France: Gagging Greene

A court bans his exposé

"To all those tempted to come and I live on the Côte d'Azur, I give a warning: avoid Nice, for it is the privileged haunt of the most powerful 'criminal milieu' in the south of France." So writes Graham Greene, the British novelist, who has lived at Antibes, only a few miles from Nice, for the past 17 years. But the French will not be able to thrill to Greene's charges in his new nonfiction book entitled J'Accuse: Portrait of a Delinquent in His Protected Milieu. The appellate court of Aix-en-Provence ruled early this month in a rare decision that the book could not be sold in France or even brought into the country because it was libelous of one of the people mentioned in the story.

In J'Accuse, Greene reveals what he has learned about the shady side of the sunny French Riviera. He became interested in the subject when the daughter of a close friend got involved in a messy divorce. After the couple separated, the estranged husband, Daniel Guy, a real estate operator in Nice, allegedly threatened his wife by hinting of his connections with the milieu, local argot for the Nice underworld. Greene tells a harrowing tale of purported assaults on Guy's wife and her father, the kidnaping of the couple's child by Guy, and threats, including a heavy hint by Guy that Greene might be in an auto accident if he kept on poking into his affairs.

Greene became increasingly frustrated when Nice police showed little interest in following up the information that he gave authorities. Insisted former Police Superintendent François Guillon: "Big crime in Nice is practically nonexistent." Said Nice Mayor Jacques Médecin, who had encouraged the expansion of gambling in his city: "Greene is spitting in the soup to make publicity for his book."

The author began to carry a canister of tear gas with him when he was on the Côte d'Azur but proceeded with plans to publish the book until Guy went to court in March, charging that it was libelous. Guy won an injunction banning its publication "under any form."

In addition to upholding the injunction, the Aix-en-Provence court ordered Greene to pay Guy $650 in lawyers' fees and trial expenses, as well as $15 for every copy that might be sold illegally.

Greene was outraged by the decision. "In my entire career as a writer," he said, "it is only the second book that's ever been banned. The first was The Comedians, and that was Papa Doc who seized it" (François Duvalier, Haiti's tyrannical dictator who died in 1971). The verdict against J'Accuse is not subject to further appeal.