While awaiting the appeal trial, Banier continued his frenetic work pace. The distractions of the Bettencourt Affair, he says, have not altered his schedule one iota—witness the publication in 2015 of his two most recent photo books: Imprudences and Never Stop Dancing. He rises early each morning, hops on his blue Peugeot motor scooter, and heads for the rougher sections of Paris looking for interesting faces to photograph with his Hasselblad. Later in the day, he will spend several hours writing in his journal or working on his latest novel, and several more hours drawing or painting in his studio. Despite his media image as a dandy and jet-setter, he is in fact an obsessed workaholic and a serious artist.
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Monday, November 30, 2015. On the Place de la République, mounds of flowers, multicolored candles, and hundreds of handwritten messages surround the central monument. Its allegorical statues represent the triumph of French liberty, but the crowd milling around the square on this chilly fall day are not here to celebrate the Republic: They have come to mourn the 130 people who were mowed down at the Bataclan music hall and nearby restaurants two weeks earlier by a band of Islamist terrorists.
Many people take photos of the makeshift shrine. Some just stare silently or pray. They are a mix of tourists and Parisians—young, old, whites, blacks, Asians, Arabs. A squadron of self-appointed volunteers circles the base of the monument with brooms, clearing away debris and rotting flowers. A hand-painted banner proclaims a defiant message, MÊME PAS PEUR (We’re not even scared) along with a smiley face. But many people in France are afraid these days, in the wake of the murderous assault on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo ten months earlier, and in anticipation of the even more horrific events to come.
A man in a black-and-white parka drives his motor scooter across the square and parks near the monument. Clutching his Hasselblad, François-Marie Banier wades into the crowd with the intense determination of a hunter. When he spots a subject that interests him, he leaps into action, usually sticking the camera right in the person’s face without a word of warning or explanation. Sometimes, if he senses resistance, he might ask people if he can take their photo. The typical reaction is surprise, followed by acquiescence or, occasionally, the striking of a pose. Rarely does anyone refuse outright. Banier has that effect on people. His in-your-face boldness, often accompanied by compliments, or even kisses, seems to mesmerize his subjects.
“For me, the street is like a studio in the open air,” he says. His work demands enormous concentration: He is always on the lookout for the right subject, the right moment. “You have to decide in a thousandth of a second. Between movement and immobility, you must always see who is there in front of you.”
In his search for what he calls “a remarkable face, a remarkable human being,” he zeroes in on atypical subjects: a well-dressed Algerian woman come to pay her respects, an elderly Chinese man in a heavy overcoat, a skinny black man wearing an imitation fur hat and holding the hand of his four-year-old son (Banier kisses both of them). Two North African youths in smart tracksuits pass by. Banier calls out to them. They turn around. Both have short beards, long black hair swept back, an imperious regard in their coal-black eyes. They are detached, neither friendly nor hostile. Banier snaps their portraits, side by side. One turns and walks away with an air of silent contempt. Banier continues to shoot the other one until he, too, turns and moves on. “There is something disturbing about these two brothers,” he says. “They are like characters in a Buñuel movie. They have this sort of false virility. They may be thieves and killers, who knows?”
Some encounters are frankly hostile. A short, middle-aged man in a blue sweater and horn-rimmed glasses approaches the photographer with a smirk. “So, Monsieur Banier, you’re making money?”
Banier bristles. “What?”
“You make money with your photos. You make books.”
“You know where the money from my books goes? I’m stupefied by the number of people who think they know all about my finances.”
His challenger, still smiling, backs away. But Banier doesn’t let him off that easily.
“That’s right, take off. It’s best for you.”
The man turns around. “No, it’s best for you.”
“Is that a threat?”
As the man turns and walks away, Banier shouts after him, “Collabo!”—an epithet referring incongruously to Nazi collaborationists during the Occupation.
Banier says that confrontation is unusual—though he was once slapped in the face by a Mauritanian who didn’t like having his photo taken as he emerged from the Métro. In 2011, he threatened to sue a homeless man who similarly smacked him on the Champs-Élysées. Normally, he says, he is applauded and congratulated by people who recognize him. Why? “Because they like celebrity and they don’t like injustice.”
