Now he's married Carla, can Nicolas Sarkozy re-engage the French?

When Nicolas Sarkozy finally tied the knot with Carla Bruni in the white drawing-room at the Elysée Palace yesterday, in front of their arrondissement mayor and 20 or so close friends, the overriding feeling - if not the blissfully happy groom's, then his friends' - was of sheer relief.

Once again, after a successful and unorthodox whirlwind campaign, the French President seemed ready to fall back to more traditional standards. Making an honest woman of 40-year-old Bruni, who has an impressive array of famous conquests to her credit but has never actually been married (hence the immaculate white wedding dress), seemed the best possible conclusion to a three-month rollercoaster that had cost the president 24 points in the opinion polls.

Having protested for decades that they understood more about moral, sentimental and sexual complexity than those poor naive Anglo-Saxons, the French finally revealed themselves as closer to their 19th-century petit-bourgeois Roman Catholic ancestors - that same French bourgeoisie which Karl Marx famously derided as "the most stupid in the world" - than to any Left Bank, existentialist cliché.

Forget Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. In those few weeks in which Sarko slid in popularity ratings from 65 per cent to 41 per cent, he has been accused of being "vulgar," "immoral," and "bling-bling" (the French press can't get enough of this phrase; you keep expecting pictures of the president breaking into a rap with Snoop Dog instead of singing along with his old pal Johnny Hallyday after dinner).

Two-timing your wife, having a mistress on the side, receiving part of your presidential stipend in cash in brown envelopes, enjoying the indefinite use of a luxury flat from the family of a foreign politician, charging the Republic for your second family's holidays in five-star hotels - none of this was a problem for previous presidents as long as they kept mum. Yet being left by your wife, divorcing, falling in love again, taking a glamorous girlfriend on holiday to those same five-star hotels (but paying your way) has turned out to be a complete no-no. "The image of France is wrecked!" was the consensus, from columnists and bloggers spluttering with rage.

While protesting that they didn't want to know anything about the President's private life, the French couldn't get enough of it, raising the sales of any paper and magazine featuring the two lovebirds, then castigating Sarko for stage-managing it.

This suddenly made it very difficult for Sarko to sell his reform package to the country. He won a crucial battle against the transport unions over his pensions reform in November, pledging to tell the French "the truth". It's not certain he would have succeeded one month later. The truth, it's turning out, is not terribly valued in France. Keeping up appearances wins you more points.

Now, six weeks away from municipal elections in which the Right expects to lose comprehensively, Sarkozy's troops, and the President himself, feel that a little new-found conventionality might go a long way. To give him his due, Sarko always meant to marry Carla as soon as possible. Like Napoleon, another short French leader of foreign origin who famously divorced and remarried in office, the 53-year-old President makes up his mind quickly. But left to his own devices, it's very likely he would have enjoyed a big party. (Paris insiders will tell you that Carla asked Chanel's über-designer Karl Lagerfeld to the Elysée a couple of weeks ago, and commissioned two very grand couture dresses; that she finally opted to get married in a less flamboyant if no less stylish creation by the whimsical Gaultier for the very Protestant House of Hermès may tell its own tale too.)

At any rate, one of the most commonly expressed objections to the whole saga - that Bruni would soon dump him - has not happened. For this everyone is profoundly thankful. The French are a cruel race: showing vulnerability is a cardinal mistake. The only time Sarko's presidential bid seemed in danger of faltering was in 2005, not so much because his wife had left him a first time, but because he seemed so affected by it. His public wooing of Bruni was the ultimate risk-taking by this unconventional politician in a structurally risk-averse country. In this case, Sarko has fulfilled Napoleon's first requirement from his generals, that they "be lucky".

Lucky in more ways than one, it seems. Cecilia used to divide her husband's associates into friends and enemies, freezing out anyone who displeased her. From all accounts, Bruni has been at pains to reconcile both camps, inviting to a surprise birthday party for Sarko both the formerly disgraced and some of Cecilia's own close friends, such as Justice Minister Rachida Dati. "It's obvious she'd been reading up a lot on recent political developments and thought things through," one guest commented.

