France will make a tentative step towards protecting corporate whistleblowers today without opening the floodgates to the sort of vindictive behaviour that has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths over the past 200 years.

The Government will be advised by an official report to implement a watered down version of America’s Sarbanes-Oxley law, which provides protection for employees denouncing corporate abuse and fraud. Multinational groups with their headquarters in France say the measure is necessary to bring the country into line with practice elsewhere.

But in a nation with a long and bloody history of anonymous denunciation, starting with the infamous tricoteuses (knitters) during the Revolution, the reform will prove highly controversial.

“Cultural reticence to whistleblowing remains strong in France,” said the financial daily Les Echos.

The report, ordered by Gérard Larcher, the Minister for Work, says staff should be invited to denounce acts “contrary to law . . . or to ethical rules which seriously harm the operation of the company”.

However, there should be no obligation to reveal abuse, according to the study drawn up by Professor Paul-Henri Anto-mattei, head of the law faculty at Montpellier University in southern France, and Philippe Vivien, head of human resources at Areva, the nuclear power plant constructor.

Nor should anonymous tip-offs be encouraged, say the authors, who call on French businesses to set up confidential channels of communication. The report calls for new legislation to cover whistleblowers “acting in good faith”.

The crows cast a dark shadow over society

The extreme caution with which France is addressing the issue of internal corporate denunciation can be explained by a sinister history.

Even the French term for whistleblower — un corbeau (a crow) — resonates in ominous tones, evoking anonymous letters to settle long-standing feuds. During the French Revolution, for instance, thousands of Parisians were sent to the guillotine on a tip-off from les tricoteuses, the women who knitted, plotted and called for blood. It mattered little whether they were counter-revolu-tionaries or not: the heads fell anyway.

A similar approach was evident during the Vichy regime, which collaborated with Hitler’s Germany during the Second World War, when la délation became a national sport.

The Vichy police received thousands of letters denouncing members of the French Resistance. The information was frequently wrong and the victims had nothing to do with the Resistance movement. Les corbeaux struck instead over neighbourhood disputes or adulterous affairs: what better way to take revenge on the wife’s lover or the hated neigh-bour than to denounce him as a enemy of the State? The outcome was often the firing squad.

Although the consequences are not so dramatic today, anonymous letters remain in use. Tax inspectors, for instance, say whistleblowers are at the root of many investigations into fiscal fraud — often after divorces, with aggrieved spouses taking the opportunity to settle a score.

In rural France, villages are regularly shaken by anonymous letter writers revealing family secrets to the community. In Bages, southern France, for example, un corbeau has operated over the past decade, denouncing “liaisons” and “abuse” and sullying the reputations of many inhabitants.

Some French firms fear that such behaviour could become part of business culture if crows are given official protection under a Gallic equivalent of Sarbanes-Oxley.

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