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As a photographer, Banier specializes in black-and-white portraits. His subjects fall into two categories: the famous and the anonymous. His uncommon ability to befriend celebrities not only gives him access but allows him to win their trust and shoot them in intimate, often provocative poses: Isabelle Adjani sticking out her tongue; Mick Jagger yawning; Marcello Mastroianni dancing alone in front of a grand piano; Italian film star Silvana Mangano emerging dripping wet from the sea; French singer and actress Vanessa Paradis breastfeeding her baby. What he seeks in each subject, he says, is “their truth.” Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who has featured Banier’s work on the cover of his high-profile magazine, praises him as “a hugely gifted artist and photographer.”
Though he is known for his celebrity portraits, Banier is most interested in the random people he encounters in the street—bums, cripples, babies, toothless old ladies, swaggering youths, gray-bearded beggars. Humanity in all its various forms and colors remains his central subject. Writes the Belgian art historian Jan Hoet: “He tries to make contact with those who, through no choice of their own, live on the margins of society.”
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Banier returns home each day with up to twenty rolls of exposed Tri-X film—more than two hundred images. Once processed, the negatives and contact sheets are stored in a special climate-controlled archive on the second floor of his town house. The 750-square-foot space is equipped with rail-mounted mobile compactor shelves that provide a maximum amount of storage. “Nobody else in the world has anything like this,” Banier boasts, negotiating the narrow passages between shelves lined with folders and boxes that, he says, contain more than a million images. Only a tiny fraction of them are selected for inclusion in his books or printed and framed for his exhibitions.
Many of Banier’s photos have handwritten texts inscribed on them. That, in fact, is Banier’s “thing”—the aspect of his work that sets it apart from conventional portrait or street photography. The words are not just decorative calligraphy; they are narratives, memories, personal essays, often philosophical reflections. For Banier is a writer and his words are as carefully chosen as his images. “The thing that marks the originality of Banier’s work,” says Jean-Luc Monterosso, director of the Maison européenne de la photographie (MEP), “is unquestionably the ‘written’ photographs, where the photographer and the writer hold a harmonious dialogue.”
The MEP, an important Paris showcase, gave Banier a major exhibit in 2003. It also houses thirty-six of his photos in its permanent collection, including twenty-two donated by Liliane Bettencourt and valued at €700,000. (At least, that is the price Madame Bettencourt paid Banier’s company for the works before donating them to the MEP.) Monterosso, who considers Banier “a great French artist,” calls his 2003 show “one of our biggest successes of the past fifteen years” with more than 50,000 visitors and glowing press reviews.
In France, at least, such triumphs are few and far between for Banier. The 2003 MEP event was Banier’s only major Paris show since 1991. (A planned second exhibition was canceled by the MEP in 2010 because of the Bettencourt scandal.) He has had numerous international shows, but they were almost all sponsored by L’Oréal as part of Banier’s sweetheart contract. The accompanying books were also paid for by L’Oréal. Since Banier’s contract was terminated in 2010, he himself has subsidized the production of most of his photo books by buying hundreds of copies from the publisher, as is customary for that type of work.
Relatively little of Banier’s photographic work has been sold at public auction—only eight images since 1997, according to Le Monde—and his gallery sales are modest. Thierry Ehrmann, director of the website artprice.com, says that “Banier does not exist in the art market; he does not exist in the big museums nor in the professional art fairs.” Nor does he currently have any regular gallery representation since the Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot dropped him in 2010. Most of his sales go to a group of friends and fans, including Johnny Depp and Diane von Furstenberg, who buy his work directly. The same is true for his drawings and paintings, which attract some big American collectors but are largely absent from the commercial art venues.
The main reason for Banier’s low profile on the art market, says his lawyer Laurent Merlet, is that L’Oréal subsidized his work so lavishly that he paid no attention to sales. Before the L’Oréal contract, Banier’s annual revenues from photo sales and book royalties averaged some €200,000—a respectable but hardly spectacular income. “Then all of a sudden, he didn’t sell anything. In fact it was a trap—he should have continued to sell, but he no longer needed to because Liliane told him, ‘Don’t worry about selling. Create!’”
