Vice and Virtue: Men of History, Great Crooks for the Greater Good

A Brief Chronicle of Anti-Heroes

    Should I start my irreverent chronicle all the way back at the time of the Flood? Let's just digress for a moment in Greece and Rome which, in addition to great benefits, bequeathed to us many dubious practices. "A great many politicians do not deserve really the name, for the politician chooses fine actions for their own sake, but many adopt this kind of life only out of ambition and to grow rich," wrote Aristotle. He went on to decry a certain number of evils from which we still suffer. "Most men are more avid for material goods than for honors ... One need not fear being short of money when one is absolute master of the State." Less naive than Plato and Xenophon (who portrayed Sparta as the paragon of all virtues), the philosopher asserts that Alcibiades went over to the enemy; Demosthenes gave in to Arpolos' gold, and Aristogiton sold himself to the highest bidder. Athens was the first to implement a "clean hands" operation, requiring politicians to justify their public expenses before a court of 500 citizens whose sentence could be confirmed or annulled by the judges of the demes or the thesmothetes.

    These democratic jurisdictions, predecessors to our audit agencies, were perverted by sycophants, professional court witnesses who threatened to denounce the rich if they resisted their underhanded requests. "They launch libelous charges against the wealthy in order to have a chance at confiscating their goods." Sycophants are still causing trouble.

    When Rome conquered Sparta, the face of Antiquity changed but corruption remained. Candidates ruined themselves trying, to be elected as proconsuls; they plundered their provinces. Verres, the gauleiter of Sicily, was sentenced to death after a devastating indictment by Cicero, and the Verrines became famous.

    This virtuous rigor did not prevent Quintus, the great orator's own brother, from writing A Little Manual on Election Campaigns for his use. "When seeking a magistrate's position, you must be scrupulously sure of two things. Both the devotion of your friends and your popular support must be based on benefits and services rendered." A better description cannot be found for the relationship between populism and corruption — primary causes of the decline of Rome, according to Montesquieu: "They introduced the custom of corrupting people with money. Crassus, Pompey and Caesar were champions." This triumvirate had many illustrious successors.

    What is corruption? We have yet to define it. It requires a passive recipient and an active tempter, for this form of delinquency cannot be one-sided. The legal system takes a particularly severe approach to it; but the (French) penal code is impotent. According to the lawyers and their legalistic jargon, corruption exists when a decisionmaker modifies his choice in exchange for undue advantages. Corruption is synallagmatic, it imposes reciprocal obligations on both parties. Don Juan corrupts Sganarelle by associating him with his seductions. Sganarelle corrupts Don Juan by seconding him in his undertakings and accepting his pledges. But this reductive sense confines the concept too narrowly. One can be corrupt and still stand by his initial decision, if that is ultimately to his own benefit. One may corrupt others in the interest of his fatherland, his party, his company, and still maintain — the supreme stage of permissiveness — a clear conscience. An appallingly diverse spectrum of examples exists.

    One form of corruption mixes private business and the public interest. Coeur, Concini, and Richelieu elevated this to a virtual religion where the sacred vessels were communicating vessels.

    The corruption of magnificence drove Fouquet, the Sun King's financial superintendent, to flaunt his wealth under the exasperated gaze of the monarch. He would have done better to play it down, like Mazarin, stowing it away in the cellars of Vincennes under the vigilant eye of the Swiss.

    With the "corruption of lucidity" Mirabeau narrowly missed preventing the Terror; he nearly gave France a constitutional monarchy that would have changed the face of the world.

    The "corruption of extralucidity" enabled Talleyrand to pay his bills every month by making deals with Austria, Russia, Prussia, and England. But it also enabled him to prepare the Congress of Vienna, which limited the disastrous consequences of the Corsican megalomaniac. Talleyrand may have had a limp, but he was by no means lame.

