THE scandals and power struggles rocking Paris City Hall for the past few weeks have been compared to French farce, which is very unfair to the likes of Feydeau and Guitry, who wrote about serial adulterers, broad-minded mistresses, and cuckolded husbands.
The city hall story resembles a sordid tragedy involving greed, abuse of influence and hypocrisy, rather than overactive libidos. The final act may still be a long way off, but it could - and this is the sort of billing playwrights only dream of - feature no less a political star than President Jacques Chirac.
The mayor of Paris, Jean Tiberi, a friend of Chirac and his deputy when the latter was mayor, has recently been subjected to a slow-moving coup d'etat orchestrated by Jacques Toubon, another friend of Chirac and a former government minister.
Tiberi's position as mayor has become highly sensitive because of a series of investigations into corruption - the worst of which, concerning a grace and favour payment of more than #20,000 to his wife Xaviere, had been shelved because of a legal technicality.
On Monday, the whole affair blew up again. Madame Tiberi was questioned by police at Versailles, and her apartment was searched.
At the heart of the matter, as before, was a badly and hastily written 36-page report which Madame Tiberi had put together for the regional council of Versailles for a fee of #20,000.
The Gaullist RPR, the party of both Mr Tiberi and Chirac, seized on the large number of journalists who had been tipped off about the house search and also the fact the investigating magistrate handling the case had written a book on the subject, to claim the affair had been politically manipulated.
More embarrassing for the Gaullists, however, were accusations made simultaneously in the press by a former personnel officer at city hall. The man in question had, it is true, an axe to grind having served a six-month jail sentence in 1993 for corruption.
But Georges Quemar alleged that in the mid-1980s, when Chirac was mayor, Paris city hall handed out no fewer than 300 fictitious jobs to political friends, including a star ballet dancer, RPR town councillors and the leader of a farmers' union in Correze, the region for which Chirac is MP. The annual cost to ratepayers was put at anything between #8m and #10m. According to Quemar, the villain of the piece was Tiberi.
The finance system of the RPR is already under criminal investigation and, as the smell of scandal moves closer to the Elysee Palace, the question of the president's legal immunity has been raised. Some argue he may only be answerable on charges of ''high treason''. But socialist Minister of Justice Elisabeth Guigou dropped a bombshell last week, saying there was no reason why a president should not go before a court, like any other citizen.
The RPR counter-attacked accusing Prime Minister Lionel Jospin of having been paid to do nothing by the French Foreign Office under the previous conservative government.
Then suddenly, as if frightened too many cats might leap out of the bag, both Chirac and Jospin called for a ceasefire, expressing concern over the ''excesses'' of recent days.
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