Himself Alone

Curzio Malaparte: The Skin

The New Criterion, October 1, 2013

Navigating the first half of Italy’s twentieth century took elasticity. There were few more elastic than Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957), author of The Skin (La Pelle, 1949), a novel of which the first English-language “unexpurgated” version is being released by New York Review Books this autumn. Malaparte was a fascist, and then he was not. He flirted with Communism, and then he did not. A protestant by baptism, an atheist by choice, he converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, but in his will left the house he had built on Capri, the most beautiful in the world some said—his “Casa Come Me”—to the Chinese Communist Party. He was a writer of great, if unreliable, talent. He was a soldier, diplomat, moviemaker, duelist, agitator, provocateur, and dandy. A famously successful Romeo, his only true loves were his dog Febo and, above all, himself.

The Skin is a strange, uneven, and baroque creation, a fabulist memoir, a surrealist fiction based on fact and anything but. It is a terrifying, occasionally hallucinatory and weirdly arch depiction of an Italy devastated by war and moral catastrophe. Added by the Vatican—no mean judge of a good read—to its Index Librorum Prohibitorum, The Skinworks well enough on its own merits, but to accept it at face value is to be beguiled by a mask.

To hazard a guess at what lies beneath involves peering into the evasive Malaparte’s bewildering, and frequently rewritten, career, and being prepared to risk being led hopelessly astray. Bear with me, this is going to take a while.

Born Kurt Erich Suckert, to a German father and Italian mother, he changed his name in 1925 to something more in keeping with Mussolini-era Italianizzazione. It was one of the more straightforward maneuvers in a life of transformation and disguise, but it came with a characteristically perverse wrinkle, with Malaparte (“bad side”) a spin on the Bonaparte already taken by another, more illustrious, narcissist.

We catch our first glimpses of him: a precocious schoolboy, some early writings, and what the British once called a “good war,” enlisting with the French in 1914 and then, after Italy signed up for Armageddon, joining his (maternal) home team. Next came stints as a diplomat, at the Versailles Conference and in Warsaw. But it was his first book, La Rivolta dei Santi Maledetti (1921), a sympathetic account of the mutiny that followed the Italian defeat at Caporetto (1917), that, in its rage at the old order, paved the way for what was to come. While Malaparte was—to the extent that any ideological labels apply (“anarcho-fascist” has been one brave shot)—a man of the “right,” it was the drama of revolution that appealed to him more.

And that’s what Mussolini appeared to offer. With the help of some fiery books, energetic journalism, and a spot of more sinister activity, Malaparte worked his way into a leading role among Italy’s fascist intelligentsia. Then the story starts to cloud. Malaparte was drawn to power, but he was too restless, too self-involved to play its games with the discipline that they require. Frustrated by Mussolini’s failure to unleash the social upheaval that had once seemed possible (and making no secret of that frustration), Malaparte drifted away from the regime’s center, but not too far: He was appointed editor-in-chief of La Stampa in 1929, only to lose the job a year or so later, for reasons that remain unclear. But the myth—assiduously promoted by Malaparte in the postwar years—that he was already slipping into outright opposition to fascism is nonsense, brutally debunked by Maurizio Serra, author of the invaluable and sternly forensic Malaparte, Vies et Légendes (2011), the finest biography of the writer to date.

Nor did Malaparte’s 1933 conviction for defaming one of the fascist leadership represent a definitive break with Mussolini. The offending letters were a clumsy power play gone wrong, nothing more. Malaparte’s punishment—five years’ confino on an island just off Sicily—turned out to be rather less than he would subsequently maintain. Thanks to Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, another of his useful friends, the sentence was eased, reduced, and, after some eighteen months, commuted. Throughout it, Malaparte wrote for the Corriere della Sera, albeit under a pseudonym—some proprieties had to be observed. A Yevtushenko (if even that) rather than a Solzhenitsyn, he resumed his career on his release. In addition to journalism, there were a number of books, and in 1937 he foundedProspettive, an initially propagandist publication that evolved into a magazine of the arts offering a modernist, outward-looking reminder that there remained some room in fascist Italy for more than jackboots and bombast. Breton, Eliot, Éluard, Garcia Lorca, Joyce, MacLeish, and Pound were amongst those who made their appearances in pages that, as Serra notes, almost never featured contemporary German writers, one of the many rebellions with which this revealingly incomplete opportunist punctuated his career.

