For nearly 12 years as France's domestic spy chief, Yves Bertrand filled spiral-bound notebooks with every rumour that came his way about the goings-on of the political elite. They were supposed to be a private aide-memoire, he says. But this month they became public when extracts were published by Le Point magazine, prompting an outburst of denials, red faces and legal action which has gripped the Paris establishment.rnThe disclosures so far are relatively coy, yet reveal the deeply pervasive culture of snooping in the country founded on the principle of liberte. Where British tabloids would have splashed intimate details across the front page, the French weekly merely hints at "the bisexuality of a certain minister" or the "tab kept by a former prime minister at a top Paris hotel". It names only a few figures. In 2000, for instance, it says that Mr Bertrand had pages of notes on the Trotskyite past of Lionel Jospin, then a Socialist prime minister whose history had yet to be exposed. In October 2003, according to Le Point, the spy chief noted that the then president, Jacques Chirac, "had a facelift in Canada." He also wrote copious notes about the marital life of Nicolas Sarkozy, then a government minister and now president, including details of a telephone conversation between his first wife and a friend of hers on the subject of his second wife.
展开▼
