A YouTube president is what the EU deserves

Sarkozy might make a spectacle of himself, but he is also good at telling it straight, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

It says a lot about Nicolas Sarkozy's confrontational style that even a decision as seemingly innocuous as lighting up the Eiffel Tower in blue, to celebrate the beginning of France's six-month EU presidency, gave rise to a controversy in Paris, with the city's popular mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, walking out in a huff from the ceremony on Monday night. ("It's only Sarkozy who has this effect on people," Delanoë aides hissed.)

Whatever Sarkozy turns his attention to is guaranteed to heat up fast.

It served him well during his triumphant election campaign last year, and it has helped unblock France's notoriously hidebound society on more than one occasion, from finessing through supposedly impossible pensions reform, to shepherding the country back into Nato to nary a bleat from the sentimental Gaullist cohorts.

Sarko managed to clinch the liberation of eight Bulgarian nurses from Libya, and rammed through the Lisbon "mini-treaty" - by the sleight of hand of selling it as most emphatically not the EU Constitution the country had previously voted "No" to.

In each case, bruised egos were seen as the unavoidable, but not terribly high, price to pay for brute efficiency from the newest kid on the block.

Though the style of the "hyper-president" has started grating in France, it still affords us some splendid spectacles, from Sarko's speed divorcing, dating and remarrying, to his expletive-laden spat with a member of the public at an agriculture fair, naturally caught on camera. (With his seeming incapacity to stand still, nervous tics, mobile eyebrows, waving hands, idiosyncratic grammar and BlackBerry habit, Sarkozy has done more than anyone for YouTube in France.)

But what will his erratic style mean for Europe - and Britain - now that France's agitated leader finds himself steering the EU for the next six months?

Although the job is less than it sounds (the rotating presiding country still holds no sway over the Commission, for instance), it still ensures great influence.

Sarko has already announced his aims, from lowering VAT on a number of areas including clean energy sources (not a favourite with Chancellor Merkel) to a moratorium on European Central Bank interest-rate hikes (ditto).

And then everything started going pear-shaped: the Irish "No"; Polish President Lech Kaczynski's refusal to ratify the Lisbon treaty; a gusty free-for-all with Peter Mandelson (who amazingly didn't find the time in his tight schedule to attend yesterday's EU presidency opening ceremony in Paris); a deadly shooting incident during a public army exercise in Carcassonne, leading to the very public resignation of the French army chief of staff; and finally, yet another of Sarko's YouTube hits - bootlegged footage showed him in manic form just before a television interview on Monday night, nearly blowing his top with the sound technician who hadn't answered his greeting, then threatening "changes" because he'd been met by a demonstration on the way to the studio.

But consider: letting loose the Amazing Exploding President on Europe might be just what that ponderous machine needs.

Sarko has been known to express frustration at the EU's apparent inability to listen to its citizens, and speak of the Commission's "autism".

Lost in the noise of his broadside against Mr Mandelson, Sarkozy said, for instance, of the Irish No vote, that "the Irish shouldn't be asked to vote again on the treaty - it would look as if we were trying to ram it through against their will".

Such niceties seem unknown among José Manuel Barroso and his colleagues.

He is also committed to the new French-British alliance, partly because Britain is the only real partner, in terms of military power, to advance European defence, which is foremost in his interests; and partly because he and Angela Merkel simply can't stand one another, personally and politically.

But no one in Paris would hazard a guess as to what will happen when Sarko the irresistible force meets the unmovable European object over the next six months.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2008

Quelle Horreur!

Eurovision and other insults to French culture.

