And so, as expected, Dominique Strauss-Kahn goes free. Not free to go back to the IMF, from which he resigned in May, but free at least to return to France and put his life back together after s-xual assault charges were dismissed at the prosecutors’ request in New York yesterday.

First, let’s get rid of the idea that Strauss-Kahn has paid an unusually heavy price for his “indiscretion” (or whatever euphemism one wishes to use). People who lack his advantages in life are being unjustly accused of crimes every day, but for them — without the money for top lawyers and the wide circle of support — it can mean years in prison and personal and financial ruin.

DSK’s fall is more dramatic than theirs, but he emerges with his wealth and family intact, having spent no more than a few nights at Rikers Island.

Nor is this a case where the defendant has been comprehensively vindicated. Strauss-Kahn is fully entitled to the presumption of innocence, but that doesn’t mean the charges have been shown to be false — merely that the prosecutors decided (reasonably enough, it would seem) that they would be impossible to prove to the satisfaction of a jury.

If Strauss-Kahn were an American, there would be no doubt that his political career was over. S-xual paranoia in the US is so great that, even if one were to accept that the “encounter” was fully consensual, having something that sordid splashed all over the papers for a married man would be impossible to live down.

France, however, is different. Senior political figures can maintain lovers on a long-term basis or have children out of wedlock without attracting any great notoriety, and the casual s-xism that might lead a famous and powerful male to think a hotel maid was fair game is still sadly common. Couple that with the widespread suspicion (despite a lack of evidence) that Strauss-Kahn was the victim of an American conspiracy, and it’s clear that some sort of comeback cannot be ruled out.

(Whether the difference in gender politics is something America should be proud of is another question. It seems to me that in the long run, s-xual puritanism is more deadly to the aspirations of women than the more old-fashioned cultural patriarchy embodied by France, but perhaps the jury is still out on that one.)

But in the meantime, the Socialist Party has moved on. The contest for its presidential nomination, for which Strauss-Kahn was once the front-runner, is well under way; the first of three televised debates between the candidates will take place in about three weeks, with the first round of voting scheduled for October 9. Even former partisans of Strauss-Kahn are making it clear there is no prospect of him rejoining the field and that he should avoid taking a position on the race.

On the other hand the leading lights of the Socialists are doing their best to sound sympathetic and not to close off any options for DSK to play a role in next year’s campaign. Francois Hollande, one of the two front-runners for the nomination, said that he would play an “essential role in the campaign of the future socialist presidential candidate by reason of his expertise on the [financial] crisis”.

Although the presidency is out of his reach, Strauss-Kahn may feel that he is still well placed, given that both Hollande and the other front-runner, party secretary Martine Aubry, would otherwise have been supporters of his. If one of them can win the presidency and then put together a parliamentary majority, he would have a strong claim to be prime minister.

The problem is that even for the tolerant French, enough dirty laundry has been aired in the last three months to significantly tarnish DSK’s reputation. Although his colleagues will no doubt be glad to see him at liberty, at the back of their minds may lurk the thought that he would have been more use to the party as a martyr in New York than as a shadowy embarrassment back in France.