For the first time since the second World War, three senior French officials went on trial yesterday for decisions they took in office.
The former prime minister, Mr Laurent Fabius, who is now the speaker of the National Assembly, is in the dock for manslaughter. So is the socialist member of parliament, mayor of Rennes and former junior minister for health, Mr Edmond Herve, and Mrs Georgina Dufoix, the 1980s darling of the Socialist party who simultaneously held three government portfolios. She has since withdrawn from politics and become a fundamentalist Christian.
Fourteen years after the Fabius government lethally mismanaged the emerging AIDS epidemic, the accused at last faced some of their victims. Sylvie Rouy's doctors steered her wheelchair to within a few feet of Mr Fabius.
Mrs Rouy contracted AIDS and hepatitis C from a blood transfusion for anaemia after the birth of her first son in August 1985. The Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR) received 345 complaints from victims, but agreed to consider only seven cases, including Mrs Rouy's.
In those seven cases, five of the victims have already died.
And neither Mrs Rouy nor AIDS-stricken 40-year-old Yves Aupic, who hobbled into the courtroom on crutches, appears long for this world. The French government has granted compensation to 4,381 haemophiliacs and transfusion recipients infected with HIV in the 1980s. The real number is thought to be much higher.
To calm public anger over the biggest medical scandal in French history, parliament in 1993 passed a law creating the CJR to try the case. French politicians wanted to maintain control over the potentially explosive trial, so they decided that 12 of the 14 judges would be members of the National Assembly and Senate.
"They're being judged by their classmates," Agnes Cochin said.
Her infant son, Charles-Edouard, contracted AIDS from a transfusion for jaundice shortly after he was born in May 1985. He died six years later.
"I want to know why these people, with 4,400 dead on their conscience, continue to hold public office," Ms Cochin asked the presiding judge. Turning to the three accused, she added: "Aren't you ashamed?"
French public opinion and much of the media already regard the trial as a whitewash. The prosecutor has said twice that he believes all three defendants should be cleared. In a departure from normal French law, none of the victims was allowed to sue as a civil plaintiff. Instead, only the two AIDS patients, Mrs Rouy and Mr Aupic, and immediate relatives of the five dead people whose cases are being examined, were allowed to take the stand briefly as "witnesses", not plaintiffs.
Mrs Rouy was too weak to testify yesterday. The testimony of the other victims was dispatched in less than one hour of a three-week trial. While rows of lawyers sat behind the accused politicians, the victims were not even allowed to have counsel present.
Mr Aupic, a former mechanic who received a tainted transfusion after a mountain-climbing accident in August 1985, trembled and clutched the lectern for support as he began to read a statement denouncing the trial as a masquerade.
The presiding judge interrupted him. It was against court rules for witnesses to read statements, he said. In view of Mr Aupic's weak physical condition, the prosecutor was willing to make an exception if Mr Fabius, Mrs Dufoix and Mr Herve agreed.
It felt as if the man dying of AIDS, not the former ministers, was the one standing trial. From their seats on the raised platform, the black-robed, white-collared judges glared down at Mr Aupic.
If found guilty of manslaughter and "involuntary attack on physical integrity", the defendants risk a maximum of three years in prison and a 300,000-franc fine.
The 235-page charge sheet says they did not bother to enforce a June 1983 Ministry of Health directive that blood donors be screened to exclude high-risk drug addicts, prisoners and homosexuals.
Although an AIDS test manufactured by the US firm Abbott was available from February 1985, they did not establish mandatory testing of blood stocks until August 1st, 1985. The main reason for the delay was the desire to promote a French-made test invented by the Pasteur Institute.
Finally, the distribution of blood stocks that were known to be tainted continued until October 1985.
Compounding these errors, until 1993 no attempt was made to notify those who had been unwittingly infected with the virus. In the meantime, many infected their partners and gave birth to sero-positive children. Whole families died unnecessarily.
The three accused and their troop of lawyers claim the dangers of AIDS were not understood in 1985. "What was established truth yesterday became an error, then worse, a crime," Mr Herve told the court. "When I speak of my compassion for the victims I am called a hypocrite, and when I am silent I am accused of cynicism."
