Going places: France’s anxiety about the budget crisis has fuelled resentment of the country’s most renowned tax exile. Photograph by Jonas Unger / Focus / Contact Press Images

Nouns get all the good parts—potato, macaca, the Appalachian Trail—but this winter, in Paris, a jobbing three-syllable adjective set off a political scandal. Minable, meaning “pathetic” or “shabby,” débuted on the breakfast show “Télématin” on December 12th. The host asked the French Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, what he thought of Gérard Depardieu’s decision to establish residency in Néchin, a Belgian village of two thousand souls, and nearly as many beet fields, in order to escape a seventy-five-per-cent tax that the French government had promised to impose on income exceeding a million euros. The normally urbane Ayrault replied, “Je trouve ça assez minable.”

Minable had previously appeared in such phrases as “Minable le Pingouin” (a children’s book about a wayward bird) and “clown minable” (after a “Simpsons” episode in which Sophie, Krusty’s estranged daughter, tells him, “I typed ‘pathetic clown’ into a search engine, and your name popped right up”). But, coming from the mouth of the second-most-powerful man in France—from state to citizen, administrator to artist—it drew particular notice. According to the newsweekly Le Nouvel Observateur, minable was “a punch in the mouth”—“one word, by itself,” that roused all of Depardieu’s insecurities, transforming him from a national treasure back into Pétarou (Little Firecracker), the son of “an illiterate prole” from the boondocks of Châteauroux, with “his farts, his head-butts, his petty hustles.” The magazine continued, “ ‘Minable.’ It was to ignore all that he had built, alone, by his own hand, his hundred and seventy films and masterpieces; his constantly growing empire of real estate, statues, artwork, vineyards, shops, bistros. . . . It was to forget, above all, what underpins it all, his culture, forged from his raving hunger for reading, his passionate friendships with Barbara, Jean Carmet, Françoise Sagan, Marguerite Duras, and André Mandouze, the Latinist, who made him discover St. Augustine.”

France’s economic situation is dismal. Unemployment is at 10.6 per cent; Standard & Poor’s has downgraded the country’s credit rating; manufacturing is dying. Ever since a recent cover of The Economist featured a bundle of French bread, topped with a lit fuse, there has been talk of a “baguette bomb.” The most pressing challenge facing President François Hollande is the budget deficit, which, at four and a half per cent, hovers stubbornly above the European Union limit of three per cent. Hollande, who campaigned on an anti-austerity platform, has promised to conjure thirty billion euros with a mixture of cuts and taxes. The government, like the Knights Who Say “Ni,” had demanded a shrubbery, and Depardieu had declined to furnish it. Minable was Ayrault’s magic curse.

Ayrault had intended to give a lesson. But Gégé, as Depardieu is known, proved a feral scapegoat. He was a student of history, his generation’s greatest interpreter of Cyrano and Danton. Conscious of the French ambivalence toward wealth, and perhaps in thrall to it, he had long presented himself, in spite of his business successes, as a man of nature. In 1988, he published a short memoir called “Stolen Letters.” In a chapter devoted to “Money,” he wrote, “In analysis, money is shit. I was truly in the shit, pal! Money, for me, had become completely abstract. It’s a thing that’s necessary to get used to quick, before it eats your head.” (It should not be lost to history that, after a rattling encounter with a dog, in 1978, Depardieu had three sessions with Jacques Lacan.) In “My Cookbook,” he counted his pleasures: the tang of wild mint, the squelch of wet earth between his toes, the lingering musk of a fox. He had grown up poor, but free, and meat remained for him the avatar of prosperity. He was a Rabelaisian sensualist, not a Balzacian crook. “I have an acute sense of hearing,” he wrote. “Sometimes it is enough just to hear part of a story for me to imagine the rest—the rustle of dry leaves in the hedgerow as a small animal scuttles back to its burrow; a bird turning over the soft earth in search of a juicy worm.”

Depardieu heard minable, and endeavored not to become Ayrault’s breakfast. On December 16th, Le Journal du Dimanche, the Sunday newspaper, carried an open letter from him to the Prime Minister. “Pathetic, you said ‘pathetic’?” it began, alluding to a line from the 1937 film “Drôle de Drame,” in which a mystery writer suffers the persecutions of a nosy and moralizing bishop. “It is, indeed, pathetic.” Depardieu announced that he was surrendering his passport, because he was a citizen of the world, who had been disrespected. “I am to be neither pitied nor praised, but I reject the word ‘pathetic,’ ” he concluded.

His cri de coeur wasn’t really meant to be read; it was meant to be heard. It was an oration, appealing to ethos (“I was born in 1948, I began working at fourteen as a printer, a warehouse worker, and then as a dramatic artist”); logos (“I have paid a hundred and forty-five million euros in taxes over forty-five years”); and pathos (“No one who has left France has been injured as I have”). It was a eulogy for himself, a departed citizen. The Académie Française, keeper of the mother tongue, defines minable as connoting “an appearance that betrays poverty.” Ayrault had committed a one-word larceny: he had called a rich man poor.

The first anyone heard of the seventy-five-per-cent “supertax” was in February of last year, when Hollande, then the Socialist candidate for President, declared in a television interview that France’s cats were getting too fat. Hollande was in the midst of a tight race against the incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, of the center-right Union for a Popular Movement, who, even by many of those who appreciated his pro-business policies, was seen as a vulgarian. Moreover, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the Left Front—a resurgent coalition of Communists, Trotskyists, Socialists, students, and environmentalists—was running high in the polls, siphoning off the hard-left vote with promises to ban profitable companies from firing workers and to seize incomes that exceeded three hundred thousand euros. A former teacher, who called himself “the sound and the fury,” Mélenchon presented a radical alternative to the Anglo-Saxon capitalism that, he argued, had crippled France’s economy and corroded its culture. “If Europe is a volcano, then France is the revolutionary crater!” he thundered at rallies. (One of them, held at the Bastille, drew a hundred thousand people.) His campaign posters read, “Make Banks Pay, Not the People,” rendering Hollande’s “Change Is Now” the model of ideological impotence.

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“My enemy is the world of finance,” Hollande had proclaimed earlier in the campaign, but his mention of the supertax caught his advisers off guard. “You’re questioning me about a proposal I haven’t heard of,” Jérôme Cahuzac, who became Hollande’s Budget Minister, admitted to a reporter. If the tax, which represented a seventy-per-cent increase for France’s richest citizens, was surprising to Hollande’s advisers, it was tantalizing to the French public, sixty per cent of which approves of a supertax. Along with other changes to the tax code—higher levies on capital gains, higher rates for the upper middle class—the supertax drew on the republican ideal of taxation as an institution that would foster social cohesion. Americans insist that the poor do better; the French insist that the rich do worse. As the French economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez have argued, high taxes on the rich are an effective way of reducing income inequality, which remains relatively low in France. Piketty, whom Hollande has cited as an influence, pitched the candidate as “the next Roosevelt.” He told Reuters, “Hollande’s seventy-five-per-cent tax plan is the right response to the Occupy movement. The irony is that the street movement is happening in the United States, while the political response is coming in France.”