France: Honk! Biff! Bam!

One surprising result of French affluence has been a marked increase in French pugnacity. Near the Madeleine in Paris, two motorists quarreled over a parking space, and in the fight that followed one dropped dead of a heart attack. An Algerian became so enraged when his car was sideswiped that he shot the other driver in the head with a pistol. Adman Joël de Cizancourt, 34, was sitting in his parked sports car when a man carrying a suitcase passed close by him. Shouting that the suitcase had scratched his beautiful car, De Cizancourt leaped out and angrily slugged the man. He turned out to be Alain Gilou, 51, an editor of the prestigious magazine Réaltiés, and he died in a nearby hospital without ever recovering consciousness.

The rapid decline in the famed politesse française has been speeded by too many cars competing with each other on an inadequate road system. Parking is so nightmarish that it has become a Parisian cliché to say "Shall we walk, or do we have time to take the car?" As fisticuffs and frustrations pile up, the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné observed: "What's needed is not a driver's license but a hunting license." The official police publication Liaisons, groping for the psychological roots of the problem, observed that in motorists there is a "connection between a certain complex of pride and power," and that "any infringement of the rights drivers hold sacred becomes an infringement of their power and pride."

The most famed case in France reached the courts fortnight ago. Last March, Judge André Heilbronner, a member of the Conseil d'Etat, which is roughly equivalent to the U.S. Supreme Court, was dragged from his Citroën by Electrician Jean Le Bihan and beaten unmercifully. Le Bihan's wife joined in with the high heel of one of her shoes. When arrested, Le Bihan claimed that the judge's car had cut him off. In an effort to impress Frenchmen with the need to end such violence, Le Bihan was given ten months in jail. To underline its concern, the Ministry of Justice ordered that all motorists engaged in automotive scuffles be charged and tried within three days of the event. Finally, France-Soir weighed in on the side of amity by passing out windshield stickers reading "Don't get mad."