US President Joe Biden called Vladimir Putin a "crazy SOB," on Wednesday, February 21. This forced Le Monde's journalists, who have made propriety their iron rule, to accurately reproduce the insult, with their constant concern for precision and "clear and true information," according to founder Hubert Beuve-Méry's motto.

A dive into the newspaper's archives showed that Biden was by no means the first to use the sexist insult. There have been so many "sons of bitches" or those qualified as such in the history of international relations.

The insult first appeared in the columns of the newspaper in the course of a short article published on April 14, 1951. It came, unvarnished, from the mouth of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, who saw red when he didn't see reds everywhere. This was how the official had described democratic president Harry Truman, accused of "signing the death warrant of Western civilization" in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal, which the then editor of Le Monde considered "more accustomed to a more stuffy vocabulary."

Nixon's prized possession

The word returned into print on March 16, 1967, in the course of a short article. This time, the remark was attributed to Robert Kennedy and addressed to president Lyndon Johnson. A few months later, on January 11, 1968, the expression reappeared under the pen of feminist lawyer Gisèle Halimi, co-author of the Russell Report on American war crimes in Vietnam. It was put in the mouth of a helicopter pilot who had just thrown a prisoner into the air.

On October 4, 1969, the phrase was lent to Stalin signing the death warrant of a young dissident. It was taken from an anonymous book that crossed the Iron Curtain, entitled Une Matinée de Joseph Staline ("Joseph Stalin's Morning"). On August 10, 1974, an article this time attributed the insult to Nikita Khrushchev, talking about Richard Nixon. We learned the pronunciation in the original language: sukin syn. Offended that time, Nixon more often than not became an offender, as later articles in Le Monde demonstrated. The American president was particularly fond of this expression, referring to Chilean president Salvador Allende (who was driven to suicide) and Pakistani prime minister Ali Bhutto (who ended up hanged) as such.

On November 25, 1978, journalist Jean-Pierre Clerc also recalled this comment by president Roosevelt about the irremovable Nicaraguan dictator put in the hot seat by the Sandinista revolution: "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." The phrase would be deemed a sufficient success to be taken up by the Russians about Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, as recalled by Christophe Châtelot on June 8, 2005. On February 21, 1990, Marie-Claude Decamps wrote that this also became a leitmotif in Fidel Castro's public speeches, as he castigated these "sons of bitch Yankees."

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