The happy couple's next projected State visit, to Britain in a month's time, can now proceed apace with no more question marks over proper protocol, and the new Madame Sarkozy can exercise her unexpected talent for teamwork by wowing them at Buckingham Palace in a statelier fashion than she once used on the catwalks.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2008

Elites, élan et l'Etat

The Ecole Nationale d'Administration is a launch pad for meteoric careers in the civil service, politics and industry. Anne-Elisabeth Moutet asks how its unabashed elitism will serve France in the 2000s

They are all alike. Or at least they look it. Smooth, clever, quick with an analysis, sometimes impressively efficient; often infuriatingly flippant and detached from the nuts and bolts of the organisations they run. France is the only country – apart from Japan, with omnipresent Tokyo University ('Todai') graduates – which has a seamless front linking top civil servants, government officials, business leaders, even finance wizards. The President of the Republic, Jacques Chirac, is a member of the club. So is his prime minister (and Socialist political opponent), Lionel Jospin. So are their rivals within their parties. So are the chairs of France Telecom, Renault, oil giant Elf-Aquitaine, 17 of the 20 largest French banks, water utility giant Vivendi, four out of six broadcast television channels (public and private), half the French Cabinet, two-thirds of partners at Rothschild et Cie merchant bank. And so on, and so on.

All these people are graduates of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, known in France as ENA. It is a government school whose students enter via a gruelling competitive examination (only 120 are admitted each year) and exit with a precise ranking that will determine their careers.

The influence of ENA has been compared with Oxbridge in the UK. It is at the same time more and less meritocratic, ENA-bred technocrats will argue almost convincingly. 'In France, you succeed and are integrated into the highest levels of society only through scholarship,' says one. 'In one generation, you can become a firm member of the establishment. In the US, in one generation you can become very rich but you will not become a Wasp. What is undemocratic is that once you belong to the elite, you will never fail. There are no sanctions, except for political ones, and these are not final, because the same people come back two years later. There is a network of solidarity.'

ENA was created on October 9, 1945, by a decree signed by General Charles de Gaulle, then heading the newly liberated France's provisional government. He wanted to remove once and for all the largely Napoleonic French administration 'that sadly had shown in 1940 how obsolete it had been allowed to become'. Behind this lay an old French fear – the defeatism and failure of its elites, as shown by the large number of high-level collaborationists in the Vichy government during the Second World War. Much the same had happened in 1871, when Professor Emile Boutmy created the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, later IEP (familiarly known as Sciences Po) directly after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

The school was the brainchild of a future prime minister, Michel Debré, who would later draft the Constitution of the Fifth Republic in 1958. He said he wanted to give 'young students of all conditions' access to the kind of studies until then 'the preserve of the children of the rich Parisian elite, studying at the Institut des Etudes Politiques'. Ironically, Sciences Po, which had fulfiled its promise in 1914, had failed in 1940 to vote for the government of Marshal Henri Pétain, and was nationalised in the same legislation that created ENA.

No one could have known, in the flush of liberation, quite how much influence ENA graduates, or énarques, would eventually wield in France. Yet their image – there are now around 4,500 énarques in France – evolved to evoke some of the very things ENA was created to dispel: a haughty, inbred caste of privileged young men (and about 20% women) firmly believing that their destiny is to rule the country in close association with other énarques, with little more than contempt for whoever is not cast in their mould.

The scarcely concealed real power is evident when you start listing famous ones. According to another study, only 10% of politicians are énarques, yet they hold almost all the high-profile jobs. Of all France's presidents of the Fifth Republic, only two – Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Jacques Chirac – were young enough to attend the new institute. De Gaulle tended to pick old Resistance companions as his chief ministers, with the notable exception of Georges Pompidou (who, like his contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre, taught French literature in a lycée during the Occupation).

Pompidou's resulting inferiority complex made him pick his own best and brightest from among the énarques, rather than from the ranks of historic Gaullists, whom he felt would always remind him of his wartime attentism, or lack of political commitment. Hence the brilliant careers of politicians and industrialists such as Chirac, Raymond Barre, Michel Jobert, Jacques Calvet and Edouard Balladur. Similarly, the Left had its own énarques: Lionel Jospin, Michel Rocard, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, Laurent Fabius, Pierre Joxe, Jacques Attali, and later, Martine Aubry and Elisabeth Guigou, among others.

The former Speaker of the Assemblée Nationale, Philippe Séguin, as well as his successor, Fabius, are énarques. The governor of the Banque de France, Jean-Claude Trichet, is an énarque. Autodidact big bosses, who may harbour their own opinion of énarques, still hire a few – so that those crucial telephone calls or discreet meetings can always be arranged between 'old colleagues'. Foreign governments send a few of their best and brightest to ENA to have someone who will help them understand France: there is a special programme for foreigners at the school, the only notable differences are that they are not ranked (ensuring they have a better time among the fiercely competitive students) and spend only three months doing a practical trainee stint (le stage) in a French administration, as opposed to two stints of six months for French students. Such high-flyers as the German Joachim Bitterlich (currently tipped to become the European Union's foreign policy representative) or the Briton Matthew Kirk of the Cabinet Office attended ENA; most European nationalities are usually represented, as well as Japan, South America and Africa.

