LOGICALLY speaking, the scandal that is driving the French media to frenzy for the past ten days or so can be summarized in a brief sentence.

Alexander Benalla, a broad-shouldered, heavy-muscled fellow who stands over two metres tall is seen in a widely circulated video pulling an apparently violent young man away from Emmanuel Macron. That’s all!

You’ll say Benalla, hired as the French president’s security guard, is simply seen doing his job; but that would be coherence and rationality, notions that now belong to the past in today’s internet, social network world where everything is judged by cheap, mass emotions and a sort of pseudo moralisation.

And that’s exactly what all the dailies, weeklies plus TV and radio networks are doing in France these days and boring everyone to death. So let’s drop the subject.

Allow me instead to tell you the story of the tribulations of a “misplaced” minister. I’m positive you’ll enjoy it much more.

While imitating him, all TV jokesters inevitably slip into Chinese accent though Jean-Vincent Placé talks perfect and fluent French without any accent. He doesn’t speak any other language, for that matter.

A South Korean orphan, he was adopted in 1968 by a Normandy based French couple named Placé. He grew up in France, going to schools as a brilliant student and choosing politics as career following his successful studies.

He founded his own Ecologist Party and was elected senator by the year 2011. Only five years later, under the Socialist rule, he would climb to the rank of “Secretary of State for Government Reforms and Simplification”, in other words a minister.

Though no longer holding that post in the new government but still an eminent political figure by his own right as the Ecologist Party head, late one night Placé entered a nightclub named La Piscine in the Latin Quarter area of Paris.

Media details reveal that he had already drunk more than a full bottle of wine with his dinner that night, not to speak of a couple of whiskies as aperitif plus an equal amount of cognac glasses afterwards.

In the nightclub, he ordered another drink and invited a twenty-year-old girl to dance with him. Apparently noticing the shape Placé was in, she refused.

But he remained adamant and, according to the girl’s accusation, grabbed her by force informing her in the same breath that he was a minister and knew well what he was doing.

The nightclub manager called the security guard, a man of Moroccan origin who tried to persuade Placé to leave the venue.

“Leave yourself,” he was told, “… you are not in an Arab country here. Go back home!”

Cops were soon called, the by-now terribly agitated ex-minister was arrested and taken to the police station where he spent the next thirty-seven hours getting over his drunkenness, then answering interrogation.

He was later charged with “contempt of police officers, racial harassment and violent behavior under the influence of alcohol”. The initial session of his trial took place a few days ago.

In an interview to a weekly he expressed shame over his demeanour, disclosing at the same time that he had been struggling with alcoholism for a while:

“I am going through a psychological treatment and I swear to pay the damages. I apologise to the people I had insulted, as well as to my own family and to my four-year-old daughter.”

The lawyer of the nightclub employee who had refused to dance is claiming twelve thousand euros as compensation for “moral prejudice” and another five thousand as his own legal charges.

Questioned if the former minister was violent with her, the young woman responded: “Violence is probably too strong a word to describe his behaviour. Let us say Monsieur Placé was a bit misplaced.”

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 5th, 2018