Paris It is difficult to overstate the weird, galactic silliness of the 52-year-old Eurovision Song Contest, which wrapped up on May 24 in Belgrade. Every spring, Eurovision fever seizes European countries, culminating in a televised finale that demolishes any tastelessness standards set by, say, American Idol or Dancing with the Stars. (That installment with Paul McCartney's tangoing one-legged estranged wife comes close.) But this year's Eurovision had all of France up in arms: Our competing entry was sung--quelle horreur--in English! Never mind that over half this year's contestants (including the Dane, the Germans, the Latvians, the Pole, the Swede, the Ukrainian, and more) also chose to sing in the language of rock music, la langue du rock. Cultural politics being what it is in France, cabinet ministers' heads may roll. After a three-and-a-half-hour TV marathon in Belgrade (which, by contract, none of the rebroadcasters may cut), the cute half-clad Russian, Dima Bilan, singing in English, won. On the face of it, he had all the makings of a Europop star (including killer hipbones), but his victory really had nothing to do with the judges' assessment of his talent. In recent years, Eurovision has become ridiculously political--it's bloc voting, with every Scandinavian nation voting for all the other Scandinavians; the former Warsaw Pact countries hanging together; and places like Ukraine, Moldova, and Estonia aligning themselves according to the pipeline that brings them oil and gas. (Seriously. Ukraine voted oil-geographically, putting Russia first, Azerbaijan second, and Georgia third.) You'd think the non-Scandinavian Western Europeans would realize they have no ghost of a chance any longer, but they still ostensibly believe in playing fair. The two French commentators--who included designer to the stars Jean-Paul Gaultier, the man who made a name for himself putting Madonna in a conical bra--mentioned none of this in their saccharine remarks, but veteran BBC commentator Terry Wogan (a kind of shaggy-haired Johnny Carson) made jokes and took potshots at everything, which apparently angered the Eurovision people enough that they complained to Wogan's bosses. Dreamed up during a 1955 Monte Carlo junket by a bunch of Geneva-based European Broadcasting Union bureaucrats, both as a technical experiment in live broadcasting and a means to cheer up postwar Europe, the Eurovision Contest took off in the sixties and seventies, fostering the music style best known as Europop, which bears only a distant resemblance to the actual national music of the participating countries. In 1967, the year of the Beatles's Sgt. Pepper album, for instance, the (winning) British Eurovision entry was Sandie Shaw's "Puppet on a String." France's 1969 winner was Frida Boccara's "Un Jour, Un Enfant" in the very year when Serge Gainsbourg produced "Je t'Aime, Moi Non Plus" and Georges Moustaki sang "Le Métèque." (A cult Eurovision entry is Germany's 1979 disco "Dschinghis Khan," which only placed fourth but is one of YouTube's top-rated videos. It has it all--stiff, uncoordinated dance number in gold lamé, luxuriant mullets, relentless mechanical beat.) Few Eurovision winners have managed to build any kind of career on their victory in the contest, the exception being the Swedish disco group ABBA in 1974. (Celine Dion, who confusingly competed for Switzerland in 1988 with an inoffensive French title, did win, but had to wait half a decade before achieving lasting fame in an entirely different style.) Yet its very dorkiness has given Euro-vision a new cool factor in recent years, hence the appearance of Jean-Paul Gaultier on the France 3 broadcast. No matter: Participation in the contest is highly coveted by any young nation between Iceland and Azerbaijan (a new contestant in 2008). Israel has been a competitor since 1973 and won three times, the last in 1998 with an entry sung by a transsexual calling herself Dana International. For months now the Serbian press, highbrow and tabloid, has been heralding the contest--held in Belgrade because the Serbian entry won last year--as their country's final proof of rehabilitation after the Kosovo crisis. You'd think more established nations, like, say, France and the United Kingdom (which, with Germany and Spain, are permanent members of Eurovision's own version of the Security Council, guaranteed a place in the finals by virtue of their major European broadcasting networks) would take things with a little more distance. You'd be wrong. Irony was tried last year, and failed. There was an Israeli entry in French, English, and Hebrew called "Push Da Button" which was addressed to President Ahmadinejad of Iran; and a group of rednecks from northern France called Les Fatals Picards who overdid the hicks-from-the-sticks style with a song from an album called Pamplemousse Mécanique ("Clockwork Grapefruit"). Neither got anywhere. This year, possibly the best entry--Ireland's Dustin the Turkey, an engaging animatronic glove-puppet DJ-ing an electronic number with a lot more charm than his human competitors--was thrown out in the semi-finals (which prompted calls for sacking at the state-run Irish TV authority in the Eire Daily Mail). And so France is abuzz with the scandale Sébastien Tellier. A protégé of the chart-topping duo Daft Punk, the hirsute and bearded Tellier, who was educated in one of France's most exclusive Catholic private schools, Saint Martin de Pontoise, sang in forgettable English a forgettable song called "Divine" (see it here, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz58Hw9hldw). He was picked to compete at Eurovision by entertainment honchos at (state-run) France 3 during a live broadcast, prompting an angry outburst on the floor of the National Assembly by Gaullist member of parliament François Michel-Gonnot ("It's the first time in 52 years that such an outrage against French culture has been committed  .  .  . "). Culture minister Christine Albanel soon came under fire. Albanel, a former Chirac speechwriter and a novelist, has quite a few enemies in her own party, who covet her plum job. Among them is Alain Joyandet, the junior minister for Francophonie, the Alliance of French-Speaking Countries, which France uses as its own little U.N. diplomatic pressure group (it was headed for a while by Boutros Boutros-Ghali). Joyandet read France 3 the riot act, then contacted the Eurovision Contest's executive producer, Svante Stockselius, to have the song altered. (Stockselius refused.) Tellier grudgingly added a couple of French lyrics to his song, but complained that it "didn't sound the same." It brought back numerous earlier French tantrums, such as the reaction against the EuroDisney amusement park near Paris when it opened in 1992. A group of intellectuals led by the great theater director Ariane Mnouchkine called Euro-Disney a "cultural Chernobyl"--as if Notre Dame had been torn down and replaced by Sleeping Beauty's castle, instead of the whole thing being built in the middle of beetroot fields 35 miles from the Louvre. This sensitivity, you understand, springs from the duty of every French citizen to foster the "rayonnement de la culture française," an expression that has French culture radiating its beneficent influence like the sun. All the same, there may be better ways to warm the planet's denizens by the glow of French culture than making French the compulsory language of all future entries in the Eurovision Contest. One came to mind recently as I searched the web. I was looking for an electronic text of Balzac's great novel Les Illusions Perdues (1843) to send to a French-educated American friend. It soon became apparent that, while the most cursory of Google searches will produce three separate English translations (thank you Project Gutenberg and the University of Virginia) as well as versions in Italian and Russian, none was to be found in the original language. Further investigation failed to produce major French classics such as the plays of Molière, Racine, and Corneille (the 17th-century trio who collectively occupy in French letters a place roughly equivalent to Shakespeare's) except for a couple of plays on a provincial teacher's homepage and an archive in Quebec. It began to look as if French culture wasn't so terribly radiant after all. As it happens, the Bibliothèque Nationale, French equivalent of the Library of Congress, now housed in a tall glass building on the Seine, was tasked by former president Chirac not long ago to provide an answer to Google Books's infernal gall. ("A commercial, American company, digitizing all books in existence? Even the French?" Chirac thundered, and promptly assigned a committee to counter this outrage.) Before that, Gallica, the website of the Bibliothèque Nationale, mostly held facsimile copies of books, exactly reproducing the original pages, typeface, and so on, which were hugely unwieldy (10 to 80 megabytes) and unsearchable. But surely, I thought, by now Gallica would have Les Illusions Perdues. After half an hour getting lost on Gallica's new site, I called the library's press office. A polite young man named Jean-Noël Orengo explained to me that digitizing books cannot be done "just like that," "on a massive scale," "helter-skelter" (oh the horrors perpetrated by Project Gutenberg's tens of thousands of cheerful volunteers who have entered over 40,000 titles into its free online collection!); it must be done "correctly." (Thus did the zealots of the Counter Reformation battle those Bible-obsessed militants raring to let just anyone read Scripture. It's not for nothing that France was, for a very long time, a Catholic country.) Monsieur Orengo said I should write to the communications director of the Bibliothèque Nationale if I wanted to find out more. "But surely," I countered, "you can guide me through the website? I'm in front of a screen. You're in front of a screen. Can't we just find one book together?" "I'm not an Internet specialist," admitted M. Orengo, getting more flustered by the minute. "But surely," I repeated, having fruitlessly waded through lists of electronic works ranked by date of digitization, "the point of a website is that it can be used by everybody?" This was obviously a new and surprising notion to my guide. It turned out that we couldn't find "my" Balzac, however hard we tried. I suggested we open another window to Google, and type the first sentence of the book, in quotation marks. No dice. I tried the opening sentence of one literary work that does exist on the Gallica website in electronic form, Molière's sublime Tartuffe. ("Allons, Flipote, allons, que d'eux je me délivre.") Google doesn't link to it. "Ah," said M. Orengo, in the tone of someone revealing an important and necessary truth, "but all web search engines are Anglo-Saxon." We eventually hung up, he worried that his boss would unfairly think he'd got the library bad press, me vowing that if it took me all night, I would find that book on the website of the French National Library. I couldn't. Typing Illusions perdues in the Gallica jungle eventually produced the text of another Balzac novel, Ursule Mirouët. I would take that one at least, I decided, and clicked on the "download" link. This brought up a two-page questionnaire, demanding from me in addition to name and address a "customer number," a Value Added Tax affiliation number, a bank account number, and the soul of my first-born. (I made that last one up.) Feeling reckless, I clicked back, selected the entire text on my screen, and pasted it in a new Word document. I now own the electronic text of a minor Balzac novel published 160 years ago, which I stole from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. That'll give me the odd frisson next time I leave the country. As for our Eurovision Song Contest entry, it came in 19th out of 25 finalists, which, while better than the three losers tied for 25th place (the U.K., Poland, and Germany), is nothing to write the Académie Française about. © Copyright The Weekly Standard & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2008

