One day in 1985, the principal of the Lycee Henri IV, the elite Paris state school that is attended by the top performers of the French education system, received a strange call.

He was asked to go to a secret meeting at the Elysee presidential palace the following Monday. There, he was told to provide a place in his school for Mazarine Pingeot, the illegitimate daughter of President Francois Mitterrand, and whose paternity must never be made public. Oh, and while he was about it, would he please enrol Mazarine's pal, Virginie, as well?

Shocked? Well, don't be, because the French aren't.

Manipulation of the education system to help a presidential bastard doesn't even show up on the average citizen's radar screen of outrage and indignation.

The reason is that, for decades, French politics have been drenched in far deeper scandals. They range from the overthrow of Third-World regimes, political assassination and the Rainbow Warrior affair to huge fraud, corruption of the judicial system and routine gagging of the press.

"For the past 50 years, France has had one scandal after another," says French journalist and author Jean Guisnel. "It's a monarchical republic in which no one controls the President."

Guisnel is co-editor of a book to be published next week, Histoire Secrete de la Ve Republique - a dictionary of the many dirty tricks that have been practised since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958 in what many view as a de-facto coup by de Gaulle.

His position legitimised by a referendum and election, and strengthened by a constitution that set down a virtual rubber-stamp parliament, de Gaulle set up a system where he held all the main levers of power.

France's foreign intelligence agency, its domestic security agencies, armed forces and its state firms, especially those in oil, armaments and nuclear energy, all became harnessed to the presidential whim.

When the system was coherent, swift to respond and skilfully used, it could help free hostages, advance French economic interests and establish a different voice in the polarised Cold War world.

But many times, it was abused or fooled, leaving no one accountable for the mess other than the taxpayer.

Some of the worst offences have been in Africa, supporting whichever despots suited France's interest, says Guisnel. The skulduggery includes the assassination of Moroccan dissident Ben Barka in 1965 and the supply of arms via Israel to fuel the attempted secession from Nigeria by Biafra in 1968-69, a war that left two million dead. Military intervention has overthrown or backed governments in Chad, Congo, Zaire, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, the Comoros and elsewhere.

In one episode, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, President from 1974 to 1981, helped install Jean-Bedel Bokassa, leader of the Central African Republic, as emperor of the dirt-poor, uranium-rich country.