When Europe caught fire, Malaparte was recalled to his old Alpine Division and appointed a war correspondent, in the catbird seat to view the inferno that fueled his best work. Il Sole è Cieco (1947), the first, in terms of the period it covered, of his books on World War II, is an unexpectedly lyrical piece based loosely—of course—on a couple of weeks in the mountains spent with the Alpini as they half-heartedly campaigned against the French in June 1940. Twelve months later, after travels that included a grubby detour in Athens writing articles intended to help prepare the Italian public for the invasion of Greece, Malaparte was tacking along with the Germans, reporting for the Corriere della Sera as the Wehrmacht swept out of Romania and into the Soviet Union.

Presciently—and unfashionably—enough, Malaparte described the Soviets as tough opponents, even in retreat, something that he claimed (later) had led to him being expelled from the war zone in September 1941 “by order of Goebbels” (no less!), a tale that, like so many of his confections, crumbles under closer inspection. After a break in Italy (no, not “house arrest”), he returned to what he thought would be a more congenial sector of the Eastern Front, the stretch controlled by Germany’s Finnish allies. After some rewriting to restore what had (supposedly) been lost to the censor, a selection of his dispatches from the Eastern Front were first published in book form in 1943—after the fall of Mussolini—as The Volga Rises in Europe (Il Volga nasce in Europa), a volume that is, much more so than the far better-known Kaputt (1944), his greatest work.

Vivid, haunting, and elegiac, the book ranges from descriptions of the summer Blitzkrieg pouring into the Ukraine, to the snow and silence of Karelian forests from which isolated Finnish outposts overlook besieged Leningrad, and skirmishes evoke the “primitive ferocity” of ancient war: “wholly physical, wholly instinctive, wholly ruthless.” There are also stirrings here—visiting remnants of the Czarist bourgeoisie clinging onto shreds of the old ways in Moldavia, an excursion to the deserted house in Kuokkala where the Russian painter Ilya Repin had lived—of the lament for a broken European civilization that emerged as a major theme in Kaputt and The Skin, and, difficult as it is to reconcile with his past enthusiasm for an upending of the social order, became another twist in this writer’s labyrinth of contradiction and ambiguity.

Malaparte may—true to form—have spent considerably less time at the front than he implied, but a good part of what makes The Volga Rises in Europe more compelling than Kaputt or The Skin is the debt it owes to the discipline of journalism. The prose is spare, the stories brief, telling snapshots of moments that may once have even been real. By contrast Kaputt and The Skin, bestsellers both, are sprawling, fragmented, astounding epics of hideous accuracy, exaggeration, and deception, “novels” where fact merges with fiction, and where lies tell a truth that Europe was just beginning to grasp. Recounted in the first person by a “Malaparte” who is both fictional and not, they were also designed to distance their author from his fascist past (a pressing necessity by 1944) whilst (in Kaputt) also trumpeting his presence—witty, sardonic, superior—in the center of the Axis’ nightmare world. This was a tricky maneuver, but unavoidable if he was to be able to demonstrate that he—his best, his only hero—mattered: Malaparte had peered into the abyss and found it filled with mirrors.