Sex, Nazis, and Videotape

The inestimable entertainment of the Max Mosley scandal.

London It's the cup of tea that lifts the Max Mosley sex scandal from the tawdry to the Roald Dahl-esque. "F1 boss Max Mosley has sick Nazi orgy with 5 hookers--Son of fascist Hitler lover in sex shame" blared the cover of the London News of the World tabloid, complete with a seven-page spread and a 90-second video--shot by a camera concealed in one of the girls' bra--on its website, the salient parts tactfully covered with a checkered racing flag. Unlike Eliot Spitzer's pedestrian misdeeds, where the most shocking part was the girl's inflated price tag, this one has everything. Whips, chains, Nazi uniforms, role-playing, five hookers in a Chelsea basement "dungeon" (at bargain basement prices, too; the total tab was a little under $5,000), and YouTube footage of the hanky-panky. And, in unique British style, after the floggings, spankings, German-language play-acting, and various activities, Mosley, who'd acted out both victim and guard, concluded his fantasy afternoon with the girls by sharing a cup of tea before shrugging himself back into his business suit--both the whipping bench and the restorative cuppa belong to the specific repertoire of the English sexual psyche. What gave the whole story its unique, er, twist, is Mosley's background. He is the son of Britain's most notorious Fascist couple: Sir Oswald Mosley and his second wife, Diana. Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932 after an inspirational visit chez Mussolini, and became famous as a rabble-rousing orator and troublemaker, marching into the working-class East End Jewish neighborhoods with black-shirted, goose-stepping troops equipped with knuckle-dusters and truncheons. A serial womanizer, the married Mosley had seduced the 22-year-old society beauty Diana Guinness, who left her brewery heir husband and two young sons to live openly as Mosley's mistress. Diana belonged to the glittering brood of aristocratic Bright Young Things, the six Mitford sisters, who together would span the entire spectrum of ideologies of the 20th century, from the Communist Jessica (who ran away from home to the Spanish Civil War) to the Nazi Unity (who was befriended by Hitler while in finishing-school at Munich and shot herself when war was declared). Diana sided with Unity and attended with her several Nazi party days at Nuremberg, making friends with assorted Third Reich luminaries, including Hitler, who took her to the Bayreuth festival. Mosley's first wife died of peritonitis, and, in 1936, he married Diana in the Goebbels' drawing room, with Hitler as best man. The Mosleys were interned during World War II--by order of Diana's distant cousin, Winston Churchill. Max, the Mosleys' second son, born 11 weeks prior to his parents' arrest, spent the first three and a half years of his life with nannies and relations. After the war, his parents sent him to school in Ireland, France, and Germany to shield him from the opprobrium his name evoked. It's no wonder that Max, who after Oxford trained to become a lawyer, found the world of car racing liberating when he discovered it in the mid-1960s. "He encountered a world where his name meant nothing. Indeed, fellow entrants in club races assumed he was the son of coach builder Alf Mosley from Leicester," explains the motor racing correspondent Kevin Garside. Mosley was neither a terribly successful driver, not even a first-rank team owner, but he came into his own working with his friend Bernie Ecclestone, the tycoon who now owns the Formula One commercial rights, particularly after he ousted the ageing Jean-Marie Balestre from the leadership of the sport's regulatory body in 1991. (Balestre himself had a colorful past: a former automotive journalist, he made much of his supposed wartime record with the French Resistance until pictures of him in Waffen SS uniform emerged. Somehow he still managed to get himself decorated with the Legion of Honor in 1979.) Mosley and Ecclestone--who is Jewish and a major financial contributor to Tony Blair's New Labour, as is Mosley on a smaller scale--transformed Formula One into the global, multibillion-dollar business it has become today, imposing better safety rules and capping research spending to provide a level playing field. Mosley's abrupt style and limited tolerance for fools served him well in that world of larger-than-life performers, who live (and die) fast. "If Max was in bed with two hookers, they'd say 'good for you' or something like that," Ecclestone said when he learned of the latest affair. "Assuming it's all true, what people do privately is up to them. I don't honestly believe [it] affects the sport in any way. Knowing Max it might be all a bit of a joke. You know, it's one of those things where he's sort of taking the piss, rather than anything against Jewish people." Ecclestone owes to Mosley what may be the most rewarding contract in the history of professional sports: a 100-year Formula One commercial rights exclusive, slated to run from 2010 to 2110, sanctioned by an unprecedented European Commission ruling after Mosley managed to persuade competition commissioner Mario Monti that it wasn't a monopoly. There was no tender, and Ecclestone was the lone bidder for the rights, for which he paid about $300 million. His companies are now valued 20 times that amount. Mosley feels there is no area of the sport he shouldn't concern himself with. Thus, last summer, was the Ferrari/McLaren industrial espionage criminal case, in which 800 pages of Ferrari's designs were stolen and used by McLaren-Mercedes's engineers. A criminal investigation being under way, he had no cause to intervene. Mosley nevertheless decided that the FIA--the International Automobile Association, which Mosley heads--should fine McLaren a record $100 million for "bringing the sport into disrepute." When a similar case arose with Renault (who had hired a design engineer from the McLaren stable who provided numerous engine and chassis diagrams), Mosley declined to fine them at all, contrasting Renault's "immediate contrition" with McLaren's "lies." To no one's great surprise, Mercedes was among the first to call for his resignation when the sex story broke in the News of the World, followed by BMW, then by Toyota and Honda. Mosley, who only denies the Nazi angle of the whole episode (the rest, he says, is his private life), was swift to hit back. "Given the history of BMW and Mercedes Benz, particularly before and during the Second World War, I fully understand why they would wish to strongly distance themselves from what they rightly describe as the disgraceful content of these publications." He was certainly touching on a sensitive point--the Mosley scandal, while virtually ignored by the French press, has been playing in large spreads in German newspapers--but he was also indulging in German-baiting of the "Don't Mention the War" variety. Press coverage in England has been enormous--often driven by humorous headlines and wordplay. "How about a whip-round for Max's retirement?" asked a Daily Telegraph columnist. So far, the Canadian, German, U.S., Dutch, and New Zealand motorists associations have called on him to go. (To date, only the United Arab Emirates motoring association have announced they support him.) Mosley has decided to stick it out to the end of his mandate in 2009 ("Triumph of the Wheel?" suggested the Times), but called an extraordinary FIA general assembly on June 3, at which the full membership--222 national motoring organizations from 130 countries--will take a secret-ballot vote of confidence. But is his position tenable until then? His mother, who lived to the age of 93 in Paris, told interviewers to the end that she had been "terribly, terribly fond" of Hitler, and saw no point in dissembling. She might not have admired her son's tastes, according to her biographer Anne de Courcy, but she would certainly have admired his stubbornness. © Copyright The Weekly Standard & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2008

How Sarko Got His Groove Back

A triumphant 36 hours in Britain.

