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Rachida Dati, French Minister of
Justice
 The
rise of Rachida Dati to one of the highest posts in the French
government—that of minister of justice—has elements of a fairy tale.
A child of Muslim immigrants who came to France from North Africa,
Dati had no material advantages while growing up, but she had
intelligence, ambition, determination, perseverance, and good looks,
and she succeeded in becoming well educated. Thanks to improbable
opportunities that she created for herself, she fared well in the
corporate world before earning a degree in law, entering government
service, and, in 2002, joining Nicolas Sarkozy, then French minister
of the interior, as an adviser. In early 2007 Sarkozy, a frontrunner
for the presidency, picked her to be his spokesperson. A few months
later, after Sarkozy won that office, he appointed her to head the
Ministry of Justice. To some she was a symbol of change—the first
person of North African ancestry and the first female Muslim to
become a member of the French cabinet; to others, she was a puppet
whom Sarkozy could use to justify the introduction of laws some
perceived as harsh, particularly with regard to immigrants. Her
management style, widely described as abrasive, angered many Justice
Ministry employees and led several to quit in protest. The pregnancy
of the unmarried Dati provoked wide speculation as to the identity
of the father (which she has not revealed), and her behavior became
a hot topic in France when she returned to work less than a week
after her daughter's birth, in early January 2009. Shortly afterward
President Sarkozy, who had reportedly decided that she was more of a
hindrance to him than a help, forced her to resign from her post,
effective in June of this year. According to John Lichfield, writing
for the London Independent (February 13, 2009), Dati “let it
be known” that she has set her sights on winning the mayoralty of
Paris in 2014.
Rachida Dati was born on November 27, 1965 in Saint-Rémy, France,
to poor Muslim parents of North African origin. She was the second
of 12 children (some sources say 11). Her father, Mbarak Dati, was a
Moroccan bricklayer, one of the many Muslim migrant workers who
settled in Europe after World War II. Her mother, Fatim-Zohra Dati,
an Algerian, was illiterate. According to Jason Burke in the London
Observer (September 7, 2008), Dati was raised on the outskirts of
Chalon-sur-Saône, in central France, where the family lived in a
government housing project. Her father's first construction job in
France was at a Catholic convent school. At his request, the
school's administrators permitted Rachida and her older sister,
Malika, to attend classes there. “It was here that Dati forged her
fierce will to succeed,” Angelique Chrisafis wrote for the London
Guardian (November 20, 2008). “Anything less than top of the class
was seen as a failure.” In addition, Chrisafis wrote, Dati would
“help adults in her council block write letters and fill out forms,
order children to stop playing and do homework: she would give
presentations about Islam to her Catholic class.” When Dati was in
her early teens, her mother died. (Readily available sources do not
reveal the cause of her mother's death.) By the age of 14, she was
not only helping to care for her many siblings while going to school
but was also earning money at part-time jobs: selling Avon cosmetics
door-to-door, answering phones as a nighttime hospital receptionist,
and working at a supermarket. She left the Catholic school at 16;
she later earned a master's degree in economics after studying at
the University of Burgundy, in Dijon, France, and then at the
University of Paris.
In 1987, at the age of 21, Dati wrote to the Embassy of Algeria in
Paris asking for an invitation to its Independence Day celebration
and succeeded in getting one. At the event she secured an invitation
to lunch from France's then–justice minister, Albin Chalandon.
“Suddenly, this nimble little woman came walking straight toward me
and told me about the difficulties in her life, that she was
physically exhausted, and that she needed my help,” Chalandon
recalled 20 years later, speaking to Anita Elash for the Toronto
Globe and Mail (June 16, 2007). “This was someone with a lot of
nerve, very direct, very intelligent, and who knew what she wanted.
And when I saw all that, I decided it would be interesting to help
someone of North African origin get out of the suburbs.” Soon
afterward Dati got a job as an accountant with the oil company
ELF-Aquitaine, where Chalandon had been a director. One day several
years later, at an awards ceremony, she told the prominent
businessman Jean-Luc Lagardère that she had dreams of working for
him. Lagardère hired her as an auditor at Matra (later renamed the
Lagardère Group), the conglomerate that he headed. Matra financed
Dati's next academic degree, an MBA from the prestigious HEC School
of Management, in Paris (the acronym stands for Hautes Etudes
Commerciales, or Higher Studies in Commerce), which she earned in
around 1993. (Dati's entry in Who's Who does not mention that
school or degree. Whether or not she received it provoked a
short-lived controversy in 2007, after a few journalists examined
her application to law school.) From 1993 to 1994 Dati worked at the
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, in London, in its
archiving and records-management department. After that she worked
for a year at Suez S.A., a multinational French corporation, as
secretary general of its bureau of urban development. From 1995 to
1997 she served as the technical adviser at the legal-management
division of the Ministry of Education.