His “horribly gay and gruesome” Kaputt is—as Malaparte recognized—a far stronger work than The Skin. He spent 1941–43 close enough to the heart of darkness to recognize it for what it was. Based however remotely on his experiences during this time, Kaputt is savage, sensual, and brilliant, decadent, revolting, and beautiful. It is filled with black humor, narcissism, self-conscious erudition, and embarrassing snobbery. There is champagne as well as carnage, Proust as well as Goya, a jarring mix that sometimes reinforces the sense of cataclysm or is sometimes just crass. Horrors are layered upon horrors, but in a way that not infrequently suggests that they are being deployed to showcase his formidable descriptive powers, an aestheticization of barbarity that underlines Malaparte’s icy detachment, a detachment that this most flawed of chameleons does not always bother to conceal.

Asked by a delegation of Jews in the Rumanian city of Jassy (Iasi) if he can intercede with the military to head off the pogrom that they rightly fear is imminent, Malaparte (no anti-Semite in fact or fiction) starts off well into the next afternoon on what he believes to be a hopeless trudge to see the relevant officers, only to pause to inspect a statue, and then head in the direction of the local bigwigs’ club to discuss poetry. He never even manages that, but instead takes a turn towards a cemetery for a nap. He awakes at sunset, woken by the sound of a Soviet bombing raid, and heads off to see a sixteen-year old waitress, Marioara, for whom he feels, well, it’s hard to say. A few hours later the pogrom begins.

In reality, Malaparte arrived in Jassy shortly after the slaughter. That didn’t stop him painting a sickening picture of the pogrom and of an aftermath that pointed to the hecatombs to come. A writer looking to walk away from an Axis-tainted past might have been expected to take the opportunity to present himself in a nobler light. And yet Malaparte does not. It says something too that, while living in France in the, for him, not uncomplicated late 1940s, Malaparte sent a portion of his royalties from Kaputt to Céline, the collaborationist French author, and notorious anti-Semite, then living in uncomfortable exile in Denmark. Whatever one might think of that gesture, it was not the act of the shape-shifter that Malaparte was so often said to be. According to Serra the two had never even met.

Kaputt ends with Malaparte’s arrival in Naples after the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, and his own brief detention by Italy’s new government. The Skin opens some time later, with Malaparte installed (as indeed, in another impressive twist to his resume, eventually he was) as a liaison officer with the U.S. army in that same occupied, liberated, humiliated, degraded, and anarchic city. Most of the book describes “Malaparte’s” stay there before a coda tracking his journey north with the Allies to Rome and beyond.

To its detriment, The Skin is more didactic than Kaputt. Its portrait of Italy’s moral, political, and physical ruin is bloated by a blend of pacifism and high school nihilism that is crude stuff after the detachment and elegant disenchantment of the earlier book. It concludes with the muttered observation that “it is a shameful thing to win a war,” an observation that is as wrong-headed (it rather depends on who is doing the winning) as it is overwrought.

And the latter adjective will do quite well to describe much of The Skin. The bizarre, sometimes surreal, interludes dotted through Kaputt work because they are interludes, whereas in The Skin (in which the freak show includes an outlandish “Uranian” rite, talking fetuses, dead soldiers on parade, and a feast with cannibalistic and mythic elements) they come close to overwhelming the book, and somehow undercut the sense of apocalypse that the British writer Norman Lewis, who was in the same city at the same time, conveyed so calmly and so effectively in Naples ’44. Worse, they fuel the suspicion—this is a book with longueurs unimaginable in Kaputt—that Malaparte was either running out of new things to say or, more cynically, that he had not much interest in doing so. Kaputt’s sales had not been hurt, to put it mildly, by its author’s emphasis on the cruel, the macabre, and the grotesque, so why not repeat the trick, only more so? But too often more turns out to be less, too rococo, too much. That’s not to argue that The Skin is without sequences of remarkable power and extraordinary beauty. It has those, but it is telling that one of its most memorable passages (a characteristic Malaparte set-piece) describes his discovery of a Ukrainian road lined with trees on which Jews have been crucified, an out-of-place digression that, even allowing for the herky-jerky chronology of both books, reads as if it was left over from a draft of Kaputt—an atrocity surplus to requirements.

