The publication of the illicit recordings in June 2010 was devastating for the image of Liliane Bettencourt. Once admired as the main shareholder and a board member of the world’s leading cosmetics firm, a philanthropist via her family foundation, the wife of a government minister, and an elegant grande dame perched at the top of France’s social ladder, she now appeared as a senile old lady with more money than she knew what to do with. That unflattering view was embodied by “Mamie Zinzin”—Nutty Grandma—a marionette featured on the popular satirical show Les Guignols de l’info. Created in 1988 by the Canal+ network, the Guignols took the form of a mock news broadcast that pilloried politicians and celebrities to the delight of its millions of daily viewers. Starting in the summer of 2010, the figure of Mamie Zinzin emerged as a gaga octogenarian handing out banknotes with cheerful abandon—mostly to President Nicolas Sarkozy.
One skit showed Sarkozy’s allies ringing the Bettencourt doorbell dressed in Halloween costumes. When Mamie Zinzin answers the door, grinning hideously and trembling with palsy, they shout “trick or treat.” She thrusts wads of €500 notes into their hands, squealing, “Aren’t they cute!” Sarkozy meets his henchmen at the street corner and grabs the cash. “That’s for my 2012 campaign,” he says, and sends them back for more. “Mamie Zinzin will forget you were there two minutes ago.”
Such skits were a not-too-subtle stab at Sarkozy’s alleged campaign gifts from the Bettencourts. But the main target was Liliane herself, for reasons that say a lot about French attitudes toward wealth. American audiences might sympathize with an elderly woman who is expropriated by unscrupulous plunderers. To the popular French mind, though, such a figure is more likely to be the object of scorn precisely because she is rich. Money is traditionally a taboo subject in France. Those who have it try to hide it, or at least be discreet about it, while those who don’t tend to resent and envy those who do. Even within the Bettencourt family, the subject was avoided. “At home, we didn’t talk about money,” said Françoise Meyers. “It was not a word we pronounced easily.”
In stark contrast to the United States, where John Kennedy could ride into the White House on his father’s money and a billionaire real estate mogul named Donald Trump could tout his personal fortune as a qualification for the presidency and win election, French politicians have traditionally sought public favor by denouncing wealth as antidemocratic and money itself as a source of corruption. “My only adversary, and that of France, has always been money,” the conservative Charles de Gaulle famously declared in 1969. At the other end of the political spectrum, the Socialist François Mitterrand unleashed his most eloquent indignation against “money that corrupts, money that buys, money that kills, money that ruins and rots the conscience of men.” François Hollande solidified his popularity among leftist voters by bluntly telling a TV interviewer in 2006: “I don’t like the rich.” Six years later, Hollande defeated outgoing president Nicolas Sarkozy, whose “president of the rich” image and bling-bling style played badly with the French public.
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The reasons for France’s money taboo have long roots. In a country whose population was largely agricultural until the mid-twentieth century, the peasant tradition of hiding one’s money to avoid attracting the attention of thieves and jealous neighbors was widespread. Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés, says an old French dictum—to live happily, live hidden. Another powerful source is the weight of Catholicism, with its stress on aiding the poor and the Gospels’ camel-through-the-eye-of-a-needle view of the rich.
France’s political history reinforced the anti-rich bias in multiple ways. The French Revolution began as a revolt against the privileged wealthy classes that didn’t pay their share of taxes. Egalitarianism, central to the republican ideology that followed the collapse of monarchy, did not sit well with the accumulation of huge fortunes. The Marxist philosophy that inspired the French left equated wealth and profit with capitalist exploitation.
All this contributed to a popular view that, even today, tends to look on the wealthy with a mixture of hostility and suspicion. In one 2012 opinion poll, 72 percent of the respondents felt that the rich are “badly viewed” in France. “There is a reticence to talk about money,” says sociologist Janine Mossuz-Lavau, author of the 2007 study “L’Argent et nous” (Money and us). “In the US, it’s common to ask total strangers how much they make. Never in France! People who are willing to talk to me in detail about their sex lives will storm out of the room when I ask them about their salaries.”