Edith Cresson, that famously crusading anti-énarque, who ordered the school's removal in 1992 to Strasbourg in a failed attempt to lessen its influence, still employed three énarques in the top jobs among her staff when she was prime minister. Probably the most accurate criticism I have heard of her was that 'she didn't know how to pick her énarques. The ones she got were absolutely the wrong ones, no charisma or organisation. They let themselves be trampled all over by everyone else's énarques during inter-ministerial staff meetings. Of course, later she gave up on énarques and hired her dentist.' Thus speaks another énarque – a chief of staff for one of Cresson's former ministers.

You can rise pretty high in France without belonging to this caste but, as the example of the late prime minister Pierre Bérégovoy shows, you are never allowed to forget that you are not quite top drawer. You will not be forgiven your mistakes. Bérégovoy – driven to suicide in the early 1990s by the disclosure of an interest-free loan he was given by a shady business friend of François Mitterrand – was the target of cruel jokes from members of his own government. Interior Minister Pierre Joxe, himself an énarque and the son of a Gaullist minister, once 'defended' Bérégovoy against criticism by remarking: 'You only have to look at Pierre Bérégovoy's socks to know he's an honest man.'

What is conveniently forgotten is how weighted the scales are in favour of those students who already know what the game is all about, usually because their families have been there first. The oral examination that ends the round of written tests to get into ENA is as much a test of social ease, a certain type of detached repartee, of social background, as it is of general knowledge. The selection committee, which in addition to professors, includes old boys and girls of every variety, tries to put the student off, with questions such as: 'What trade did [JM] Keynes' wife practise?' (One student who actually knew the correct answer – a Ballets Russes dancer who ran with the Bloomsbury crowd – was still not passed: he had committed, he recalled with bitterness 30 years later, the cardinal sin of shooting back his answer 'too earnestly, as if I were sitting in a quiz show instead of making a flippant joke of it'.) 'Who, for you, is the woman who best represents the average French female?' 'Do you prefer Athens or Sparta? Talleyrand or Fouché?' The same unlucky candidate gave Michèle Morgan as the epitome of French femininity, only to be countered languidly by a white-haired diplomat with: 'But what about Brigitte Bardot?'

The two-year course includes a practical stage in an administration, state-owned company or even a foreign country, as well as lectures in public law, economics, history and political science. Tension is kept at a high pitch; the final exam includes a ranking that effectively will decide the énarques' future career for the next 40 years. Only the top 15 students of their 120-strong year at ENA (la botte) can join the civil service grands corps (Inspection des Finances, Cour des Comptes and Conseil d'Etat). These are inter-ministerial bodies that control state finances and procedures of the state administration. Inspection des Finances is by far the strongest network – they are superénarques who believe they are a different breed from all other énarques. Most of them then go on for a stint at the French Treasury: no anti-Frankfurt advocates need apply. The rest will become préfets, diplomats, and so on, their networks never as high powered as expected; their careers and pay never quite hitting the heights.

The result of this inbreeding, critics have repeatedly warned, is to create structural weaknesses in the French economic and political fabric, a tendency to do deals with one's peers rather than let them assume the full weight of their decisions – witness the constant bailing out of ailing French companies by the government, from Dassault to Air France.

The French elite rise to the top without any business experience; they apply to every situation the strong authoritarian hierarchic mould they learnt in the civil service; they are remarkably insular and ignorant of the world outside France. For example, Jacques Attali insisted that an 'Anglo-Saxon plot' had cost him his job at the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development, not his lavish spending on the bank's headquarters. They demoralise the majority of civil servants, politicians, and businesspeople who, knowing they are not members of the club, realise that most top jobs will escape them, even if they have spent an entire career in their company or political party.

Unlike Whitehall civil servants who come from a slightly more varied academic background, even if a great many are Oxbridge, they have read an infinity of different things there, énarques have spent their formative studies swotting on narrow subjects. 'While the studies were of a very high level,' remembers one British énarque, who enjoyed his time at the school, 'I found it impossible to have real debates with my classmates. They were amazingly bright but they would never "waste time" in conversation or intellectual debate when they could be gaining the few points that meant a difference in ranking. All they always wanted was "the right answer" – it dismayed many of our lecturers.'