As with Kaputt, it is what The Skin adds to the understanding of its elusive author that make for some of its most intriguing moments, whether it be the mocking condescension with which he views African-American GIs, or the peculiar obsession with homosexuality, something found elsewhere in his writing, which may suggest that Malaparte wore at least one mask that he was never prepared to recognize, let alone remove.

Above all, there is a delightful scene—as so often in these books revolving around a meal (well, he was Italian)—in which the trickster plays games with his own reputation. He is eating couscous with a group of French officers just before the final advance on Rome, one of whom teasingly comments that “judging by Kaputt, Malaparte eats nothing but nightingales’ hearts . . . at the tables of Royal Highnesses, duchesses, and ambassadors.” If their “humble camp meal” is to make it into Malaparte’s next book, it will have to be reinvented into an infinitely grander occasion. That leads to a more general discussion as to the truth or otherwise of what is found in Kaputt, to which Malaparte’s American colleague, Jack, eventually responds that “It is of no importance whether what Malaparte relates is true or false . . . the question is whether or not his work is art.” Malaparte then discloses that, unwilling to break up “such a pleasant luncheon,” he had “nibbled” his way through the hand of one of the French goumiers, blown off by an earlier grenade, only to end up, he had discovered, in the couscous. The French are appalled. Malaparte subsequently explains to a delighted Jack how he had arranged some ram’s bones on his plate to look like the remnants of a hand. It was left to readers more observant than me to work out that Kaputt did not appear until several months after the liberation of Rome. Malaparte’s story about his lying could never have been other than a lie. How the ghost of Laurence Sterne must have laughed.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Malaparte’s later peacetime years were, with his war books behind him (Mamma Marcia, arguably a fifth, unfinished, was published after his death), creatively something of an anti-climax, distinguished mainly, and tellingly, by an examination of the aftermath of that conflict, Il Cristo Proibito (1951), a well-received movie that he both wrote and directed. He was, for the most part, rehabilitated, but never entirely trusted, and the perception that his charlatanry extended into his art as well as his politics meant that he was never able to regain quite the prominence he had once enjoyed. In 1956, still, despite everything, tempted by the hard men, he traveled to the China of Chairman Mao, and decided that he liked what he saw, but his Chinese doctors did not like what they saw in him: Malaparte was diagnosed with lung cancer. They did what they could (leaving his house to the Chinese Communist Party was partly Malaparte’s thanks for the care he had received), but there was nothing to be done.

He returned to Italy to choreograph the death-bed drama that was, writes Serra, his last masterpiece, wooed by right, left, and the Vatican alike, each eager to claim his scalp for its own. The Communists sent him a party card, but he neither acknowledged nor repudiated it, preferring instead to reaffirm his membership of the centrist Republican Party. And yes, he did indeed, finally, convert to Roman Catholicism, if I had to guess, a Malapartian hedge, gaming God on the basis of a hint from Pascal, but a dramatic switch nevertheless, the last, critics might jeer, in a long turncoat career.

But that’s too simplistic: The only colors he really wore were his own.

The Prince

Il Divo

National Review Online, April 24, 2009

To listen to what is not said is often as informative as hearing what is. Absence can reveal as much as presence, the opaque more than the clear. It is this idea, brilliantly conveyed, that runs through the performance that dominates Il Divo, transforming this bravura, epic, and wildly imaginative new film by the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino (released last year in Italy, it opens at selected U.S. venues this weekend) from the merely great into something very close to a masterpiece.

An acerbic, allusive depiction of Giulio Andreotti (born 1919), the acerbic, elusive statesman who served seven times as Italy’s prime minister between 1972 and 1992, and who was for decades its most powerful politician, Il Divo is not a movie with obvious appeal to a wide American audience. It monkeys with time, reality, and genre, jumping to and fro between decades, between fact and fiction, between comedy, tragedy, satire, and philippic. The events it purports to describe are little known over here. The political figures that prowl through its lethal funhouse narrative will be unfamiliar and, in their urbane cynicism and sardonic Realpolitik, almost indistinguishable from one another. Was that Franco Evangelisti we just saw, or Salvo Lima? Does it matter?

