Judging a Book by Its Claims

The sun-kissed Mediterranean coast has long been home to mobsters and shady big-bucks real estate schemes.

But a new book by two journalists, one of them the great-great-grandson of science-fiction pioneer Jules Verne, has bowled over even the most jaundiced residents with its allegations about French politics, southern style. Though it uses code names, the expose fingers two former Cabinet ministers for allegedly having ordered the 1994 murder of Yann Piat, a fellow member of the French National Assembly and a political ally.

Encornet (“Squid”) is clearly Francois Leotard, former minister of defense and leader of the center-right Union for French Democracy party, while Trottinette (“Scooter”) is thought to be Jean-Claude Gaudin, mayor of Marseilles, fellow UDF bigwig and former minister of territorial development.

The book has streaked onto the bestseller lists, with more than 100,000 copies reportedly in print.

A furious Leotard went on television last week to denounce it, while Gaudin filed charges against its authors, Andre Rougeot and Jean-Michel Verne, in Marseilles.

“These people have lied, they have dishonored their profession, they have ridiculed justice, they must pay,” Gaudin said.

On Monday, sitting in the same chamber where revolutionary judges condemned Marie Antoinette to death, a Paris tribunal ordered a halt to sales of “The Yann Piat Affair: Assassins at the Heart of Power” until Oct. 24.

Leotard had petitioned the court to have 20 pages excised from the book, but the judges decided instead to give the authors time to prove their allegations.

That is something that, until now, Rougeot and Verne have declined to do, a fact that has deeply troubled some other French journalists. The charges leveled at the erstwhile ministers result from Rougeot’s interviews with an anonymous source, identified in the book as “the general”--supposedly a former member of the French military intelligence agency.

The alleged motive for the murder? Lawmaker Piat uncovered proof of her fellow pols’ involvement in corrupt property deals, especially the sale of military land for private development. Encornet also supposedly had ties to the Italian Mafia.

In February 1994, Piat, 44, was fatally shot in her chauffeur-driven limousine by a motorcycle hit squad on a lonely road near her home on the outskirts of Hyeres. It was only the latest act of political violence in the scandal-ridden Var area of the French Riviera; over a 10-year period, a dozen local government officials had been shot or had their cars blown up.

An investigating magistrate ruled that Piat had been murdered by two brothers from Toulon, supposedly working for a Hyeres bar owner. But no clear motive for the killing has ever emerged. The brothers were later found asphyxiated in a car and the bizarre deaths classified as suicides.

Some French journalists are reserving their judgment on Rougeot, a staff reporter at Le Canard Enchaine, a Paris weekly mixing satire and investigative journalism, and Marseilles-based freelancer Verne, until the affair goes back before the judges.

But others have accused the pair of discrediting their profession. In its latest edition, even Rougeot’s publication carefully distanced itself, saying, “Le Canard is Le Canard, and the book is the book.”

“Bringing a man, minister or not, into question without proof is a crime,” Le Parisien newspaper said in a scathing editorial. “It is the opposite of our mission and the shame of our craft.” By making the most serious accusations in decades against some of France’s elected leaders, and not substantiating them, the book could spur legal restrictions on investigative journalism, the Paris daily said.

This week, President Jacques Chirac seemed to show what he thought of the allegations by decorating Gaudin with the Legion of Honor.