Nobody much likes the paparazzi, perhaps for understandable reasons. They make their living out of intrusion into people’s private lives and, in some cases – as when they flashed away at the terrible scene in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel early last Sunday morning – out of tragedy.
So when the world was stunned this week by news of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the paparazzi provided convenient scapegoats. The princess was said to have died “fleeing” their deadly cameras. The French police ostentatiously arrested seven of their number as well as their motor vehicles – including a humble scooter.
In Cape Town the Earl of Spencer denounced them and their employers in the most extreme terms, declaring that every editor who had used their pictures in the past had “blood on their hands”.
But from an early stage the blame for the accident looked ill-directed. The tangled wreckage which had been a Mercedes Benz 600 was stark testimony to the speed at which it had been travelling.
The statement by a witness that she had heard a squeal of brakes lasting as long as seven seconds before the explosion of the impact suggested the speed was even greater than the wreckage indicated.
The disclosure by the French authorities that the chauffeur was drunk confirmed the responsibility.
It might be protested that, even so, the paparazzi precipitated the tragedy; if they had not been there the chauffeur would not have driven so fast, even if he was drunk.
But if one is to trace responsibility back to the roots of tragedy, why not start even further back? With the royal family, for example.
The British royal family is a symbol. Although the sacrosanct nature of the family as such is a relatively modern development, they have come to epitomise the monarchy, which in turn represents sovereignty in Britain. And the power of that symbol has been carefully cultivated over the centuries.
The monarch ruled in the early days by divine right. Their executive powers were subsequently removed, but if anything the mystique surrounding them was reinforced, as if to compensate for their powerlessness and ensure their survival as a constitutional device.
That mystique reached an apogee with the arrival of the camera and the age of television. Their carefully rehearsed and scripted performances – the queen’s speech, the new year’s address to the nation, the pomp and ceremony of the birthday parades, coronations and royal weddings – returned them to near-godly status, Buckingham Palace a Mount Olympus, the people outside its railings their worshippers.
But, as legends of Zeus and his motley crew testify, even the gods are not totally in control of their lives.
The royal family pays a price, because the cultivation of their image has created an appetite among their subjects to know more about their lives. It is not a great price to pay, in the context of their privileged existence. The queen is probably the richest person in Britain, with a fortune rivalling that of the man who has personally revolutionised the way the world works, Bill Gates.
Princess Di herself was a millionaire many times over. Their wealth and that of those with whom they play – a Dodi al-Fayed, entertaining Di on a “yacht” which looked more like a floating block of flats than the graceful sailing barques usually identified with the term – give them, for the most part, cloaks of invisibility woven from the cloth of money.
But occasionally, just occasionally, they are to be glimpsed as they fly down from Mount Olympus to play in the streets of Paris. Where the cameras wait for them.
And why shouldn’t they wait for them? They live by the cameras, as surely as do the actors and actresses who so assiduously cultivate the media in search of their own places among the stars. They also feed the dreams of the people entranced by stories as powerful as a Greek legend.
And was there ever a legend as powerful as that of the nursery school teacher who, through love, won a place at the table of the gods only to be cast out by them and forced into a search for meaning in life as poignant as Orpheus’s journey through the underworld: the betrayal of marriage, the bulimia, the ill-conceived passions, the startled discovery of a shared humanity with the victims of society, the excitement of a new love, the fast car hurtling along the Seine …
There is something compulsive about a road accident. We all condemn the rubber-neckers who cause traffic jams on the highways, slowing down for a glimpse of the wreckage. And yet we all make that guilty glance, not because we are ghouls, but because those broken bodies in the rain are harbingers of our own mortality.
And if we look backwards, through the lens of the paparazzi gathered around that splintered Mercedes on Sunday morning, we see nobody but ourselves behind the view- finders, mourning our own lives in the death of the Princess of Hearts.