If it’s any consolation, Italians also struggle to understand their country’s post-war political history. It’s a half-century-long saga of cabals, conspiracy, and faction, of collusion with organized crime, of governments that fell but never changed, of guilty verdicts that were not, of murky Masonic lodges and devious Vatican bankers, and, always, the fear that the country’s deep ideological divisions would ultimately lead to violent conflict. Finally, hideously and, except to the dead, ambiguously, they did. The “years of lead” between the late 1960s and the early 1980s were the years of the Red Brigades, of fascist bombings, of a Mafia that appeared ready to take on the state, but also of a growing suspicion that much of this was the result of a deliberately engineered “strategy of tension” designed to whip up support for a more openly authoritarian regime. It’s no surprise that Italians have a word, dietrologia (“the science of what’s behind”), to describe the quest to discover who is really responsible for what goes on in that country of theirs. Up until recently, the answer, more often than not, or so it is repeatedly claimed, was Andreotti.

Paranoia? To a degree, but amongst the members of the faction that Andreotti led within Italy’s Christian Democratic party, and who feature in Il Divo, Salvo Lima used his connections to la Cosa Nostra to deliver large numbers of crucial Sicilian votes (he was eventually murdered by the Mafia in a response to government moves against it), Franco Evangelisti was a self-confessed recipient of large amounts of illicit campaign-finance “contributions,” Paolo Pomicino was convicted for his role in a major bribery scandal (naturally he still sits in parliament, where he has served as a member of the commission responsible for investigating organized crime), and Giuseppe Ciarrapico was found guilty of involvement in the same Banco Ambrosiano affair that saw the bank’s chairman “suicided” from London’s Blackfriars Bridge. Ciarrapico became a senator in 2008. Under these circumstances, does it matter who exactly is who?

As for another Christian Democrat leader, Aldo Moro, a former prime minister, who haunts this film and, it implies, what’s left of Andreotti’s conscience, he ended up broken, “tried” and murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978 after a kidnapping in which efforts to rescue him may have been hampered by the same establishment of which he once believed himself to be an indispensable part.

Then there’s Mino Pecorelli, a prominent muckraking journalist with a sideline in blackmail. He’s gunned down at the beginning of the movie. Back in what passes for real life, he was reported to have had damaging information about Andreotti, information that may have proved fatal — though not to Andreotti. In 1999 Andreotti was tried for his alleged involvement in Pecorelli’s murder and acquitted, only to be found guilty by a court of appeal in 2002, a verdict that was itself overturned the following year. Andreotti continues to be a senator-for-life. Pecorelli continues to be dead.

Pecorelli’s is just one of many violent deaths to punctuate this movie. The most striking is that of Salvo Lima. Filmed in a cleverly cross-cut sequence strikingly reminiscent of the murderous finale to TheGodfather, Part II, it is just one of several nods to Coppola’s trilogy (which featured, incidentally, a character thought to be partly based on Andreotti). In another scene we watch Andreotti handing out small gifts to some of his humbler constituents. It’s impossible not to remember Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone dispensing a favor here and a favor there, and, if you’re me, to be struck by the similarities between the patronage state and a successful criminal enterprise.

But compared with Andreotti, Brando’s Godfather is a mumbling, incoherent lout. As depicted by Sorrentino’s biting, perversely witty, slyly winking script and Toni Servillo’s extraordinary (and in the view of many, remarkably accurate) performance, the reserved, melancholy Italian prime minister is a black hole, enigmatic, all-consuming and irresistible, his nature illuminated only by tiny inflections of his hunched, tightly held-in body and flashes of bleak, knowing humor. He’s devoutly religious (famously so), but we soon come to realize that he has embraced the idea of a fallen humanity so fully that it has become for him both inspiration and alibi.

