The news in France over the weekend was dominated by the resignation of Jack Lang as head of the prestigious Arab World Institute in Paris. In more ways than one, Lang is France’s answer to Peter Mandelson, a figurehead for the bourgeois left and a figure of loathing for those on the other side of the political spectrum.
The fall of Jack Lang raises some uncomfortable questions for the Elysee
Lang resigned after his name appeared 673 times in the Epstein files in correspondence between 2012 and 2019. Also made public was a video of Lang and Epstein in front of the Louvre pyramid in March 2019, more than a decade after the American’s conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution. Lang says he was unaware of Epstein’s conviction.
The name of Lang’s daughter, Caroline, also cropped up, the files revealing that she had launched an offshore company with Epstein in 2016 to invest in the work of young artists. Lang said that she resigned from that offshore company when further allegations were made against Epstein in 2019.
She was also cited as a €5 million (£4.4 million) beneficiary in Epstein’s will, although in an interview last week she denied knowledge of this will.
Caroline Lang swiftly stepped down from France’s Union of Independent Producers after the files were released. Her father, who denies any wrongdoing, tried to remain in the post he has occupied since 2013 but eventually the political and media pressure became too great for even Lang to resist. He reluctantly resigned on Saturday but Lang has promised to ‘prove his innocence’.
Lang has never been short of hubris. When Francois Mitterrand was elected the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic in 1981 he appointed Lang Minister of Culture. “Culture, it’s me!” declared Lang, a statement that captured the conceit of the man.
Lang was very much a man of his generation, what the French call a ‘Soixante-Huitard’, a 68er, one of the entitled bourgeois who led the cultural revolution of May 1968. Their rallying cry was ‘It is Forbidden to Forbid’, a mantra that ushered in a period of decadence and degeneracy.
In 1977, Lang was one of the signatories to a now infamous letter published in Le Monde. He, along with other left-wing intellectuals including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, defended three people accused of paedophilia.
In 2021, Lang expressed his regret for having signed the letter, explaining that ‘it was after 1968 and we were carried along by a wave of libertarianism’.
The letter didn’t damage Lang’s political career. Bill Clinton was nicknamed the ‘Teflon candidate’ by the American press when he ran for the presidency in 1992, and similarly nothing seemed to stick to Lang during his decades in politics. Until Epstein crossed the path of both men.
It was announced on Friday that France’s national financial prosecutor has opened a preliminary investigation into Lang and his daughter for suspected aggravated tax fraud laundering. No charges have been filed and the Langs deny the allegations.
The fall of Lang also raises uncomfortable questions for the Elysee. According to a report in the French media outlet, Mediapart, the Ministry of Finance were on the tail of Lang in 2020. They contacted the US authorities as part of an investigation ‘into an offshore transfer of €50,000 (£44,000) made by the sex offender at the personal request of Jack Lang’.
Despite this investigation, Lang was invited to the state banquet in honour of King Charles and Queen Camilla at the Palace of Versailles in 2023. Lang told reporters that he had met Charles on several occasions over the years, and that he and his wife had even been invited to Sandringham.
Few in France are mourning the demise of Lang’s reputation. ‘Epstein scandal tarnishes former minister Jack Lang and France’s image,’ is how Le Monde headlined its editorial on Saturday.
On the right the prevailing response has been schadenfreude; not just satisfaction at Lang’s fall from grace but also the disintegration of the left’s moral superiority.
A columnist in the centre-right Le Figaro wrote on Monday that there has been ‘such long-standing leniency towards Jack Lang’ because he was the last of Mitterrand’s 68ers, the ‘gauche caviar’ [Champagne Socialists] who believed they were better than everyone else. Le Figaro reminded its readers in its editorial on Monday of ‘the lessons in morality and anti-racism that this left-wing, Fidel Castro-friendly government preached to the whole world’.
Just as the defenestration of Peter Mandelson has been described by British commentators as the final nail in the coffin of Blairism, so the resignation of Lang marks the end of Mitterrandisme.
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