Famous Face Incites Fiscal Debate

PARIS —  In American terms, it’s as if Uncle Sam had fled to Castro’s Cuba to escape the IRS.

Enter any of the 36,000 town or city halls in France and you’ll find a bust of Marianne, the embodiment of France and its republican virtues. In the past, screen beauties such as Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve served as the models. Last October, a 21-year-old cover girl and actress from Corsica, Laetitia Casta, was chosen to personify the next generation of Mariannes to be cast in bronze.

Imagine the scandal, then, when a newspaper on the other side of the Channel reported last week that Casta had chosen to live not in republican France but in London, the very seat of the British monarchy, to avoid high French taxes.

“This symbolizes magnificently the failure of socialism, which has managed to chase all talents out of the country,” said Patrick Devedjian, a spokesman for the neo-Gaullist Rally for the Republic party.

Fellow party member Philippe Seguin, contender for the Paris mayor’s seat, claimed that the Socialist-led national government’s tax policy has sparked a “third great period of French emigration,” following the exodus of the Huguenots under Louis XIV and the flight of aristocrats during the French Revolution.

For many French, what really stung was Casta’s supposed choice of England, their hereditary foe. Had that choice been tax-friendly but French-speaking Monaco, there would have been much less comment. Moreover, many French believe that if they pay a good deal in taxes, they get something back: excellent public transportation, a public health-care system and the like.

“Laetitia Casta will soon find out very fast that property prices are much higher in London and that you have to pay twice as much in rent,” left-wing Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement commented. “If she gets sick--and I hope she won’t--the health care in a British hospital will be far short of French hospitals.”

The Times, the London daily responsible for the original report, smugly dragged up a pro-Nazi figure from France’s past as it theorized that the French were struggling to cope with “a national betrayal more shaming than Petain, more humiliating than Michelin’s top award going to an English chef.”

After keeping quiet for a few days, Casta, who was in Los Angeles this week to do publicity photos for a new brand of clothing, issued a statement denying that she had any intention of buying a home in London or moving there for fiscal reasons. Her London apartment is not her primary residence, she later said, and she gave another reason for her occasional visits: Her boyfriend lives there.

Little matter. Nationwide debate on taxation had been jump-started in France, precisely at a juncture when Finance Minister Laurent Fabius, appointed March 27, was vowing to bring some relief.

How high are French taxes? It may be some consolation for Americans now wrestling with their 1040s to know that the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says that, on average, the marginal tax rate on the income of a single person without children, such as Casta, is 34.9% in the U.S. but 52.9% in France. In Britain, it says, the average marginal rate is 39.9%.

“Reductions in taxes, and not only on income, must expand in the future, and I’m going to work for them,” Fabius vowed last week.

Many French business leaders believe that if their country is to be competitive in a fast-integrating Europe and the world, the government will have to take a thinner slice of the national wealth.

With “l’affaire Casta,” discussion of French tax policy has gone from arid talking-heads TV shows to news bulletins and the gossip press. And ordinary people and politicians alike are taking sides.

In Nice, Mayor Jacques Peyrat has refused to install one of the new busts of Marianne, which have just begun to be delivered to city halls at a cost of $5,700 apiece.

Equally piqued at Casta, artist Serge Chachkine has started sculpting an alternative Marianne, using a 62-year-old retired factory worker as model.

But Le Parisien, a French tabloid, found public opinion running 3 to 2 in Casta’s favor in a rough street poll it conducted. “In France, we’re suffocated by taxes,” career military man Ange Jouglar, 34, told the paper.

The model also received very public support from the 65-year-old Bardot, who declared that Casta would be “absolutely right” if she left France for London. Bardot added that, if she had the courage, she “would go and join her.”