Paris With Nicolas Sarkozy's precipitous slide in the polls finally reversed thanks to a carefully calibrated spin campaign and an unexpectedly successful state visit to Britain, there are long faces to be seen on the left--but even longer ones inside the president's own party. Call the French inconsistent. They objected to their new president's perceived flaunting of his private life. But give him a picture-perfect trip to England, complete with horse-drawn carriage ride into Windsor next to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, gala evenings, a speech before the Houses of Parliament, and a new commitment to a French-British alliance equal to the French-German "axis" that for the past half-century has kept France in the leadership of Europe--and what do the French pick up on but the accolades bestowed by the British press on Sarkozy's new wife. "London falls for Carla--Carlamania seizes Britain!" goes the headline in Le Monde. "Carla steals the show," trumpets Libération. And that's only the supposedly "serious" (and usually anti-Sarkozy) left-wing press. It took a 36-hour visit, one night at Windsor Castle, and nine dress changes (all in demure but très chic Dior) for Sarko's poll numbers, which had dropped 30 points in three months, to finally inch back up, from 35 percent to 40 percent favorable, leaving him a bit of elbow-room to announce a series of cuts in welfare spending last Friday. The week before last, everyone in France was dismissing Sarkozy as last year's wonder, a four-year lame-duck president who'd managed to squander a clear victory in record time. Worse, he'd managed to lose half a dozen large cities to the left in local elections on March 9 and 19--almost without help from the opposition Socialists. As France moves more and more into a two-party system (Sarkozy has destroyed Jean-Marie Le Pen's far-right National Front in a neat mirror-image of François Mitterrand's shrinking trick with the Communist party a quarter century ago), the Socialists still don't have a leader or a platform. Deciding on these--at their next national conference in November--promises a lively free-for-all, as former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal slugs it out with her archenemy, Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë. Unlike their German Social Democratic or British Labour counterparts, the French Socialists still haven't formally abandoned Marxism. If they do, they fear losing the votes of France's three (count 'em!) small Trotskyite parties preaching class struggle and antiglobalization. As a result, the Socialists' message is often distorted by the tension between ideology and realism. Meanwhile, they look less modern, less diverse, and older than Sarkozy's troops, which helps explain his victory last year. (It took Sarko to appoint blacks and Muslims to major cabinet positions and to insist on strict equality between the sexes in appointments ranging from cabinet jobs to the Legion of Honor.) As Sarkozy seemed intent on an own-goal ignominious free fall, his real enemies started coming out of his own party's woodwork. They are the self-proclaimed Gaullists, to whom the new president's pro-Americanism is anathema, and the keenest of them all is a lanky figure well-known in Washington, Dominique de Villepin, the former foreign minister and prime minister of anti-Iraq war fame. Villepin and Sarkozy hate each other's guts. It's political--they have different views of the world, and Sarkozy despises in Villepin the career bureaucrat who never ran for elective office--but also personal. Villepin, who for a good while toyed with the idea of running for president himself in 2007, has been indicted in the Clearstream scandal, a smear campaign in which Sarkozy's name (and others') were faked on a computer list purporting to show holders of illegal Luxembourg bank accounts. Around 2004-05, Villepin and, in all likelihood, President Jacques Chirac, allegedly hired through intermediaries a computer expert to produce the list, in a dirty-tricks bid to prevent Sarkozy from running for president. The chief intermediary was an officer in the French intelligence service, General Philippe Rondot, who found the task distasteful enough that he kept detailed notes in his office safe, to be produced if any of this leaked. It did. It should probably be noted here that even if Villepin is found guilty and sentenced (in all likelihood to a fine and a suspended prison sentence), this will be no hindrance to his pursuing a political career. The bright line in France is personal pecuniary gain. Another former prime minister, Bordeaux mayor Alain Juppé, was three years ago sentenced to a 14-month suspended prison term for financing the Gaullist party through City of Paris coffers. Since he did not help himself to a centime, he was reelected in Bordeaux in March with an even higher majority. While Villepin is incensed that Sarko didn't lift a finger to slow down the judicial process against him (French judges are civil servants; it is not uncommon to convince them to slow a proceeding to a crawl), his official reason for opposing Sarkozy is that the president is betraying the "Gaullist legacy." One sure sign that Villepin intends to pursue an active political career, probably even run for president in 2012, is that he's recently registered with the Paris bar. He doesn't need the work--he is already getting both his prime minister's pension and an ambassador-at-large's salary from his civil service career--but as a lawyer, he can receive large fees from clients without having to disclose them. It is a known dodge in French political finance. Sarkozy himself was a barrister. So are Socialist chief François Hollande and his former partner Ségolène Royal, even though they're both (like Villepin, Chirac, and many more--but not Sarko) graduates of the illustrious Ecole Nationale d'Administration and therefore civil servants for life. Until last week, Villepin and his bevy of anti-American, anti-EU, largely pro-Arab "historic Gaullists" were licking their chops at Sarko's fall from grace, punctuating the president's descent in the polls with snide attacks. "Europe has never had borders.  .  .  . Europe made concrete commitments vis-à-vis Turkey some decades ago and [those commitments] need to be honored," Villepin told students (and the local great and good) at Galatasaray University in Istanbul, in open criticism of Sarkozy's well-known refusal to let Turkey into the EU. "France has no call to reintegrate NATO," he thundered in an interview with the radio station Europe 1, just as Sarkozy prepared to announce exactly that at the Bucharest NATO summit. "I might very well run for election in France," he confided to La Tribune de Genève. "The government's message isn't clear enough," he sniped on public radio France-Info. Even when selling his collection of Napoleon memorabilia and papers (tellingly, through the auction house owned by a longtime Mitterrand acolyte, Pierre Bergé), Villepin seized the occasion to express his grave doubts about France sending more troops to Afghanistan "in the absence of clearly defined goals by the United States and NATO." Sarkozy's reaction was typical: Just as, after winning the election last year, he brought half a dozen leftwingers into his cabinet, throwing the defeated Socialists into further disarray, last week he had two Villepin associates appointed to leadership posts within the UMP, the Gaullist party, one of them as vice secretary in charge of defense. Sarko believes that while Villepin stays out in the cold, he can whittle some of his troops away from him. It's a daring strategy, undertaken even before the poll numbers started to improve, but Sarkozy, who at 53 is two years younger than Villepin, has been in politics for twenty years longer. Villepin has written several admiring books about his hero, Napoleon, but it's Sarkozy who's got the true Bonaparte style. © Copyright The Weekly Standard & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2008

Anyone who discounts Nicolas Sarkozy as a lame-duck president is missing the point

Entente cordiale: Nicolas Sarkozy and his new wife, Carla Bruni, will be entertained at Windsor Castle

"Sarkozy sinks even further!" was the headline in Le Canard Enchaîné, France's Left-wing answer to Private Eye, as the French president launched a new nuclear submarine at Cherbourg last week.

