No longer a world saviour WHEN Dominique Strauss-Kahn was hauled off a plane in New York in 2011 and arrested on charges of sexual assault, there was indignation in France. At worst, it was seen as a set-up; at best, the result of American puritanical excess. The spectacle of a handcuffed IMF head doing the “perp walk” aroused special outrage. “It’s not as if anybody died,” shrugged a senior French Socialist.Those charges were eventually dropped, but France now has its own home-grown version in a courtroom in Lille. Mr Strauss-Kahn, along with 13 others, is accused of “aggravated pimping”, an offense that carries up to ten years in jail. As details of orgies with prostitutes in Washington, Paris and Lille have emerged, the French are being torn between an instinctive respect for privacy over sexual behavior and a creeping moral disquiet.The presiding judge in the trial, which opened on February 2nd, made it clear that this was a criminal, not a moral, hearing. The case against Mr Strauss-Kahn hinges on whether he knew that the women who attended soirées libertines, or group-sex parties, often organised in…