Banier’s privileged situation, out of the rough-and-tumble commercial world, has also affected his reputation in the eyes of other working professionals. “For photographers from the agencies or fashion studios,” says Guy Marineau, formerly with Women’s Wear Daily, “he was considered a minor artist, in spite of the incredible quantity of exhibitions and photo books sponsored by L’Oréal. That had nothing to do with the way I and my colleagues worked.” Marineau was particularly struck by a 2005 visit to Banier’s town house. “I didn’t know a single photographer capable of buying a place like that with the revenues from his work,” says Marineau. “We were in a very big room, a sort of library, where I noticed a good number of master paintings on the walls. I had never considered this guy part of our ‘family’ of photographers, but there I had the proof that he had nothing to do with our circle.”
As a novelist Banier was initially hailed as a prodigy with a brilliant future—a new Stendhal or Turgenev, as Louis Aragon put it. But his early success might be seen, in retrospect, as a flash in the pan. His biggest seller, and arguably his best book, was Balthazar, fils de famille, which has sold about 70,000 copies since it came out in 1985. After that, the figures plummeted. His latest novel, Johnny Dasolo (2008), sold fewer than 2,000 copies. Today, Banier is not even on the literary radar screen. Nonetheless, he continues to write several hours each day, scribbling in the journal he has kept since he was eighteen—always by hand—or working on his latest novel, entitled Nineta, about a woman in some unnamed South American dictatorship in revolt against an oppressive regime. “Writing is a necessity for me,” he explains. “A single word can move me deeply. So I write pages and pages that may never be published.”
Dominique Fernandez, author, editor, and member of the prestigious Académie française, thinks he knows why Banier’s writing career has stagnated. Fernandez, an editor at the Grasset publishing house and a close personal friend of Banier’s, considers him “a very good writer. He has spirit, clarity, vivacity, and rapidity.” But instead of focusing on his writing, patiently developing his craft book after book, he allowed himself to be distracted by photography.
“He started out like a whirlwind, and then”—Fernandez shrugs. “He hasn’t published anything in a long while. He threw himself into photography, that’s what preoccupies him.” That is a reflection of Banier’s temperamental “dispersion,” says Fernandez. As a photographer, he “runs through the streets chasing images. Writing requires concentration. He has a hard time concentrating.” Banier hasn’t grown as a writer “because he hasn’t worked enough—and he knows it.” His career illustrates the dangers of being surdoué—supertalented—says Fernandez. “He’s unpredictable, he jumps from one idea to another. And he himself has trouble knowing who he is. Sometimes he asks bizarre questions—‘Who am I?’—because there are too many things in him. He is too rich, too talented, and that’s very difficult.”
Fernandez doesn’t use the word, but what he is really describing is a gifted dilettante. Banier takes photos, he writes, he paints, he draws; he does it all very well, but he lacks the discipline to fully develop his talent in any one field. Since all these activities are basically projections of himself—his ego, his identity—he is reluctant to commit to any one endeavor for fear, perhaps, that it would diminish his worth in the eyes of others. When Le Monde journalist Michel Guerrin asked him to define his real métier, Banier replied, “Writer.” Why not photographer? “Photographer, like artist, is an inspiration. But writer is a craft.” And yet, when his sixth novel, Les femmes du métro Pompe, came out in 2006, he didn’t even want to promote it. Liliane scolded him like a schoolboy for his lack of commitment. “Promoting a book may be exhausting,” she wrote him, “but is it better if no one talks about it? You should have thought about that before.”
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Who, indeed, is François-Marie Banier? Even today, after so much about him has been revealed, it is impossible to answer that question with any certainty. Is he the former battered child crying out for love? Is he the charming and seductive character that so many people flocked to for his witty conversation and provocative originality? Is he the master manipulator and cynical schemer that much of the media—and the judges—have made him out to be? Or is he, as he sometimes suggests, a victim of Liliane Bettencourt’s manipulation, the innocent object of her affections, and the ultimate expression of her own ego?
