miller and Carlos Fuentes, had been invited to the occasion. The sunny weather was almost perfect, the historic nature of the moment caused people to speak in excited, mildly alcoholic murmurs, and Mitterrand himself rocked back and forth on his heels, wearing his new grandeur with a look of numb surprise. But mainly I recall a subtle and hovering eroticism. Sex drenched the air like perfume. Seven of the admirers surrounding Mitterrand were lovely young women in their spring dresses; as time wore on and they left his side, one by one, each twittered, “A bientot, François!” A French journalist whom I knew, standing next to me, whispered amiably, “And you can bet they will be back soon.”
Mitterrand had a wife and he had a mistress, who bore him a daughter—this is old news by now—and he also had a slew of girlfriends. Everybody knew about it and nobody gave a damn, least of all the members of the press, who had been aware for years of Mitterrand's robust appetites. They never mentioned his diligent womanizing. In a touching memoir about Mitterrand's last months of life—published this past spring in English under the title “Dying without God”—the journalist Franz-Olivier Giesbert spoke with the ex-president about numerous matters—politics, literature, history—but the subject of women came often to the fore. Giesbert knew Mitterrand in the days before his presidency and he recalls mornings when he would run into this avid lover, resembling “not so much a night owl as a wolf that had been out on the prowl until dawn.” Giesbert adds that women “were not merely his passion but the only beings on the face of the earth capable of making him abandon his cynicism.”
Mitterrand liked and admired Bill Clinton (as opposed to Reagan, whom he called a “dullard” and a “complete nonentity”) and was especially fascinated by what he described as his “animality,” which doubtless meant something steamier. It's easy to perceive a kinship between the two chiefs of state. Clinton's own tumultuous sexual past—the Arkansas bimbo eruption, “the hundreds of women” he spoke about to Monica Lewinsky—might find a correspondence in the wonderfully candid remark uttered by the dying Mitterrand: “To be able to yield to carnal temptation is in itself reason enough to govern.”
Mitterrand was a deeply flawed character—many Frenchmen still hate him—but his presidency was creative and illustrious. Clinton's self-admitted wrongdoing, his lies and his nearly incomprehensible recklessness, helped produce Starr's inquisition—an ordeal that has left his career and his ambitions in wreckage. But if Clinton is the victim of a sexual “addiction,” whatever that means, so clearly was Mitterrand; the difference is that in France a compact between the press and the public allowed the president to deal with his obsession, and even perhaps to revel in it, so long as he governed well.
In America a complicity between the public and the media has generated an ignoble voyeurism so pervasive that we have never permitted a man like Bill Clinton to proclaim with fury that his sex life, past and present, is nobody's business but his own. Long before Kenneth Starr set up his cruel and indefinable pillory there had begun to evolve a climate where privacy—la vie privée—to be cherished above all rights—was all but gone, leaving the way clear for the Starr Report itself, and its invincible repulsiveness.
[New Yorker, October 12, 1998. The text published here is the full version, preserved in a handwritten draft in the Styron collection at the Hollings Special Collections Library, University of South Carolina.]