Servillo’s soft-spoken, deadpan Andreotti makes the screen his own. Even if you have no interest in this film’s subject matter, go for Servillo, a maestro depicting a master with a subtlety and intensity that defy description. At times he seems almost inhuman, his narrow frame and bat-ears hinting at Max Schreck’s Nosferatu, particularly in a sequence in which he practically glides down the corridors of power, corridors that, Italy being Italy, are as architecturally glorious as they are politically treacherous. Its story of murder, corruption, and betrayal may be ugly, but Il Divo is frequently gorgeous to look at. It’s a contrast that reinforces the message that Sorrentino is trying to deliver. This is underscored by scene after scene shot in that perfect chiaroscuro where light and darkness play off each other with neither quite prevailing. Even the times when Andreotti walks slowly and stiffly down a quiet Roman street, completely, hauntingly alone yet accompanied by a heavily armed police escort, are filmed with a somber noir beauty all their own.

To be sure, in some respects Il Divo’s Andreotti is a caricature (the real Andreotti, no surprise, is no fan). Sorrentino is not looking for balance. He is making the case for the prosecution: Look out for the sequence in which Andreotti is interviewed by a journalist who recites a long list of distinctly awkward “coincidences” for which Andreotti has no easy exculpatory explanation. On another occasion Andreotti is filmed confessing, if only to himself, to terrible wrongdoing.

Sorrentino does at least allow his Andreotti to refer briefly to the Communist threat that had threatened to overwhelm the young, fragile Italian republic. Fair enough. To head that off required tactics unlikely to pass muster in safer, more complacent times. “Trees,” observes Servillo/Andreotti on another occasion, “need manure in order to grow.” Andreotti takes a similar tack in the course of his “confession,” referring to “the deeds that power must commit to ensure the well-being and development of the country,” and the “monstrous . . . contradiction [of] perpetuating evil to guarantee good.” Maybe, but these “deeds” became an end, not the means. The excesses that ensued, and the scandals they brought in their wake, brought both the First Republic and Andreotti tumbling down, even if, the film’s coda suggests, neither fell quite as far, or as hard, as they deserved.

One notable commentator on Italian politics has written that a leader “must not flinch from being blamed for vices which are necessary for safeguarding the state . . . Some of the things that appear to be virtues will, if he practices them, ruin him, and some of the things that appear to be wicked will bring him security and prosperity.”

Somehow I don’t think that Machiavelli would have liked Il Divo. See it nonetheless.

Bullying Berlusconi

National Review Online, July 22, 2003

As Silvio Berlusconi has now discovered, publicly comparing a German politician to a concentration-camp guard is a really, really dumb idea, but the row that has followed has been out of all proportion to one very bad-tempered remark. With something approaching relish, Europe's grandees are citing this gaffe as another reminder that the Italian premier is not up to the supposedly immense responsibilities of the presidency of the EU council. Of course, critics of Berlusconi claim to have more to their case than one stupid joke. They grumble about his unpredictability, his imperiousness, and the way that he is said to use his extensive media holdings to influence the democratic process. Above all, they point to Berlusconi's continuing legal problems as evidence that he is unfit to represent that city on a hill, the Europe of Chirac, Schroeder, and the Common Agricultural Policy. Berlusconi's difficulties with the law — a tawdry, and seemingly endless, cycle of convictions, acquittals on appeal, and courtroom maneuvering — aren't pretty, to put it mildly, but they have to be seen in the context of a country where politically motivated prosecutions are far from unknown. What's more, they relate back to a period when Italy had yet to emerge from the grip of a political class so corrupt that, for many businessmen, the payment of bribes had become an inevitable, if unwelcome, part of everyday life.