What made the Bettencourt Affair so explosive in terms of public opinion was the perceived collusion between private wealth and political power. “For those who wanted to show that political power is corrupt, this was the perfect demonstration of a link between power and money, a link that was deemed unacceptable and despicable,” explains sociologist Michel Wieviorka, referring to the Bettencourts’ suspected campaign payments to Éric Woerth. Woerth himself realized, too late, that it was a grave mistake for him and his wife to be associated with the Bettencourts because of the toxic image of money in the eyes of the French. If he had it to do over again, he said, he would never have let his wife take a job investing Liliane’s stock dividends. “We did not fully appreciate the extent to which this family, though discreet and hardly ostentatious, embodied in the collective imagination the supreme symbol of excessive wealth.”
Which is why there was so little public sympathy for Liliane Bettencourt, though she was depicted by her daughter as an elderly victim of an insatiable exploiter. Liliane herself was widely seen as an idle heiress who had done nothing to earn her wealth, while Françoise was perceived as a rich girl battling mainly to preserve her own inheritance. The publication of the butler’s recordings, with their revelations about the Bettencourts’ secret Swiss bank accounts and their undeclared island in the Seychelles, reinforced the view of Liliane as rich, privileged, and unethical to boot. And the news of her €30 million tax rebate, though in no way illegal, was greeted with a mixture of irony and indignation. One website invited users to compare their annual salaries with Liliane’s dividends. A salary of €100,000, for example, would be equaled by the heiress in ninety-one minutes, a statistic sure to cause envy and scorn among the French. Interestingly, though, French consumers did not take their resentment out on L’Oréal, which continued to report healthy profits throughout this period.
The public’s demonization of money and wealth also besmirched Banier, who despite a certain Robin Hood image, was widely seen as an unscrupulous gold digger. “They massacred François-Marie through a well-organized press campaign,” says attorney Richard Malka, who defended Martin d’Orgeval and, indirectly, Banier himself. “They said he stole 500 million from an old lady. It’s very hard to recover from something like that. For certain French people, gaining money is worse than pedophilia.”
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Liliane Bettencourt was sensitive about her superwealthy image long before the affair hit the front pages. Money was the main subject of her 1987 interview in Egoïste, the one for which François-Marie Banier first photographed her. “A rich woman,” she said, “the term itself is disagreeable. It’s an ugly word. I prefer fortune. A rich woman is locked into a certain status by her wealth. She is weighed down. Trapped in a definitive idea of herself. That’s what is so annoying about this kind of stereotype they saddle you with: They rein you in and park you.” No one was objective about wealth, she lamented. “Once you reach a certain figure, everybody derails.”
She went on: “There are a lot of jealous people . . . wealth irritates them. How can you justify yourself? There is no justification in life, for anything. Either you accept your inheritance or you don’t . . . Yes, you always have to excuse yourself when you have money; the French don’t understand the industrial phenomenon. They say, ‘Too much is too much.’”
Ever wary of wealth’s negative image in France, Liliane Bettencourt in 1987 created the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation to support worthy projects in the arts, science, and medicine. Entirely funded by the Bettencourt family, the foundation devotes more than half its annual spending to medical projects, with particular attention to AIDS research. In the cultural domain, it awards annual prizes for choral singing—a particular interest of Liliane’s, in spite of her deafness—and French craftsmanship.
The foundation also supports the restoration of historic sites, publications, and films it deems worthy of public interest, including Jacques Perrin’s award-winning 2001 feature on bird migrations, Le peuple migrateur. In February 2010, just as the Affaire Bettencourt was becoming an embarrassing subject of French media attention, Liliane donated €552 million to this family endeavor, bringing its total capital to some €750 million and making it the country’s wealthiest private foundation. Message: Liliane’s fortune could serve the public good in addition to enriching a little-known artist beyond his wildest dreams.
Madame Bettencourt’s good works had in fact been recognized in 2001, when Minister of Health Bernard Kouchner pinned the Légion d’honneur on the jacket of her Chanel suit. The award recognized the foundation’s leading role in AIDS research and Liliane’s “43 years of social and professional activity.” As it happened, the decoration provided the occasion for yet another mother-daughter dispute: Françoise had suggested a small family reception attended by a dozen close friends; Liliane overrode her and invited five hundred people to a high-profile ceremony in the gilded halls of the Health Ministry. Françoise’s ruffled feelings were hardly soothed by her mother’s choice for master of ceremonies: François-Marie Banier.