Taking the advice of Simone Veil, a former French minister of health
and a Holocaust survivor, Dati decided to win the credentials
necessary to become a magistrate—in France, either a prosecutor or a
judge. From 1997 to 1999 she attended the prestigious National
College of Magistrates, where she received a law degree. After
graduation she became a magistrate judge in Bobigny, a city near
Paris.
After three years of service in the judicial system, Dati landed a
job with Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then the minister of the interior,
responsible for maintaining the internal security of France. (The
Ministry of the Interior has virtually nothing in common with the
American Department of the Interior.) How Dati, a woman with no
political experience, became one of Sarkozy's assistants has—like
much of her life story—taken on an aura of legend. Dati wrote
Sarkozy a series of letters (most accounts say five) asking for a
job. In one letter she congratulated him on his tough (albeit
unpopular) stance on young criminals. In 2002 Sarkozy hired her as a
policy adviser. “There's something in me that echoes with him, a
mirror effect,” Chrisafis quoted her as saying. “Like me, he can't
bear to be humiliated.” Chrisafis continued: “Both feel themselves
to be outsiders, her because of her background, him because of the
foreign-sounding Hungarian surname he says haunted him, and the fact
that he didn't study in Paris's elite graduate schools. He also
feels deeply self-conscious about his absent father following his
parents' divorce when he was a child, which set him apart from his
bourgeois peers in western Paris.” Dati devoted much of her time to
policies and activities dealing with juvenile delinquents.
In 2006 Dati officially joined Union for a Popular Movement (UPM), a
relatively conservative political party of which Sarkozy was also a
member. In January 2007 Sarkozy was chosen as the official UPM
candidate for president of France. On the day his candidacy was
announced, Sarkozy—thanks in part to a strong suggestion from his
then-wife, Cecilia—appointed Dati as his spokesperson for the
presidential campaign. In May Sarkozy won 53 percent of the vote to
defeat his main opponent, the Socialist Party candidate, Ségolène
Royal. When Sarkozy took office, 10 days after the election, he
appointed Dati minister of justice.
Sarkozy's selection of Dati to head the Ministry of Justice was seen
by some as a hopeful sign of better governmental relations with
Muslims and a symbol of France's increasing tolerance of Muslims—and
by others as a calculated and overtly political move. To some, it
was all of those things. On the positive side, Dati was the first
person of North African origin and the first Muslim woman to hold a
major government position in France. (Women in France hold
significantly fewer political positions of power than women in most
other European countries and many developing countries.) The main
cause of cynical interpretations of Dati's appointment stemmed from
remarks Sarkozy made in 2005, when he used such terms as “scum” and
“thugs” to refer to the immigrants and children of immigrants (many
of whom were Muslims or of North African origin) who rioted in
violent protests against their marginalization, unemployment,
poverty, and what they viewed as unfair treatment by the police. The
appointment of Dati, said Sarkozy's critics, was a way of mollifying
Muslims, North Africans, and others who opposed his tough stance on
crime. But it also heartened conservatives, since Dati's stance on
crime is also tough. She has supported minimum sentences for young
offenders, many of them immigrants and some as young as 12, and she
has pressed for a way to keep dangerous criminals locked up even
after they have served their terms.
Dati soon took on the task of reforming the French court system.
“Unpopular as it may be, the reform makes sense,” according a writer
for the Economist (December 8, 2007). “The geography of the
French court system has not changed in nearly half a century,
despite huge population shifts. In largely rural areas, there is a
tribunal de grande instance (county court) for fewer than 150,000
people; in big cities, one such court serves over 550,000. In
Lorraine in eastern France, ten magistrates' courts employ a
full-time judge without the workload to justify it, and two have
none at all. By contrast, some city courts have vast backlogs.”
Acknowledging those changes in the “judiciary map,” Dati drew up
plans to close 178 of the 473 magistrates' courts and 23 county
courts and to reallocate staff. The many lawyers, judges, and others
who opposed her actions pointed out that France has 20 million more
people than it did 40 years ago.
