The Value of Privacy

French photographers may not be quite as notorious as Italy's pugnacious paparazzi, but they are no less unscrupulous about invading people's privacy. When they are not wading out into the Mediterranean to sneak pictures of Brigitte Bardot semi-nude on her private beach, they are risking their necks schussing down the ski slopes of the Alps on the track of the Aga Khan. In one typical operation they took a picture of a Parisian professor chatting with one of his students in a Left Bank bistro, then used it to illustrate an article attacking "old pigs" who debauch teenage girls.

The raft of scandal sheets that publish their photos have been hit by innumerable lawsuits but seldom hurt by them—awards often amount to no more than a symbolic one franc. Now, however, one newspaper has been ordered to pay $8,000 in damages to the family of the late actor Gerard Philipe —the largest sum yet awarded for photographic invasion of privacy by a newspaper.

Last spring, Gerard Philipe's nine-year-old son Olivier was dangerously ill in a Paris hospital when a photographer suddenly broke into his room, started snapping photos while the terrified child hid his head under the sheet.

A few days later a big Paris weekly, France Dimanche (circ. 1,300,000), devoted its entire front page to pictures of Olivier and hinted that the boy was dying of leukemia. He was not. His mother obtained a court order confiscating the entire press run of the France Dimanche issue; the court tongue-lashed the photographer for his "veritable aggression," and the newspaper for its "intolerable invasion of the private life of the Philipe family." Though the $8,000 in damages will probably not make an appreciable dent in France Dimanche's pocketbook, it certainly serves notice on the French press that the value of privacy is going up.