Fleeing Taxes and \'Insult,\' Gerard Depardieu Says Au Revoir, La France

PARIS - The actor Gérard Depardieu, who was best known until recently as a pillar of French cinema with an occasionally embarrassing tendency to over-imbibe, this week made an ignominious name for himself as a tax evader, drawing the ire of the government, the news media, and a good number of his fellow French citizens.

Fellow French citizens for now, at least.

Mr. Depardieu has taken up residence in the Belgian town of Néchin, just over the French border but somewhat farther from France with regards to fiscal policy: the maximum marginal income tax rate is not 75 percent in Belgium, as it now is in France, and there is no wealth tax.

France's prime minister, the Socialist Jean-Marc Ayrault, has called Mr. Depardieu's departure unpatriotic and “pathetic” at a time of economic belt-tightening. The assessments of most politicians and c ommentators have been the same, if somewhat less harsh.

On Sunday, in an angry open letter to Mr. Ayrault, Mr. Depardieu said he would renounce his French citizenship and that he was moving to Belgium not solely for tax reasons but because he feels the government believes “success, creation, talent - difference, in fact - must be punished.”

“I am neither to be pitied nor to be praised, but I refuse the word ‘pathetic,'” he wrote in his letter, published in the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, noting that he had paid an 85 percent tax rate on his income this year and 145 million euros, or more than $190 million, over 45 years.

He also noted - correctly - that a number of other French celebrities have long been based outside France for tax reasons, but that not all of them have come in for such approbation from the government or news media. And he r ejected the notion that patriotism would require him to submit to whatever fiscal regime the government might cook up.

“We don't have the same homeland anymore,” he wrote in his open letter to Mr. Ayrault. “I am a true European, a citizen of the world, as my father always taught me.”

Rendezvous wrote last week about increasing efforts to find and tax billions of dollars earned by individuals and companies.