In September 2008 the public learned that Dati, at age 42, was
pregnant. She announced that she would keep the identity of the
father of her child secret. “I have a complicated private life and
I'm keeping it off limits to the press,” she declared, as quoted by
Steven Erlanger in the New York Times (September 4, 2008).
Her unmarried state received scant coverage in the mainstream press
in France, where currently more than 50 percent of all births are
out of wedlock. But in French tabloids and on French blogs and other
Web sites, articles and discussions, most based on gossip, appeared
for days on end. Fascination with Dati's pregnancy was also evident
in news reports and commentary printed and posted outside France.
“We are all enjoying the guessing game, but all I know is that I am
extremely pleased for her,” Valérie Hoffenburg, a Paris city
councilor and one of Dati's close friends, told William Langley for
the London Sunday Telegraph (September 7, 2008). “She has
wanted a child for a long time, and has had many disappointments and
sometimes been brought very low, and I think it is courageous of her
to become pregnant knowing that there will be all this publicity and
curiosity about who the father is.” Hoffenburg then added that Dati,
who is a secular Muslim, “has been held up as a role model for
Muslim girls, and now we have Muslims denouncing her. Most people in
France aren't shocked by an unmarried minister getting pregnant. The
only real protests have come from her own community, and that must
be hard for her.”
On January 2, 2009 the 43-year-old Dati gave birth to a girl, Zohra.
Five days after the delivery, by caesarian section, Dati—looking
slim and attractive, according to many press reports—returned to
work. While some of her compatriots applauded her commitment and
dedication to her job, country, and president, her decision to
resume her professional life so soon after the birth led to an
outcry from Frenchmen and -women ranging from women's-rights
activists and pediatric experts to politicians (most of them male).
Some accused her of setting a bad example for French women, by not
spending sufficient time with her newborn and failing to take
advantage of her allowed time off. (Actually, French law stipulates
that while companies must grant women four months of paid maternity
leave, the government is not bound to give cabinet ministers or
elected officials paid or unpaid leave after births.) Others noted
that on the day that Dati came back to work, President Sarkozy held
a press conference to announce important judicial reforms and
perhaps had made Dati feel compelled to be at his side at that
moment. A writer for Agence France Presse (January 13, 2009,
on-line) quoted Ségolène Royal, who had four children with her
partner (whom she never married) and was pregnant during her service
as France's environment minister in the early 1990s, as saying,
“Being back on the job only five days after a caesarian is too soon,
there's no doubt about that. But this exceptional duty requires
exceptional behaviour.” Others expressed the view that Dati's action
was a somewhat desperate act to keep her job. Some observers
suspected that Sarkozy already had plans to remove her from his
cabinet. In late January Charles Bremner, writing for the Irish
Independent (January 24, 2009, on-line), and many other sources
reported that Sarkozy had forced Dati to announce that she would run
for a seat in the European Parliament that June and would leave her
ministry job at that time. “Despite denials on all sides,” John
Lichfield wrote, “this amounted to a slow-motion dismissal” of Dati.
While few hard facts were discernible amid the abundance of rumors
and speculation that surrounded Dati's fall from favor, most
political insiders and analysts attributed the change in Dati's
fortunes partly to her “imperious,” “high-handed,” “abrasive,” and
“overly aggressive” manner with staff members, as it was variously
described, and her failure to discuss with them Sarkozy's changes to
the judicial system, which as justice minister she was obliged to
introduce. Nearly 50 Justice Ministry employees quit, according to
some reports. Photo essays about Dati in fashion magazines along
with her penchant for wearing very expensive clothing and jewelry in
a time of recession also drew sharp criticism. “The trial of a
brother for heroin trafficking was an excuse for more attacks,”
Jason Burke wrote. “The slightest gaffe is the pretext for
editorials questioning her competence.” Some political commentators
believed that animosity between Dati and Sarkozy's second wife, the
model and singer Carla Bruni, also contributed to Sarkozy's
dissatisfaction with her.
Most observers expect Dati to win a seat in the European Parliament.
According to some sources, Sarkozy has promised her that, once she
begins her service there, he will not stand in the way of her
political ambitions. In addition to minister of justice, Dati is the
mayor of the seventh arrondissement (district) in Paris, a mostly
ceremonial position that she won in March 2008. In February 2009 she
announced that she plans to run for mayor of Paris in 2014, when the
second term of the current mayor will expire.
Citation:
Original source: Current Biography
Original publication date: 2009
Original publication type: Print
Publisher of original publication: The H. W. Wilson Company
Database publisher: The H. W. Wilson Company
Database: Biography Reference Bank
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