The French President’s strop is more eloquent than any policy or speech, says Celia Walden. He is a pint-sized de Gaulle regularly made to look a fool by his wife
The truth, invariably, is in the detail. Theresa May’s leopard-print shoes, Jon Snow’s refusal to wear a poppy, Prince Andrew’s bedful of teddy bears, Nick Clegg’s arithmetic (he counted up the women all right but got the weekly pension wrong by two thirds, at 30 — wait for it — ‘quid’), and Catherine Zeta-Jones’s decision to take OK! to court ‘because they made it look as though all I did on my wedding day was eat’. World events, often opaque till years later, can betray little about the motivations of those involved, though one piece of trivia can do it for you.
‘Sarkozy fights voodoo doll’. Now there’s a headline. Read the piece once and you’ll be amused: the French President, it transpired last week, demanded the withdrawal from French bookshops of a voodoo doll in his image (complete with set of pins) being sold alongside a manual on how to put the evil eye on the President. Read the piece a second time and two things dawn on you. For Sarkozy to muster the time to dispatch a legal letter about some daft prank in the midst of a global meltdown is the first. But the wording of the letter, agreed by him and published in Le Monde, is significant enough to paralyse the attentive reader with horror. ‘Nicolas Sarkozy,’ writes lawyer Thierry Herzog to K&B publishers, ‘has instructed me to remind you that, whatever his status and fame, he has exclusive and absolute rights over his own image.’ Status and fame? Fame is for celebrities, surely? Were de Gaulle and Pompidou famous celebrities too, or has something changed? Is Sarko’s global fame now separate from his position as the French President? The egomaniacal explosion of vanity in that single word is enough to make one wonder whether Sarkozy is indeed in need of a large pin-prick to the head.
It’s been a volatile 18 months for a President who promised a break (‘rupture’) with the past and whose inaugural address emphasised the need for France to adapt to a fast-moving modern world. It’s been shifting along smartly all right, the rupture being with the global financial past, yet while the storm was brewing Sarko’s first year seemed to be more about adapting to his fast-moving private life: Cecilia’s affair, his affair, their vaudeville reunion complete with public rendition of what might have been a duet in the musical of their life — ‘I am the man of her life just as she is the woman of mine’ — and the split soon after. Then came Carla and the ensuing gush of bilge, any mention of which now causes the same involuntary flinch in the French as Bush’s name does in an American. Sarkonautes laughed it off, of course. They stopped laughing earlier this month when the President of the French Republic — a position of some dignity, as we have been reminded — was persuaded by his wife, presumably under threat of a suspension of his conjugal rights, to drop a court action to deport exiled Red Brigades terrorist Marina Petrella to Rome.
In this grossly insolent enterprise Carla was joined by her film-maker sister, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. Well, if you can’t use your influence to give little gifts to your wife, such as condoning the actions of a woman found guilty of participating in terrorist actions that resulted in the vicious killing of a police officer and the kidnapping of a judge, then what the hell is it all for, eh? Still zinging from that power play, le petit Nicolas went on a week later to claim the credit for the devising of a rescue plan for the global financial crisis at an EU summit in Brussels. ‘C’était moi! C’était moi!’ he was rumoured to have raged, with Beavis and Butthead-style shaking of his tiny fists, as Flash Gordon drank in the applause that should have been his.
Now France has a history of egocentric presidents, but in a quasi-monarchical state, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that Sarkozy is not well-balanced enough to resist becoming deranged by his own power. ‘He oscillates between discipline and devilry,’ explains his biographer, playwright Yasmina Reza, who spent a year with the French President on the campaign trail. But without any strong opposition on the domestic front (a Socialist party split three ways is no viable threat), that discipline is draining away and being replaced by a desire to beat his chest on the world stage. We’ve had all this grandeur with Charles de Gaulle, but imagine what de Gaulle would have been like at five foot five with a wife like Carla.
‘When he got together with Carla it was like he grew a foot taller,’ one French friend of mine recently remarked. ‘Being with a woman every man in the world wants to sleep with does that to a man.’ Perhaps, but her presence has had a lot to do with tipping this serial modeliser over the edge. Never mind becoming President, the real seal of approval for the stamp-collecting son of a Hungarian immigrant was landing a supermodel. All that posturing in Brussels: was that for the French people or for her? With his presidency tucked beneath one arm and the model under the other, he’s now fixed his eyes on the next prize, picturing himself as the saviour of modern Europe. Not content with his six-month rotationary period as President of Europe, he’d like the position for life. To a certain extent this is a simple extension of the policy of national conceit perpetuated by French leaders, and one which is not entirely without foundation. Brussels was founded by enarchs on the model of the French Civil Service, so they never really stopped seeing the rest of us — let alone the Czechs, for goodness sake — as intruders.
Talking about his presidential campaign, back in the days when he had neither the ‘position’ nor the ‘fame’, Sarkozy told one interviewer: ‘It’s hard, because you need to find within you the serenity, calm and tranquillity which allow you to face up to all the mayhem. It’s a kind of selflessness.’ Given that the next few years are likely to be the toughest in post-war history for any leader, it’s precisely those things, coupled with stability, steadfastness and a solid emotional and domestic life, that will be needed. Sarkozy has none of them. Reflecting on his statement at the time, Reza was astute enough to predict the eventual, perhaps unwitting, hypocrisy evident in it. ‘He got lost in words,’ she writes. ‘What he, or these men, live out is not selflessness. It’s the opposite: an obsession with the self and the eventual forgetting of everyone else.’