Nicolas Sarkozy, who is beginning a two-day state visit to Britain on Wednesday - three months before France assumes the European Union's rotating presidency - will arrive weighed down by a controversial image and baggage as heavy as the gold Rolex watch which he has only recently been persuaded to give up.

Fellow European leaders consider, with feelings ranging from fascination to dismay, his precipitous slide in the opinion polls of more than 30 points in less than three months; his party's poor performance in last week's local elections, and the cloud of high-octane gossip that has surrounded his very public divorce and his new marriage, to the model and singer Carla Bruni.

All those marital complications may sound horribly familiar to the Queen, of course, as the mother of three children who have divorced.

She will do the French president and the new Mrs Sarkozy what Élysée aides called the "rare honour" of accommodating them at Windsor Castle - not Buckingham Palace - on Wednesday. Mrs Sarkozy has rehearsed her curtsy, ready to "follow proper British protocol", French diplomatic advisers confirmed.

The Sarkozy visit is not just designed to make him look as lofty and presidential as polls at home suggest the French would like him to be. It is also aimed at producing some substantial diplomacy, drawing Britain into a more decisive role in Europe and as a supporter of France's return to Nato, four decades after General de Gaulle walked away from the Atlantic Alliance in a huff. If it happens to miff the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, after Berlin pulled the rug from under Mr Sarkozy's projected Mediterranean Union by voting against EU subsidies, so much the better.

For, almost obscured by the publicity and paparazzi pictures, is the fact that Mr Sarkozy has a long-matured plan of what he aims to achieve in France and abroad. "I've had 30 years to think of what I'm going to do," he told an interviewer shortly after his election last year.

He may have been surprised, and infuriated, by his loss of popularity; he thought he had been elected with a clear mandate to modernise France, and that the French wouldn't mind a younger look and style to go with it. (They did, terribly; they wanted a traditional figure who would adopt a grand bedside manner while applying the forceps.)

But anyone discounting Mr Sarkozy as a four-year lame-duck president, facing opprobrium at home and abroad just like America's George W Bush, is missing the point. Mr Sarkozy is no family heir comfortably groomed for power, no École Nationale d'Administration upper civil servant gone into politics with a safety net and a network of supercilious grad school friends.

His own father, a Hungarian refugee from communism, told him, before leaving the household for a peripatetic life full of pretty women, that "with a name like yours, you'll never make it in French politics".

Mr Sarkozy got his start at the grassroots, handing out leaflets and organising young Gaullists. He snatched the city hall at Neuilly aged 28, when his political mentor had to undergo a routine operation. He has always made enemies, and has often been unpopular.

In 1995, he briefly considered quitting politics, after he left Jacques Chirac's side to support his Right-wing rival Edouard Balladur's bid for the presidency, only to see Mr Balladur trounced by the more experienced Mr Chirac. At the time, newspaper cartoons showed Mr Sarkozy as a diminutive, cartoonish traitor, and it seemed his reputation could not recover. But it did, as he forged alliances, seized the Gaullist party from Mr Chirac's remote stewardship, and eventually defeated rivals to stand alone as the Right's presidential hopeful in the polls.

After the 2005 riots, when he was interior minister, the Left, attempting to whip up an "Anyone But Sarkozy" front, painted him as a quasi-fascist and racist. This doesn't work so well today, now that he has appointed six former Left-wingers to the most diverse cabinet in French history. Mr Sarkozy is no Margaret Thatcher. He is a man of conviction, but more of a pragmatist than an ideologue. Head-on conflict doesn't work with the French, so he would rather avoid it when possible.

He believes France will suffer fatally in the global competition stakes without reforms. But he wants to slide these past the unions by agreeing to any number of temporary sweeteners, so long as his real goals - structural reform of France's too-generous social and welfare net and of the health and state school services, plus lower tax on businesses and services - remain intact.

This strategy succeeded last November, when Mr Sarkozy defused a threatened transport strike while reaching an agreement on a common retirement age for public- and private-sector workers. And even as his party was dealt a resounding slap in last Sunday's local elections, an opinion poll found that two-thirds of voters want reforms to be implemented faster. Seated in their collective dentist's chair, the French seemed to beg for the drill - and for the whole thing to be over with already.

Mr Sarkozy has now announced that he will increase the pace of reforms, to derisive comments from the Left. He can, however, brush these aside because at national level he has only a divided opposition with which to contend.

The recent "bling-bling" anti-Sarkozy campaign was waged on style, not substance, precisely because the Socialist party is still split between two leadership contenders (Ségolène Royal, whom Mr Sarkozy beat to become president, and Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris), has no platform, and can't manage to make peace with the Greens and three small Trotskyite parties whose votes it crucially needs.