Banier himself can’t tell you who he is: He hides as much as he reveals. The most useful insights come from the people who know him best—lovers, ex-lovers, close friends, even his lawyers. Martin d’Orgeval, who has shared Banier’s life for nearly a quarter century, is a thoughtful man whose calm manner could not be more different from his partner’s frenetic style. Looking younger than his forty-three years, he is tall and slender with a fashionable black stubble on his prominent chin. His large black-framed glasses give him the look of a university student, which is what he was twenty years ago when he earned his master’s and began a doctorate (unfinished) in art history at the Sorbonne. Today he works as a photographer in his own right after serving for years as Banier’s assistant. His Left Bank studio on the rue Visconti, a space Banier purchased years ago from Madeleine Castaing, is filled with framed prints of his work—mostly landscapes and geometric plays on light and shadow. He consciously avoids the kind of portraiture that Banier specializes in.
“François-Marie is someone who is rather elusive,” he explains. “He can be joyful, crazy, completely extravagant and funny, but inside he is dark, wounded, tortured. Often with joyful artists, there is a dark side.” Banier is “someone who is free, you see that right away.” But the cost of that freedom is that he is “ill-adapted” to the society around him. “He’s a child. I live with a child. He fights against the reality of social, urban, and civic codes. People have this image of the man who succeeds at everything, who is very social. That image is long outdated. We never go out, we never go to dinner parties. We’re pretty secretive.”
Martin’s uncle, Pascal Greggory, sixty-two, a veteran actor who has appeared in numerous French films, plays, and TV series, shared Banier’s life for seven years from 1974 to 1981. Today, though Greggory lives in a separate building adjoining Banier’s town house, the three of them are like a small family. “François-Marie is different from most people because of his sensibility,” he says. “He’s someone who is not in the consensus; he lives on the margins. When you are on the margins, you need space, a lot of liberty. But he pays dearly for it.”
Today, Greggory laments, Banier’s image is based almost entirely on a distorted view of the Bettencourt Affair. “People see him as a crook, but he’s not that. There is a Robin Hood side to him—he provokes people to see their reactions. But the aim is never financial gain. His relationship with Liliane Bettencourt is based on mutual affection. He has a phenomenal, enormous need to be loved—by Liliane or by an ordinary woman or man.”
Banier has “no sense of guilt, no regret,” says Greggory. “Everything is clear and sound in his mind. But he is struggling against the moral order, tilting against windmills, against very conventional people, because of these sums that are considered abnormal. But in this affair, everything is abnormal—the wealth, the characters of Liliane and François-Marie. People don’t understand that. They only understand envy.”
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“Everybody who met François-Marie was charmed by him,” says New York–based fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, a close friend of Banier’s since 1972 and one of his most ardent defenders. “He’s the kind of person that exceptional people wanted to have around. It’s not the other way around. People are intrigued by him because he’s very funny, and he’s deep. It was his wit and his mind that were so sharp, his outlook. This wasn’t just anybody.”
One of the people who knows Banier best is his lawyer Laurent Merlet, who handled his copyright and libel matters for four years before becoming part of his defense team in 2010. “Everybody knows Banier is an excessive man, but excessive doesn’t mean he’s going to abuse anyone.” Banier “explodes” but then he submerges himself in his work. “That’s his personality. I think he was like that when he was twenty. In any case, you will never make him fall in line.”
Merlet, a youthful-looking fifty-two-year-old with a striking resemblance to Harry Potter, admits that there is something abnormal, almost pathological, about his client’s behavior. “He’s hyperactive, he needs to see a doctor. He’s not someone who makes plans, he’s incapable of that. He’s also incapable of realizing when he’s in danger.” Which explains, Merlet believes, why he could never say enough is enough as Liliane Bettencourt’s gifts mounted into the hundreds of millions. “A rational person” would not have accepted such limitless largesse, he says, “but Banier doesn’t say ‘enough!’ He is content. It gives him pleasure. It’s easy to understand. The thing is he was not at all loved by his parents, and Liliane could not build a relationship with her daughter, so they found something to repair all that.” Echoing a view that many others have voiced, including Banier himself, Merlet concludes: “He’s a five-year-old child. You can do whatever you want with him. He’s not someone who manipulates you.”
Enigmatic, iconoclastic, eccentric, ungovernable. In the end, Banier is not someone who can be pinned down or pigeonholed. He is sui generis in the literal sense, one of a kind. Maybe that’s what made him so attractive to Liliane—and so difficult to judge according to a moral code based on right and wrong, black and white, good and evil. In the complex Bettencourt saga, after all, there were strains of evil that had nothing to do with Banier.