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Facebook Threats Postpone Controversial French Immigration Minister's Wedding

by Amar Toor on September 7, 2010 at 05:10 PM

eric bessonFrench workers, in an entirely unorthodox turn of events, have gone on strike today to protest President Nicolas Sarkozy's decision to raise the national retirement age by a couple of years. If recent history is any indication, today's strike will make headlines around the country, but it certainly won't do the kind of damage that Facebook recently did to French Immigration Minister Eric Besson's personal life.

As the Independent reports, the controversial 52-year-old Besson was forced to postpone his own wedding, due to threats he had received from the Facebook community. After a French paper revealed the place and time of Besson's marriage to a 24-year-old bombshell of an art student, a Facebook group vowing to "create havoc" at the ceremony was quickly formed. Besson, of course, was absolutely shocked that the paper would publish such personal information. "There should be a Chinese wall between public matters and private matters and this wall is being breached," Besson emphatically, if not eloquently, declared during a recent appearance on national television. "I do not want my children, my new wife or my ex-wife to be collateral damage for my political choices."

Besson, however, hasn't exactly done a lot to ingratiate himself to the French community in recent weeks. On Saturday, activists took to the streets to protest Sarkozy's recent twin decisions to expel thousands of Roma gypsies from the country, and to strip French nationality from any immigrant who attacks a police officer. Once known as a reformer, Besson has vociferously supported and justified Sarkozy's hardline actions, leading many to brand him as a racist. Others have noted the irony that such an anti-immigrant politician would choose to marry a Tunisia-born art student, who also happens to be the granddaughter of former Tunisian first lady Wassila Bourguiba.

Perhaps most reputation-wrecking of all, though, is a memoir published by his ex-wife, Sylvie Brunel, who had three children with Besson during 25 years of marriage. Shortly after the minister decided to leave his family for Tunisian tajine, Brunel published her tell-all book, in which she discussed her husband's rampant infidelity and affectionately called him a "serial cheat with inter-changeable mistresses" -- or, as most French people would call him, "un homme francais."

Tags: EricBesson, facebook, FacebookGroups, france, gypsy, immigration, NicolasSarkozy, politics, Roma, sarkozy, top, web, wedding

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