The president's real opponents are within his own party, where the old anti-Atlanticist Gaullists, horrified by what they see as a betrayal of France's non-aligned tradition, are hoping that a challenger will emerge to stand against him for the Gaullist candidacy in the 2012 presidential election.

One such might be Alain Juppé, mayor of Bordeaux and a former prime minister; another possibility is the former foreign secretary and prime minister, Dominique de Villepin. But Mr Sarkozy's bet is that he has more political experience, and more experience of life's reversals, than any of his rivals.

Watch him this week as he proclaims a "new fraternity" between France and Britain, in a carefully honed speech to both Houses of Parliament. He has been knocked down before, but never out.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2008

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

Suburbs plan disappoints Nicolas Sarkozy

When Fadela Amara, the popular 43-year-old junior urban affairs minister, announces France's much-awaited "Hope for the Suburbs" plan on Tuesday at Vaulx-en-Velin, a working-class suburb of Lyons, she will be flanked by several members of the Cabinet.

But not by President Nicolas Sarkozy, as was initially intended.

This is because the plan is known to have deeply disappointed the president, to the extent that he last week quietly commissioned a trans-cabinet task force to come up with more radical and wide-ranging reforms for his own presentation of "the details of the suburbs plan", scheduled for 8 February.

A famously forceful interior minister under Jacques Chirac, Mr Sarkozy was branded an authoritarian (and worse) by the opposition because of his often-misquoted remark on ridding dangerous neighbourhoods of "scum".

In fact, the word was never meant to refer to all young inhabitants of the troubled areas, only the rioters, and was indeed first used by local residents themselves during a Sarkozy walkabout at Argenteuil in October 2005.

Mr Sarkozy was elected on a platform which included finding solutions to the ethnic and unemployment problems which led to France's month-long 2005 race riots. His first move was to assemble France's first multi-cultural cabinet, with several representatives of what are known here as "visible minorities", instead of the lily-white governments, both Left and Right, which had until then ruled the country.

Ms Amara is a French-Algerian socialist alderwoman from the Auvergne capital, Clermont-Ferrand, and a vigorous feminist activist who founded the Ni Putes, Ni Soumises (Neither Whores, Nor Submissives) movement in response to forced marriages, violence and gang rapes of women in France's worst areas.

She is also perhaps the most visible representative of "the new France" in the cabinet and has retained the colourful accent and expressions of the banlieues, breaking into Arabic on occasion when visiting sink estates.

Unlike Rachida Dati, the glamorous and well-spoken justice minister who is the first woman of North African background to hold a key ministerial position, Ms Amara has never set foot in a Dior shop, cuts her hair in her own bathroom, and still lives in a council flat in a working-class part of Paris rather than use her ministry's official residence near the Eiffel Tower.

She is regularly rated as one of the three most popular ministers in the cabinet and a television profile of her screened in prime time last Thursday garnered some of the evening's best ratings.

She, therefore, cannot be allowed to fail, and will stand next to the Mr Sarkozy when he finally details "her" plan's measures in three weeks' time.

Tuesday's exercise in Vaulx-en-Velin will essentially be yet another of those symbolic numbers so beloved of French politicians, in which a number of piecemeal, if well-meaning, measures will be thrown at the assembled media to show that Something Is Being Done.

Almost all of the initiatives announced in Ms Amara's Madame Figaro interview yesterday are already in operation, some for several years. Her ministry doesn't have much of a budget of its own, and is dependent on the co-operation of other, more powerful administrations, such as education, transport and health, to effect any kind of significant change.

Until the Elysée stepped in last week, Ms Amara's abrasive personality and the relative inexperience of her chief aides had not earned her much goodwill among other mandarins.

Contrary to public perception, a great deal of money has always been thrown at France's most disenfranchised areas - though not always judiciously. Even more is regularly spent on infrastructure - transport, communications, public conveniences and post offices - in a country where long-term state investment is tantamount to a lay religion. (One politically incorrect testimony to the excellence of French public transport is the sudden drop in petty crime in city centres whenever the transport unions have called a strike.)

Meanwhile, a bevy of France's supercilious but competent technocrats are now slaving away at finding radical ways of facing the stark reality that between 15 and 20 per cent of France's population live in semi-ghettoes where a de facto apartheid already exists, especially when it comes to housing and schools.

Solutions, they feel, should be radical. For instance, ending social housing policies to replace them with personalised grants so that poorer citizens can actually look for homes on the open market. This, however, would mean dismantling a entire bureaucracy which can be confidently expected to be obstructive.

If anyone can do the job - and half a dozen similar ones - it's Nicolas Sarkozy himself.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2008

Cécilia Sarkozy may change France more

The Sarkozy divorce news finally came out last Thursday, on the day of the first mass transport strike in France since 1995. With its terse press release, the Elysée was obviously intent on burying bad headlines.

If it had been Britain, it would clearly have been an attempt to hide a politician's embarrassing matrimonial breakdown. Not in France. Media-savvy Sarko was using his high-profile divorce to deflect attention from the much more harmful consequences of an industrial dispute. That is a key difference between our two countries.

The truth is that while we voters here in France like a good gossip, we're about as likely to judge our leaders on personal transgressions as to expect them not to have affairs. It's when they don't have any that we worry.

Ever since the time of Robespierre and the Revolution, the French have been deeply distrustful of "incorruptible" politicians who lead a blameless life. Since Nicolas Sarkozy is a keep-fit-crazed teetotaller, he's almost obliged to have an eye for the ladies — he'd be highly suspect otherwise.

