PARIS — A widening phone-hacking scandal is prompting a broad reassessment of the balance between press freedom and privacy in Britain, even as France grapples with the consequences of its tradition of protecting the powerful.

If Dominique Strauss-Kahn walks free now that the sexual assault case against him in New York seems to be weakening, will the French public have a right, or, indeed, an appetite to know more than what emerged in American courts? And if less-exalted people in Britain feel that their secrets should be protected too, how should they shield themselves from unscrupulous journalists hacking into their most intimate voice mails?

The questions underscore the contrasts between cultures that, in the past, have made Britain a temple to strident disclosure and France a whispered haven of discretion. In both countries, the debate has reached what might, at first, seem like a tipping point.

In London, a tabloid newspaper, The News of the World, was accused of eavesdropping on the cellphones of a kidnapped and murdered schoolgirl, the relatives of people who died in the 2005 London transit bombings and possibly the families of British war dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.