Forgive and forget, especially forget

BBC news is currently running the tear-jerking story of Helene Castel, who has finally been arrested for robbing a bank 24 years ago. She had fled to Mexico, and made a new life there as a psychotherapist, but was arrested four days before her case would have expired under the relevant statute of limitations. Not surprisingly, she comes equipped with a ready fund of psychobabble: she needs to live through this, to be "reborn in France to be whole". Well, I suppose it sounds better in French.

If you read the BBC report, you will realize that Mme Castel doesn't sound like your ordinary bank robber, but the report is puzzlingly silent as to what might have driven an apparently educated person to commit a major crime. It makes a single oblique reference to a charge of "armed robbery in an organised group". Who might that group be? The Hole-in-the-Wall gang, the Wild Bunch? Mais non, it's Action Directe, one of the many radical lefty criminal gangs which sprang up in the more affluent parts of Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Now try to imagine that same BBC report if Mme Castel had been convicted of jaywalking, and was found to have been a member of the National Front 20 years ago. French leftwing newspaper Liberation protests that Mme Castel has been denied her "right to forget". The BBC, at least, is prepared to respect that right.