Think regular French people support Polanksi like Hollyweird snob elites do? Think again.
For once it appears French popular sentiment and American popular sentiment are both on the same page and in opposition to the elitist glitterati who just do not get it.
Some French officials have joined with the fringe of the Hollywood establishment in crying foul over Roman Polanski’s long overdue meeting with justice.
The Polanski apologia has repulsed regular, everyday, thinking Americans – who typically go to jail for crimes like drugging, raping, and sodomizing thirteen year olds.
But if you think the country of France is united in support of the rapist director Polanski, you would be wrong. According to the New York Times, the French masses have also had it with Polanski’s rich and ignorant defenders, believing they represent the worst side of snob class moral relativism.
The out-of-touch artistic and political elitists peddling excuses for Polanski will now face backlash from the French people, who share American astonishment that anyone is coming to the defense of this fugitive child rapist:
Marc Laffineur, the vice-president of the French assembly and a member of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling center-right party, the UMP, took issue with…remarks supporting Mr. Polanski, saying “the charge of raping a child 13 years old is not something trivial, whoever the suspect is.”
Within the Green party, Daniel Cohn-Bendit — a French deputy in the European parliament whose popularity is rising — also criticized Sarkozy administration officials for leaping too quickly to Mr. Polanski’s side despite the serious nature of his crime. On the extreme right…politicians Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen also attacked the ministers, saying they were supporting “a criminal pedophile in the name of the rights of the political-artistic class.”
Marie-Louise Fort, a French lawmaker in the Assembly who has sponsored anti-incest legislation, said… she was shocked that Mr. Polanski was attracting support from the political and artistic elite. “I don’t believe that public opinion is spontaneously supporting Mr. Polanski at all,” she said. “I believe that there is a distinction between the mediagenic class of artists and ordinary citizens that have a vision that is more simple.”
The mood was even more hostile in blogs and e-mails to newspapers and news magazines. Of the 30,000 participants in an online poll by the French daily Le Figaro, more than 70 percent said Mr. Polanski, 76, should face justice. And in the magazine Le Point, more than 400 letter writers were almost universal in their disdain for Mr. Polanski.
That contempt was not only directed at Mr. Polanski, but at the French class of celebrities — nicknamed Les People — who are part of Mr. Polanski’s rarefied Parisian world. Letter writers to Le Point scorned Les People as the “crypto-intelligentsia of our country” who deliver “eloquent phrases that defy common sense.”
Are the French more American than they think, or are we Americans more French than we think? Most likely, this shows that common sense – lacking among too many in the elite glitterati rape-minimizing snob class – is simply universal among regular folk who pay attention.
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