The danger with Oxbridge graduates can be dilettantism; but it has advantages – a sense of distance that the average énarque cruelly lacks. On the other hand, it does not much matter what your social background is when you have been to ENA; the school makes you. And in France, accent and delivery have got to do with education, not background. However, the snobbery is confined within the school. The Inspection des Finances actually prints its own annuaire (listing of past graduates of inspection), distinct from the less exalted annuaire de l'ENA. Anyone thinking that Jospin (ranked in the 80s, foreign ministry) is on the same level as Chirac (ranked tenth, Cour des Comptes) or Fabius (first, inspecteur des finance) is missing a key nuance in French politics.

Through France's mathematical and scientific tradition, and because the only other school that approaches ENA in terms of social promotion is the top engineering school Polytechnique – which your brightest énarques, from Giscard d'Estaing to author Alain Minc, have also attended, énarques are usually much better plugged into technology and business. One example is Michel Bon, chairman of France Telecom, universally acknowledged to be the best among European telecommunications chiefs. Bon, an atypical enough inspecteur des finances that he headed the hypermarket chain Carrefour for several years, really understands what industrial policy is about.

But then French culture is about top-down industrial policy all the way from Louis XIV: anything that requires massive investment and infrastructure, from the high-speed TGV trains to fibre optics, telecommunications, etc. Your average énarque, however, is blind to the 'bottom-up', that 'post-industrial revolution that takes place in the bedrooms of 14-year-olds', as the writer Adam Gopnik once put it. The Internet baffles them – they cannot comprehend that it has no centre.

And yet most members of this elite still feel they have to prove themselves in different areas, always with the detached attitude of the amateur. The solution in France? Literature, of course. Attali, Jean-Yves Haberer, Juppé, Giscard d'Estaing have all written rather bad, bloodless novels. Jean-Claude Trichet writes poems and essays on poetry. Banque Nationale de Paris' Michel Pébereau, even in the middle of the bank's current hostile takeover bid for Société Générale and Paribas, reviews science fiction books for a highbrow magazine. Having monopolised almost all positions of power in France, énarques still crave recognition from circles that they know have little power.

© Copyright The European & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1999

Fink Tank

Alain Finkielkraut is the Left Bank's most conspicuous new star. Anne-Elisabeth Moutet studies his fatal attraction

They may have sold La Coupole to the mass-market Brasseries Flo chain, and admittedly Lipp's is wall-to-wall nobody now that Monsieur Cazes has died, and yes, the level of the French novel has sunk to the point that Philippe Djian, of Betty Blue fame -- Philippe Djian! -- is rated the best writer in France these days; but don't let yourself be deceived: your Left-Bank French intellectual -- bright, elitist, arrogant, handsome, seductive, mad, bad, and bent on the pursuit of universal truth pour épater le bourgeois -- is around and kicking and still published by Gallimard's, juste like Sartre and Camus before him. The only concession he may make to these sad modern times is to chainsmoke Marlboros instead of Gauloises. (For our Gordon Gekkos of the intellect, low-tar is for wimps.)

Consider this: I am sitting at a choice table in Les Antiquaires, the Hôtel du Pont-Royal restaurant, just above the bar where Sartre and Malraux and Philippe Sollers drank, where Francoise Sagan used to beg her publisher Henri Flammarion for fatter advances, where Michel Foucault indulged in a spot of (harmless?) highbrow cruising. Pierre Nora, the historian, is engrossed in serious speculation with a Nouvel Observateur columnist two tables away. The white-maned, 70-year-old Claude Gallimard is ensconced behind me, his back (safely?) to the wall, with a novelist, whose face I know and whose name I can't place, from his nearby stable receiving eagerly The Word between morsels of Oeufs Savignac.

And, next to me, simultaneously berating les copains: Libération, the trendy Globe magazine, all six French television channels, humanitarian champion Bernard Kouchner, philosophers André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Gilles Lipovetsky, and the slowness of the waiter, is Alain Finkielkraut, 38, latest boy wonder of the Paris literary scene, a former Agrégé de Lettres turned visiting professor at Berkeley, turned philosopher-at-large at Gallimard's, turned sudden bestseller and media superstar last summer with his eighth essay, La Défaite de la Pensée, now turned Savonarola of the establishment that created him. A ho-hum everyday success story on the Left Bank. The Parisian Dream writ in 12-point Plantin typeface inside the white and red covers of a Collection Blanche Gallimard novel.

"Television ought to be restricted to one, two channels maximum, and be forbidden to show movies, any movies at all," Finkielkraut is intoning. "This... debauch of images is perverting us, debilitating our culture, trivialising everything. It's a drug, an addiction -- you come home tired, you turn the box on, you leave it droning on and on. Fellini is right: films should be shown in theatres, on a real screen, in the dark, the way they were meant to be seen, none of this cropping the edges to make the pictures fit, no commercial breaks. Television shoud be educational -- definitely more than just one or two hours of intelligent programmes a week. I mean, how can you hope to counteract the daily effects of Wheel of Fortune or Falcon Crest with one hour on Lacan or Dumézil every other month? Am I talking too fast? Did you take all of this down?" he asks solicitously, peering at the illegible scrawl on my notebook. Yes, I assure him. "Will you be able to re-read it?" he insists, his voice gently blending concern and doubt. "Certainement," I say, which single reassuring word triggers new bursts of impassioned eloquence against those misguided spirits who think fashion is art and equate a Jean-Paul Gaultier suit with a Turner painting, graffiti on Métro cars with the Divine Comedy. "Do have some wine," he offers at the end of a period, never missing a beat -- hell, he must be a lot thirstier than I am. "It's not bad at all, non?"

Since it is Château La Lagune 1985, I should jolly well say it's not bad at all, nod, and down some more. These mad reforming monks of the French intelligentsia wouldn't dream of going out to the barricades without some decent claret. That's why changing the world in Left Bank cafés is so... well, comfortable. (The same form applies in, say, a fight between two motorists in the middle of a traffic jam on Place de La Concorde at 6:00 pm. You shout a lot, wave your arms a lot, "...et vous en êtes un autre, Monsieur!" a lot. You don't whisk out a .22 rifle and shoot indiscriminately. That's for Americans, who, as we know, are naught but overgrown children and flood our French airwaves with the deplorable Dallas and Dynasty.)

Yet, for all his imprecations against late 80s mod. cons., Finkielkraut is not your French egghead buffoon, as reviled in (for instance) Sun leaders. La Défaite de la Pensée is a surprisingly clear book, making a few points which Spectator readers might find themselves agreeing with. To wit: the seal of approval indiscriminatingly granted Third World dictatorships as long as they call themselves "progressive," punk musicians, rock video directors et al, always proceeds from the same spirit of appeasement -- when in doubt, follow the latest fashion. Finkielkraut dares to challenge current sacred cows (youth "culture;" the mediacracy -- no better in France that in England; the little coteries who run the publishing world; Live Aid; the myth that the Barbie trial would clear up France's past; France's most watched book programme, Apostrophes and its Clive James-style star presenter Bernard Pivot; the Pope) in a tone Peregrine Worsthorne might now disavow.

Finkielkraut himself is articulate, intense, handsome. For all his disdain of the star-system, he did allow himself to be photographed for an 8-page French ELLE spread enticingly headlined Les Nouveaux Séducteurs, in which he was profiled next to actors Peter Coyote, Rupert Everett, Jean-Hugues Anglade, and heartthrob Paul Belmondo -- and so he became the latest coqueluche in Paris, being interviewed on anything from Israel's policies to the deeper meanings of the film Fatal Attraction -- which, incidentally, he hated. "It's a regressive, infantile fantasy. Americans are so scared of AIDS that they'll call 'an instance of moral revival' what is really little more than a juju dance."

This is when I remember that Finkielkraut also wrote two essays on the need for a return to what he calls "the wisdom of love:" Le Nouveau Désordre Amoureux and La Sagesse de l'Amour. "You've read them?" he asks a little impatiently. Well, no, I haven't, for the very good reason (to me) that they're out of print. I am soon made to feel that I ought to have bought them at the outset. Broadly, he explains, we ought to try for fresh emotions, for a creative romanticism, for relationships that break out of our era's tired routine -- "not just between men and women but in all the relationships of love -- love toward friends, family, parents." (After our lunch I managed to track down copies of the books, and they indeed contained beautiful pages in his distinctive, clear, literary style -- on watching the face of someone you love; on dispelling a child's fear of the dark; on the rapture of being in love -- pages that brought to mind Stendhal's cristallisation theory, and bore evidence to Finkielkraut's literary training.)

He is Jewish, born of Polish parents who settled in France in the Thirties and managed to escape the Nazis during the Occupation. His unsettling, almost Sartrian honesty in describing the strange condition of being a young Jew growing up in France after the Holocaust has often provoked -- enraged -- militant French Jews. "I experienced all the vicarious advantages of being a hero without having been exposed to real danger. Being Jewish was an easy way out of the eventless Fifties." Jewishness as a safe course out of the Zeitgeist does not necessarily tally with the more orthodox views of a, say, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Finkielkraut doesn't make things any easier with offhand remarks such as: "Of course I was not immune to bouts of depression -- but I had over the other children the immense superiority of being able to dramatise my own biography. Out of my people's real tragedy I created a tragic theatre in which I was the hero."

True to form, Finkielkraut delights in being hard to place. Having taken firm stands against the Revisionists during the Faurisson and Barbie trials -- he'll say flatly he doesn't believe, "on the dubious grounds of freedom of expression," in allowing the publication of Revisionist history treaties, the kind which pile up thousands of grim, surrealistic figures (time needed to consume a human body multiplied by square feet on concentration camp groundplans multiplied by cost of fuel...) to deny the Nazi genocide of the Jews -- he then voiced concern at Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and, recently, handling of the Palestinian riots.

"I don't think the French are anti-Semitic," he says, "but I do believe the real anti-Semites are the antii-Zionists. You just can't be anti-Semitic anymore in Europe -- you can't shout 'Death to the Jews' because too many Jews died already. But you can keep a smug Left-Wing stance and be anti-Zionist -- this is socially acceptable, this is the latest in radical chic. Instead of telling the Jews: "You are an evil race," you tell them "You are racist; Israel leads Nazi policies; therefore you have to justify yourselves for Israel's policies. I hear this all the time around me."

This is one of the exquisite attractions of La Rive Gauche: one can indeed have a serious, intense conversation while sipping Château La Lagune and ordering more coffee and bitter chocolates. Our talk turns to the loss of quality in life, the evermore accepted sloppiness in intellectual pursuits; in books, in films. Finkielkraut likes to quote Hannah Arendt wondering whether the world's greatest works of art would survive their trivialising commercial exploitation.

"Well, she wrote it of Hollywood in the Fifties. You know, people who saw Doctor Zhivago, or Madame Bovary, or The Idiot -- and assumed they'd read the books. Now they produce this pap for television." Doesn't he watch television? (He certainly has appeared on it quite a few times.) "Of course I do. I hate myself for it. I feel soiled, dirty when I've watched it -- but it's addictive and I can get myself sucked in by it." Oh, the demons that threaten a French Left Bank intellectual! The dragons that lurk in a book-lined Quatorzième flat! And all of this before you've bought your morning copy of Libé, which you'll read spluttering with rage at your rivals' infernal gall! "I loathe the Libération - Globe branché crowd because they work on a principle of exclusion. Fashion is exclusion. Trendiness is exclusion -- and an admission of defeat. You blow with the wind, you hold no moral convictions, you start pushing this infernal idea of consensus, you annihilate any kind of debate. Left is not Right! It is now de rigueur in France to despise the body politic. Well, politics have a function -- one that can't simply be fulfilled by humanitarian associations. One-shot orgies of charity, Live-Aid pop concerts and the such, are an easy way to buy oneself a clear conscience -- it's Wash'n Dri absolution!"

He motions to the waiter. No, no, I protest, the lunch's on Tatler. We go through the accepted motions, in French polite society, of fighting for the bill. (Finkielkraut does this ritual dance very well, and loses gracefully. I pay.) Whom does he like, then? He looks surprised. He likes lots of people and things. Francis Ford Coppola. Ryszard Kapuscinski. Jacques Derrida. Duke Ellington. Mozart. A new French writer called Claire Desréaux. Fellini's Intervista; in fact anything by Fellini. This, you understand, is Paris, where bookshops on Boulevard Saint-Germain, next to the Café de Flore, stay open until 2:00 am; where you can see 500 different films a week; where they're building a fourth Opéra on Place de la Bastille; where you can hear jazz at Le Rosebud and Barbara Hendricks at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées; where you can get up from lunch at Les Antiquaires at 3:45 pm, having agonised over the problems of the world, pronounced against false prophets from the rival publishing houses, polished off a bottle of Château La Lagune over a Navarin d'Agneau -- and all of this without guilt! For this is how we live, on the Left Bank, upholding our right to freedom, truth, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. Or at least of a really good book programme on prime time television.

© Copyright The Tatler & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1988