So it has come to this. Patrick Bruel, the crooner whose songs once soundtracked the golden afternoons of the French bourgeoisie, now stands accused of rape. The Paris prosecutor’s office has charged him, and the guillotine of public opinion is already falling. We are watching the Second Fall of the Roman Republic, but this time the barbarians are not at the gates. They are in the courts, in the newspapers, on Twitter. And they are armed with hashtags.
Let us not pretend that this is about justice. Justice is a slow, deliberate process, a careful weighing of evidence and testimony. But the #MeToo movement is not interested in justice. It is interested in spectacle. It is the Thermidorian Reaction of the 21st century, a purging of the intellectual and artistic elite that once held France together. Bruel is merely the latest victim to be fed to the crowd.
What is the charge? We do not know the details. The prosecutor’s office is famously tight-lipped, and the accuser’s identity remains sealed. But that does not matter. In the court of public opinion, Bruel is already guilty. His albums will be burned, his concerts cancelled, his face removed from the Musée Grévin. This is the new French Revolution: a reign of terror without the beheadings, but with the same bloodless cruelty.
And what of the accuser? She is, no doubt, a woman of great courage. But let us not forget that the same movement that has brought down Harvey Weinstein has also destroyed the lives of men like Luc Besson, Roman Polanski, and now Patrick Bruel. Some of these men may be guilty. Others are merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. The mob does not discriminate.
This is the decadence we have been warned about. The Victorians knew it well. A society that loses its capacity for forgiveness, for temperance, for due process, is a society that is eating itself alive. We are seeing the same thing in America, of course. But France was supposed to be different. France was the land of liberté, égalité, fraternité. Now it is the land of accusation, resentment, and destruction.
Bruel’s career is over. Even if he is acquitted, he will never sing to a full house again. The stain of the accusation will follow him to the grave. And what of the accuser? She will be celebrated for a time, then forgotten. The mob will move on to its next victim. It always does.
I am not defending Bruel. I do not know if he is guilty. But I am defending the principle that a man is innocent until proven guilty. That is the foundation of our civilisation. Without it, we are nothing but a pack of wolves tearing at each other’s throats.
The French have a word for this: déchéance. Decadence. The slow, inexorable decline of a great nation into chaos. We are watching it happen in real time. The only question is: who will be next?