    Edgar Faure embodied the "corruption of intelligence." He played such a brilliant tour de force in the 4th Republic that his greatness underscored the smallness of others. He transformed this evanescent but productive regime into a mere Lilliput. When Charles de Gaulle took center stage, Faure maneuvered to lay the foundation for the France of tomorrow, while the General gave yesterday's France its final illusion of grandeur.

    "Corruption of the heart" is the most contagious. François Mitterrand corrupted France through disenchantment. He set out to change society but he left the old structure in place, crumbling, greedy, and egoistic, only now less generous, less interdependent. Money became a cancer during his reign. I do not know the truth about the esoteric bank accounts and other allegations ... and, frankly, nobody else knows, either. For the moment, Mitterrand is one of those men who has left no one indifferent and yet whom no one can admire completely.

    Corruption is the spawn of two evil mothers: the weakness of humanity, and the inadequacy of our institutions. Montesquieu noticed that, long ago. "There are two kinds of corruption. One, when people do not observe the laws; the other, when they are corrupted by the laws. The latter is an incurable evil because it lies within the remedy itself." The present age should consider this warning. There is no salvation if the law does not teach us to prefer public interest over personal passions, as Robespierre observed. Protecting goods, honor, and life, when tragedy is in the wind, it gives license to steal, and to kill — in the name of sacred love of the fatherland, for example. In so doing, it perverts virtue, corrupts it.

    Any regime that intends to be incorruptible becomes malevolent, by taking the place of God in the choice between Good and Evil. Popular democracies are no exception. Limits on competition, managed consumption, nationalized ambition — all our navigation buoys on the course of happiness — have led to the black market, to the single party and to the reign of the Mafia. Their corruption, embodied in power, gives Benjamin Constant's pessimism its potency: "Mankind is foolish, and is led by rascals. That is the rule."

    Utopia itself is condemned to bring about corruption and to corrupt itself; even justice cannot escape this curse. The establishment of an international tribunal charged with punishing war crimes and crimes against humanity constitutes a decisive projection of the law. For its severity to be neither corrupt nor hypocritical, the community of men will have to judge with identical rigor the torturers of small, vanquished peoples and the torturers of the great victorious nations.

    But let us return to corruption and to its anti-matter, virtue. Should "virtue" be written in the singular, or plural? This is a question of ethics, not of grammar. If Virtue comprises all the virtues, no weakness would be tolerated and the cabinet ministers would have to be beatified before attaining their positions in the marble halls of the capital. The man of power must be virtuous; that is not a question of conscience alone but also of prudence. If, on the other hand, virtue is diluted, the statesman can be satisfied with just one quality and ignore those that are foreign to the matter at hand. Then, is he entirely virtuous, half-, or one-quarter virtuous? Lucky Socrates, who could say: "I am truly fortunate. I seek a single virtue and find myself amidst a whole swarm of virtues." Of course, he died from it.

    The conflict between perfection and pragmatism generates many painful paradoxes. A judge on the take, who accepts money to acquit someone who is innocent and who does acquit the person is just, but not honest. Another, who spurns all bribes, listens to his inner convictions and condemns the innocent person, is honest but is not just. We ask magistrates not to be irreproachable but infallible — irreconcilable adjectives.

    During the long cohabitation between politics and money, among the men who made France, the virtuous ones were rare. Often, the most effective were the least presentable and their contribution was measured by the scale of their lapses.

    The allure of gold and the fascination of power were inseparable under the Ancien Régime, where the king set the pace and confounded the public till with his own coffers. This example carried in it the seeds of a generalized corruption, reaching first the ministers and the king's favorites, who forgot that the King was the State and that, by acting in his image, they became abusive servants. However, of the great corruptible figures presented in this work (except for Concini, who was condemned post mortem), only two had to account for their actions: in 1453, Jacques Coeur, who was so imprudent as to try usury on his sovereign; and Fouquet who, in 1661, had impudence to dazzle the great king with his own wealth. The others, having made their fortunes, lived to see a tranquil old age. France was easy on those who served it while relieving it of its assets, as long as their merits outweighed their shortcomings.

