Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Can a culture minister who has written an autobiographical book about paying for sex in the male bordellos of Bangkok and Jakarta stay in his job?

To put the question in context, this is the same French minister, Frederic Mitterrand, who last month jumped to the defense of the Polish-French filmmaker Roman Polanski, saying the charges against him -- namely having sex with a 13-year-old girl -- were “ancient history that make no sense.”

In Paris, the answer, so far, is yes, Mitterrand should stay. So says his boss, French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Leading lights of the capital’s political and cultural elite have gone further, attacking Mitterrand’s critics as populist moralizers who are skirting dangerously close to homophobia.

There is a big problem with that argument. This isn’t about sexual preferences or even prostitution, which is legal in France. It is about sex tourism, a disturbing practice whereby rich Westerners go to poor countries to pay for sex with young people, often children. If your brother-in-law were caught doing it, you would be appalled. The same should go for a top government official.

Let’s assume Mitterrand is honest when he says he never had sex with underage males. Some people may have drawn that conclusion from his confessional book, “The Bad Life, ” published in 2005, where he refers to the “boys” and “kids” in Thailand and Indonesia. He says he meant young men.

“As for pedophilia, it is completely foreign to me,” he said in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur magazine. “I condemn it totally.”

Money and Sex

That may be, but that still leaves the morally dubious portrait of a man traveling around the world to take advantage of young men who sell themselves cheap. In his book, a literary confession praised for its honesty and the quality of its writing, Mitterrand, a well-known television personality, explained his attraction to Bangkok’s sex scene.

“The money, the sex: These go to the heart of my being because I know I will not be refused,” he wrote.

The book had been out long before Sarkozy tapped Mitterrand to be culture minister in June. Its revelations, however, were overlooked in the general excitement of a Mitterrand -- a nephew of Francois Mitterrand, France’s last Socialist president -- becoming a member of Sarkozy’s center-right government, a prize catch for the president’s ambition to pull members of the opposition into his Cabinet.

Forgiving French

The French have always been more forgiving than Americans about the private lives of their politicians. Segolene Royal, the Socialist party candidate who ran against Sarkozy in 2007 was the unmarried mother of four children. President Mitterrand had a mistress and a daughter whose existence was an open secret among the Paris elite.

There is another France beyond the cafés of Saint Germain, home to a conservative, mainly Catholic, electorate that is increasingly fed up with what they see as the Paris crowd’s sense of its own impunity. Their reaction to the Mitterrand story is not one of moral indulgence, but outrage.

“The provinces are shocked,” intoned Christine Boutin, a former minister in Sarkozy’s Cabinet who trumpets family values.

This is where “l’affaire Mitterrand” may come back to haunt Sarkozy, who is halfway through a five-year term. When he was elected, he promised to break up the Paris-based elite, with its tightly woven networks, interlocking directorates and a tendency to protect its own at all costs.

Sarkozy Scandal

Right now, he doesn’t seem to be keeping that promise. Last week, the Mitterrand story was pushed off the front pages by another scandal, this one involving Sarkozy’s 23-year-old son, Jean, who is vying for the presidency of a major government development agency. According to recent polls, the appearance of nepotism is playing worse among the French public than support for a sexually adventuresome culture minister.

What galls Sarkozy’s supporters most is that the morals issue has been seized by the far-right National Front, whose vice-president, Marine Le Pen, was the first to read out a passage from Mitterrand’s book during a talk show on Oct. 6.

Since then, le Pen has continued to hammer away at the moral blindness of the Paris establishment.

“The system has looked for a way to quiet the debate, but in the heart and minds of the French people, the indignation is still strong,” she said recently.

Sarkozy would do well to listen to that indignation and let Mitterrand go.

(Celestine Bohlen is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

Click on “Send Comment” in the sidebar display to send a letter to the editor.

To contact the writer of this column: Celestine Bohlen in Paris at cbohlen1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 19, 2009 19:00 EDT