Besides, it's not as if Berlusconi went around beating people up. That distinction is reserved for German foreign minister Joschka Fischer. These days he's a darling of the EU's elite despite (or, perhaps, partly because of) his extremist past. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Fischer was part of a radical Left that was all too prepared to cross the line that divides legitimate protest from outright political violence. In 1973, Fischer took part in the brutal beating of a young policeman at a riot in Frankfurt. That moment of 'revolutionary struggle' was caught on camera, but most of his activities in those years remain clouded in somewhat sinister mystery. To take one example, after initial denials (attributed to 'forgetfulness') we now know that Fischer attended a 1969 PLO Conference in Algiers that passed a resolution calling for the extinction of the state of Israel. Fischer was there — an ugly place to be for a German less than twenty-five years after Auschwitz, and a gesture far more 'insensitive' than Berlusconi's ill-judged insult.

Ancient history, you say? Well, let's take a look at Lionel Jospin, a man widely respected across the EU for his "integrity." He was France's prime minister until last year, and the Socialist contender in that country's presidential elections — until he was beaten into third place by a neo-fascist (and people call Italy's politics a disgrace?). At about the time young Joschka Fischer was beating up a policeman young Jospin was an activist in a revolutionary Trotskyite group known as OCI. A youthful mistake? Perhaps, except that it was a youthful mistake that Jospin was to continue making into middle age. He maintained discreet links with OCI for another two decades. Jospin has said that he has no need to feel "red-faced" about his red past, but, strangely, he never chose to mention it to the electorate. Lionel's affection for Leon (a mass murderer, lest we forget) was only discovered a few years ago — after Jospin had become prime minister).

And then there's money. The wicked Berlusconi is not alone in having allegations of bribery and corruption thrown his way. Take a glance at Giscard D'Estaing, the man the EU hired to cobble together its new "constitution." This squalid blueprint for permanent bureaucratic rule was unveiled recently amid scenes of choreographed rejoicing that reached their apogee when one brown-nosing Green MEP hailed Giscard as a new Socrates, a description that would have had the Greek sage reaching again for the hemlock.

The notoriously vain Giscard was, doubtless, delighted to have a second chance to leave a mark on history. These days his one, rather lackluster, term as president of France is best remembered for a widely rumored affair with sexy Sylvia Kristel (Emmanuelle) and, less impressively, for his habit of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of diamonds from Central Africa's cannibal-emperor Bokassa. Giscard has never really had much to say about those glittering pebbles, but then he has never had to. The French establishment looks after its own — Giscard was never charged with any crime.

Ah yes, some might say, and that's why Berlusconi is different. He has actually been prosecuted. Fair enough, but then so has Jean-Claude Trichet, the next chief of the European Central Bank. He was charged with approving false accounts for Credit Lyonnais, a bank that has cost the French taxpayer billions of dollars. He has, however, just been acquitted and is, therefore, free to take up his new job at the ECB in November. Now, an acquittal is an acquittal (unless it is Berlusconi who is being acquitted, in which case it doesn't seem to count), and we must--of course--assume that the unfortunately-named Trichet is innocent, but it says something about the EU that it is prepared to appoint a man with this shadow over his past to one of the most sensitive--and powerful--financial jobs in the world.

Matters may not end so happily for Edith Cresson. She is an undistinguished former French prime minister best known for her suggestion that one in four Englishmen are homosexual. She was the EU's 'research and education' commissioner between 1995 and 1999 and she is now facing criminal charges in Belgium of forgery and conflict of interest relating to her time in office in Brussels. The case has been under investigation for four years (not so long by Belgian standards for politically sensitive prosecutions) and is forecast to last at least another twelve months or so, after which the EU Commission will then decide whether to seek additional administrative penalties against her.

The commissioner responsible for investigating Cresson is, with nice symmetry, an undistinguished former opposition leader. Neil Kinnock led the Labour party to defeat against Mrs. Thatcher and, more remarkably, John Major. He is a man in a good position to know that the Cresson scandal was no isolated incident: Berlusconi's alleged wrongdoing is small beer compared with what has been going on in Brussels. In 1999 Kinnock and all his fellow commissioners, "accepted responsibility" by resigning after the publication of a highly critical report detailing fraud and corruption within the Commission then led by another undistinguished former prime minister — Luxemburg's Jacques Santer. The report had been prompted by the persistence of Paul van Buitenen, a Dutch whistle-blower from the commission's control department. He was suspended on half-pay and labeled a madman, but eventually his complaints grew too noisy for even the EU parliament to ignore and, somewhat reluctantly it authorized the independent inquiry that was to doom the Santer Commission.