    Moreover, they hardly dissembled their delinquencies and these great men knew how to handle their failures. Danton, Morny and Clemenceau never claimed to be feeding their factions' bank accounts. However, one cannot play that way anymore, and today's politicians are militant in manifesting their disinterestedness. It is the party and the party alone that must appear to benefit.

    Today, we face corruption of the third kind. For decades the French government practiced laissez-faire, the Parliament kept its mouth shut, and justice closed its eyes, for both the better and the worse. The political parties, as vast enterprises without capital and with no one standing guard over the accounts, were condemned to institutional begging; they experienced the dilemma of Jean Valjean — steal or die.

    When the time came to elect a President, nothing was spared in the effort to ensure the triumph of the providential man (something France had been lacking since Napoleon III). Now, that "nothing" was paid at a high price. Public forums and republican banquets had given way to the public relations industry (expensive advertising campaigns) under the impotent gaze of the Minister of Justice, who should himself have passed around the handcuffs. Relentless competition between the factions led to the cohabitation. The Constitution of France in its ripe age has difficulty regulating the relations between the citizens and their elected officials, and greater difficulty regulating those of the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.

    In 1995, France had three million unemployed, the offence of begging was beginning to rear its head, the links between the economy and politics were putrefied, and the alarm clock of populism was about to go off. Thus the outlines of the new French trouble were drawn. A new and necessary therapy appeared; but it was a therapy that, in the long run, may turn out to be pernicious: the revolt of the judges.

    Illegitimate because they were not elected, the judges proclaimed themselves the saviors of a drifting ethical system. How much has changed since I, as an adolescent, first visited the Chancellery. In the Ministry of Justice, petitioners were jostling each other. "How do you recognize the magistrates?" I asked the assistant prosecutor who was accompanying me. "They wear white gloves," he answered me, "and they crawl on their bellies to move up the ladder."

    It's not like that anymore. The servility of the judgeship has been replaced by jealous independence. Today's judges live in autarchy, and they assume the right to make up for any deficiency of the other powers resulting from the universal vote. Threatening the fragile balance of power, they claim theirs is supreme over all the others. Our judges decided (and who could blame them for it?) to apply the law without taking account of the personality of the delinquents nor of the apparent purity of their motives. For them, abuse of public funds, forgery and secret payoffs remain condemnable, even if the money ends up in the right bank account or makes it possible for a company to enter a new market that requires upfront payments.

    France during the Liberation wearied of the spectacle of poor wretches, brutally shorn and paraded naked under the public's gibes and catcalls. Today, I am fed up with TV images of those who have been indicted, exposed to the public scorn. This spectacle masks the responsibility of the Republic and its leaders, who left the financing of political parties (the drive train of democracy) in a vacuum for decades. The spectacle diverts attention from the complicity of a whole people, who never wondered, who never asked, how were these ruinous election campaigns financed? To make an exhibition of this criminality that we all tolerated is pernicious, and all the more so given that it is accompanied by the devaluation of the fundamental guarantees. The burden of proof is reversed, room for doubt no longer benefits the defendant, the secrecy of the jury's instruction is ridiculed and we speak about the great principles only with the respectful tones reserved for those who are already deceased.

    France's Third Republic consecrated the separation of the Church and the State. The Fifth one must separate politics and money. But does appearing to be virtuous make one virtuous? Molière showed us otherwise. The purity of morals is an ongoing combat. To achieve it, the powers must cease clashing.

    Were the great corruptible men in our history perverted by institutions that were already polluted? Or did they degrade healthy regimes? Is there collective responsibility for corruption? May your visit to this portrait gallery enlighten you (and give you the strength to resist pernicious requests). In moments of temptation, may we all forget Talleyrand's last sally: giving his word to Louis-Philippe, he murmured: "It is the thirteenth time, Sire."

Copyright © 2000 Algora Publishing. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-892941-08-2