France Analysis

Pardon for battered wife highlights paradoxes of French system of government

President François Hollande has just granted a full pardon to Jacqueline Sauvage, a woman who killed her husband after he had continually beaten her and sexually abused their daughters. Hubert Huertas says the decision to act having hesitated for so long over the pardon sums up Hollande's presidency. He also argues that the case illustrates the limits of French democracy and highlights the issue of judicial scandals.

Hubert Huertas

This article is freely available.

So, it required four years for Jacqueline Sauvage's judicial fate to be distinguished from that awaiting murderers, thieves, rapists, drug traffickers and fraudsters. One day in September 2012 this 66-year-old woman, who had suffered for so long and who was seized by panic, killed her husband. Were there extenuating circumstances in her favour? Two or three come to mind: 1) this man had beaten her for years; 2) this man was sexually abusing their three daughters, also over a long period; 3) her son, worn down like her, had killed himself just before she committed her “crime”. The fact that the justice system, on a point of principle, found the accused guilty after two trials is its right, and is also the law. However, the fact that the same justice system on two occasions judged that after such a litany of woes this woman had to be sent to prison for ten years, and had to be kept there like a lost or dangerous person is quite another thing.

Illustration 1
Pardon at last: President François Hollande has finally pardoned Jacqueline Sauvage in the face of a lengthy campaign on her behalf.

It was after the second of these rulings that President François Hollande finally granted a full pardon to Jacqueline Sauvage, urged on by public emotion and following interventions by several feminist collective groups, support committees and political figures. These personalities covered a wide political spectrum and included the socialist mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, the right-wing president of the Paris region Valérie Pécresse, right-wing Member of Parliament and former minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, former green European MP Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and radical left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Hollande's decision sums up his five-year term of office. It was a partial decision befitting a presidency full of compromises, one that appeared clear-cut but was not quite that in reality. Back in January 2016 Hollande had decided on a pardon because he was moved by Jacqueline Sauvage's story. But at that time he only granted a partial pardon because he felt repelled by the notion of issuing a full pardon, a presidential power that dates back to royal times. It is an excessive power that in effect imposes a political decision on the judicial authorities. Just as in the 2013 saga of the Roma schoolgirl Leonarda - who was deported to Kosovo after being ordered off a school bus – Hollande's heart was torn between between two solutions. In that case Hollande, because he was a man of feeling, decreed that Leonarda could return to France, but because he was also the president he decided that she could only do so without her parents.

In the case of Jacqueline Sauvage, as so often in his presidency, Hollande's obsession with finding a compromise position led him to yield to the strongest law; and in most cases the strongest in the domain of justice are the judges. Those judges, who were shocked by the use of the presidential pardon last January, even though it was partial, twice rejected moves for the convicted woman to be given conditional release from prison, first in August and then in November 2016.

In the judgement of the sentencing court at Melun, south-east of Paris, freeing Jacqueline Sauvage would have run the risk of “maintaining [her] in the status of a victim”. She was thus kept in a criminal status instead and invited to make the most of the vantage point of her ivory tower cell to reflect more deeply on the impact of her act and the failure of her married life.

It was as a response to this pitiless decision that François Hollande finally granted Sauvage a full pardon. According to his entourage, the head of state “feels free to do what seems to him to be just” since his decision not to seek a second term of office. Thus François Hollande, having long hesitated to use his full powers, decides to use them at the moment when the announcement of his political retirement has made him a mere bystander. To be or not to be, therein lies his ambiguity. He was not president at the time when he was president, and he is one at the very time when he no longer is. That, perhaps, is what history will remember of the way this man exercised the supreme office of the French state.

But it would be unfair, and would not tell the whole story, simply to see the Jacqueline Sauvage affair through the prism of the current president's hesitations.

For what is the value of these state institutions that heap everything onto one man, thereby depoliticising political decisions? In France power is represented by the eccentric myth of a solitary man before his people, to whom he is connected by the magic of universal suffrage. In that case, how does one avoid public life being reduced to the private study of the one figure who counts? What, then, is the value of a system deprived of a real Parliament, and whose actions cannot be understood through the genuine power struggle of opposing movements, but through the moods, loves and conscience of the republican monarch?

What, too, is the value of our political customs? By some miracle, everyone was happy with President Hollande's decision on Wednesday to grant a pardon and it was widely applauded. Of course it was, because the president now only manages day-to-day affairs. If, however, Hollande had chosen to stand again for the presidency that very same decision, pronounced by the very same man, would have shocked political opponents, furious at what they would have branded an electoral gambit. What is the value of politicians' speeches if they vary on the same issue according to prevailing circumstances?

Finally, what is the worth of a justice system that is so tough on a woman who was beaten by her daughter-abusing husband and so able to understand the difficulties of another woman – Christine Lagarde – who escaped all punishment on December 19th? A system that decided that the current head of the International Monetary Fund should walk free from court on negligence charges because she had been under pressure as a result of the “global financial crisis” and because of her “national and international reputation”?

The two cases are different, as were the courts, and there is a risk of yielding to populism, but nonetheless the two events were just ten days apart and involved the same justice system. The president of the judges' professional body the Union des Syndicats de Magistrats (USM), Virginie Duval, was doing her job when she tweeted after Sauvage's full pardon: “This is a deplorable decision, it's a total attack on judicial decisions.” One would have liked the same kind of soaring rhetoric when the powerful IMF boss was both found guilty and given a de facto amnesty by another court.

Unless of course the legitimate defence by a woman in the name of her dignity and that of her family has less value than the price of power and the power of money.

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  • The French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter