WHEN the French actor Gérard Depardieu collected his Russian passport this week, the English language media erupted with puzzlement and mockery. One online commentator called the corpulent defector “shameless” for becoming “a citizen of a dictatorship just to avoid taxes.”

Tax exile is nothing new, of course. European countries have a long history of wooing one another’s rich with offers of bigger salaries and smaller government. Last year, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain announced that he would “roll out the red carpet” for any French businessmen willing to take up his country’s lower tax rates.

Yet while few batted an eye when a slew of prominent Parisian financiers moved their families (and bank accounts) en masse across the channel in December, Depardieu’s action seems to have crossed an imaginary line in many people’s minds.

For if by moving to Belgium or Britain the actor could be criticized merely for valuing money over motherland, in decamping to authoritarian Russia he seems to have placed money ahead of even democracy itself. In this way, he might be said to have forsaken not just his country, but also the fundamental Western notion that rights and freedoms are inalienable and non-negotiable.