ARE WE MURDERING THE FRENCH?
Patrick Marnham says that France is so cross
with us over OD that poor Mr Gummer may end up in a Paris court
Paris THE cartoonist Plantu, whose work appears on the front page of Le Monde, long ago created a character suitable for his Mad Cow jokes. This is a clearly crazy cow that dances around standing on its tail, seeing stars and sticking out its tongue. Last week Paris Match carried a disturbing picture feature about the life of a boy called Arnaud who lives outside Paris and is in the terminal phase of `vache folk' or new-variant Creutzfeldt- Jakob Disease (nvCJD). But still Plantu's Mad Cow danced on, defying all political- ly correct or even humanitarian reaction. Plantu's cow has become a barometer of French sangfroid, as reflected by the edi- tors of Le Monde. But for how much longer will this deranged animal be allowed out of its creator's imagination and on to the page, given the increasing level of Gallic alarm about the forthcom- ing epidemic of nvCJD? For many years the French public was more or less impervious to Mad Cow scares. This was partly because BSE was regarded as mainly a British problem and partly because the reality of such an epi- demic threatened the French way of life, which includes regular feasts of beef. Where a predicted disaster threatens the French way of life the public tends to hear only the good news. This happened with Aids reporting in the 1980s, particularly in the left-wing press, which was ideologically committed to the ideal of sex as a form of recreation. For years the readers of Libera- tion were given the impression that Aids was a plot hatched by Anglo-Saxon puri- tans to interfere with their republican right to go at it hammer-and-tongues with four different opponents a day if the mood took them. A bas la capote anglaise et vive le sport! Then came the sad morning when the World Health Organisation revealed that Europe's highest Aids figures were in Paris and Nice and reality broke in.
There has been a similar change of mood in the last few weeks on the subject of vache folle. Evidence that the official figure of 189 reported cases in the French national herd was too low, the growing conviction that the safety of French beef was an illusion, the news that the disease was spreading through Europe and that a French govern- ment ban on the use of contaminated feed had failed — all these combined to cause an outbreak of near panic. First, beef was banned from school canteens. Then Presi- dent Chirac intervened to demand that the use of recycled protein in animal feed should be totally banned in France. Next, the country's most celebrated chef, Alain Ducasse, threatened to stop serving French beef and replace it with American if noth- ing was done. Then an opinion poll suggest- ed that two thirds of the French public had become convinced that their food was a health hazard.
In response to all this the French press suddenly woke up and undertook some long- overdue investigations into the byways of the beef trade, discovering many interesting facts about the buying habits at the meat counters in the Carrefour and Leclerc supermarket chains. It seemed that middlemen were pur- chasing sick steers for 500 francs (150), no questions asked, and selling them on to dodgy abattoirs for 3,000 francs. I notice that the butcher close to my office on the rue de Rennes, whose silly prices for steak on Sat- urday afternoons had queues stretching down the pavement, has lost his customers. Everyone now has a pretty good idea of where he must have been getting his meat.
It was against this background that the first criminal case brought on behalf of the victims of nvCJD reached the French High Court. The parents of Arnaud and the par- ents of a second victim have charged 'X' under three heads, with poisoning (a par- ticularly grave type of murder), manslaugh- ter and 'deliberately risking another person's life'. Under French law the identi- ty of 'X' can be decided when the essential guilt of someone has been established.
The French have no shortage of targets for their anger about the way in which BSE was allowed to get into the French national herd. They blame the Grandes Surfaces (the supermarket chains) for putting maximum pressure on the price of meat. They blame the animal-feed importers for fraudulently evading the French ban on importing con- taminated British feed that was being mar- keted in Belgium at rock-bottom prices. And they blame the leaders of the all-pow- erful FNSAE (farmers' union) for going along with the price war and encouraging its members to industrialise their production methods. But they also blame successive British governments between 1987 and 1996 for the way in which they handled what then seemed to be a British crisis. Last week on the steps of the High Court in Paris the vle- tims' barrister, Maitre Francois Honnorat, who is experienced in these cases, said that he had no doubt where the guilt lay. Refer- ring to the period between 1988 and 1990, when recycled animal protein was banned in Britain but licensed for export, he touched on the kernel of his case when he said, Tor two years the British government knowingly exported contaminated animal feed, while the French government, in the interests of French producers, knowingly refused to intervene.'
The idea of British ministers being sum- moned to answer serious criminal charges in a Paris court may seem far-fetched when viewed from London, but it is far from exaggerated here. In February 1999 the former French prime minister Laurent Fabius and two other members of his gov- ernment were tried in Paris for poisoning and conspiracy to poison in 'the case of the contaminated blood' that was based on the deliberate use by the national blood bank of blood donated by HIV-positive donors in the 1980s. The ministers were acquitted, although other senior officials were con- victed and in some cases imprisoned. In this context John Major, John Selwyn Gummer and Sir Donald Acheson, all of whom issued reassuring statements about the nutritious nature of British beef between 1990 and 1995, may be on Maitre Honnorat's preliminary list of possible 'Monsieur Xs.'
What has particularly enraged French public opinion has been the impression given that from 1989 onwards, when stricter and stricter controls were intro- duced to protect the British public, France became a clandestine dumping ground not only for contaminated animal feed bit also for beef and beef products such as offal and reconstituted beef (stripped from the spine and used by fast-food chains in ham- burger mince) that were banned for public consumption in Britain. All things consid- ered, this may not be the best moment for British politicians to threaten reprisals against French beef, or to demand British supervision of French vets.
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