Santer continued to describe himself as "whiter than white," but despite that, he was replaced by a slightly more distinguished former prime minister — Italy's Romano Prodi. Prodi remains "president" of the Commission today and is, we must presume, "whiter than whiter than white." Only boors will choose to mention that, like Berlusconi, the pristine Mr. Prodi was under criminal investigation on at least two occasions in the 1980s and 1990s. No charges were ever brought, but it's worth remembering that just as there tends to be something a little political about prosecutions in Italy, there can also be more than a touch of the political about decisions not to prosecute.

But back to Kinnock. As we have seen, he accepted his share of "responsibility" for the failings of the Santer Commission by resigning. He then agreed to accept even more "responsibility" by being appointed to the new Prodi Commission, promoted and being put in charge of "administrative reform." This is why the Cresson case has ended up in his in-tray.

Madame Cresson, meanwhile, is not going quietly. Her prosecution by the Belgians is, she says, an attempt to "damage the name of France" (no cheap jokes, please) and she has sent a letter to Jacques Chirac asking for the "protection of the Republic." That "protection" is something that Chirac, the toast of the EU parliament during the Iraq crisis, knows a bit about himself. The French government has now endorsed a law that will safeguard Saddam's old pal from prosecution for as long as he is president. This isn't unique (Berlusconi has secured similar immunity in Italy), but it may come in handy given certain characteristics of Chirac's time as mayor of Paris, which reportedly included both traditional and more exotic misbehavior including some $2,000,000, for example, claimed in reimbursement for food and drink expenses.

Neil Kinnock's "reforms" have, meanwhile, proceeded at a predictably leaden pace, prompting a despairing Van Buitenen to resign from the Commission in 2002, saying it was "unreformable." The EU's Court of Auditors probably agrees. It has been criticizing the commission's accounting for years. One of the few people who seem to really care about this is Marta Andreasen, the new chief auditor appointed to the EU last year. She went public with claims that the commission's chaotic and confusing 'system,' which is meant to track around $100 billion a year, might be open to fraud. She was promptly suspended, but on full pay — there has been some progress). In fact, Andreasen's comments were relatively restrained. The Court of Auditors has estimated that losses from fraud account for around five percent of the budget. To add to the drama, it turned out that the EU's internal auditor (another determined Dutchman, this time by the name of Muis) had been preparing a report of his own. It backed up much of what Andreasen was saying, not that that did her much good.

To his credit, Muis persisted, but only for a while. He has tendered his resignation citing the now traditional "slow pace of reform." There are suggestions that he was also frustrated by the Commission's reluctance to allow him to investigate the growing scandal at Eurostat, the EU's statistical office, a place where, it seems, nothing quite added up. The details are murky, but there's talk of secret bank accounts and siphoned-off funds. As usual the whistle-blower, (Danish, this time, not Dutch), was left twisting in the wind. She claims to have been bullied out of her job. Requests to that great reformer Kinnock for legal assistance were rejected. That, at least, has now changed. The case, a spokesman for Kinnock told the Financial Times, is "more complicated than we originally thought." Indeed it is.

Now, the point of reciting these tales of hypocrisy and corruption within the EU (and there are plenty of other stories where they came from) is not to exonerate Berlusconi. All those wrongs don't make a right. At the same time, they do make the indignation over the Italian prime minister look a little, well, selective. For an explanation, forget the dodgy dealings back in Italy. Berlusconi's real crime is something far worse — he is a capitalist, a conservative (of sorts) and, horrors, an Atlanticist, and in today's increasingly intolerant Europe the reward for such heresy is meant to be political and legal destruction.

And that's the real scandal.