Nor did anyone mistake the final split as having been caused by both Nicolas's and Cécilia's affairs during their 11-year marriage (and nearly 20 years of life together).

Yes, she left him two years ago to spend a couple of months in New York with a high-profile event organiser, and has been spotted more recently with a French novelist.

Yes, even before his carefully-leaked affair with a Le Figaro political journalist – in some ways a tit-for-tat designed to show Cécilia he was emphatically not pining – Sarko was well-known for office flings, usually with comely staffers (one of whom, some 15 years back, was Jacques Chirac's daughter Claude).

But none of this is the stuff French divorces are made of. Most couples are expected to weather a significant amount of straying.

The example comes from the top. Not a single Fifth Republic president, with the possible exception of Georges Pompidou, who was unfashionably in love with his wife, refrained from playing the field — not even De Gaulle, whose discreet affairs took place long before he reached the Elysée at 68, and are not common knowledge.

Mitterrand used to go on the pull with his Foreign Minister, Roland Dumas, thereby cheating on both his wife, Danielle, and his regular mistress, Anne Pingeot. This was well-known in Paris, if not printed because of stringent French privacy laws.

So when 92 per cent of respondents told a Le Parisien poll yesterday that their opinion of Nicolas Sarkozy won't be affected one way or another by his divorce, why, you might ask, are there still such laws in the first place?

First, because until recently, hypocrisy was seen as one of the cardinal virtues in France. George Orwell may have coined the term, but we live doublespeak every day.

In a country where apologies are seen as an unforgivable admission of weakness, it's the (relative) whiteness of one's lies that sometimes gets questioned, not the practice itself.

To the French, the resignation of Lord Browne from BP (or, for that matter, Bill Clinton's impeachment) was incomprehensible.

Of course Browne lied about his sex life — if anything, evidence of good sense and his capacity to run a major multinational oil company (or a superpower) with the required amount of sophistication in a difficult world.

It's frankness that gets you in hot water here. My grandfather, Marius Moutet, a former cabinet minister and senator, never made a secret of his complicated private life, which included two (consecutive) wives and an official mistress whom he regularly took to state functions.

He recognised all his children from his various women, so I spent happy holidays in the family house in the Drôme countryside with my cousins and their assorted parents.

Later, I found out that his openness cost him the presidency of the Fourth Republic back in 1953, when the President was elected by the two Houses.

It took 13 ballots to reach a decision; my grandfather's name came up a number of times, always to be shot down with "Monsieur Moutet's private life does not bear inspection." What his colleagues meant was not that he had women but that, unlike them, he didn't lie about it.

Second, the French don't like to admit, even to themselves, their guilty pleasures. No, not sex, that's absolutely fine. But taking a prurient (or what is seen as prurient by our tame standards) interest in others' private lives is the sin you never own up to.

It's not that there isn't an interest — tabloids and trashy weeklies, which set aside a hefty budget for fines and illegally expose celebrities' private lives, sell more copies than all newspapers combined.

It's like a taste for American fast food (superciliously foodie France has the largest number of McDonald's franchises per capita outside the US): unacknowledged, shameful, irreconcilable with the lofty image of ourselves we need to hold.

Yet this may be changing at last, and for that we have both 2007 presidential candidates to thank. This last election was contested by two candidates whose domestic relationships were about to implode, and have, indeed, now done so.

More significant, perhaps, is that both Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy were outsiders who relentlessly cultivated personal publicity to dislodge their respective parties' heavyweights. This made their complacently-touted private lives fair game to the media, as legitimate political coverage.

When Ségolène publicly kicked her partner, François Hollande, out of their home, his longstanding affair with a Paris-Match political journalist was reported in one of the celebrity mags.

Hollande and his girlfriend duly sued for invasion of privacy. She was awarded damages, he wasn't — on the grounds that he had already paraded too much of his life for the media to be "harmed" by the invasion of his privacy.

But nowhere does the law actually make such a distinction – and in a Roman-law country where the Civil Code counts for more than jurisprudence, and where judges are civil servants who are not meant to make or amend the law, this is a groundbreaking ruling.

Expect, therefore, more coverage of French public figures' private lives in the future — but not much more accountability. This being a Latin and a Catholic country, it's money that can harm a politician's career – not just corruption, but simple familiarity with the ways and means of the rich.

Sarko's brief summer holiday on a billionaire businessman friend's yacht cost him far more in popularity ratings than anything he and Cécilia could cook up. (The hospitality of Tony Blair's rich cronies would have destroyed his image if he'd been French.)

As for Cécilia, who once boasted that she "didn't have one drop of French blood in her" (born in France, she's of Spanish-Russian-Romanian extraction), she probably wasn't as disingenuous as she sounded when, protesting that she had left because she couldn't stand the glare of publicity, she nonetheless gave interviews on Friday.

"One day, you no longer feel at home in the couple. The couple is no longer the essential thing in your life. It doesn't work any more. The reasons are inexplicable," she said.

In truth, she left because she was bored. She'd done it once before, dropping her famous, older, TV presenter first husband for the 30-year-old Sarkozy.

This is part of the fascination she undeniably exerts on the French, and very likely on Sarko himself — they don't understand someone running off just when they've reached the top. Unable to fake interest for too long, she's a bolter. It is, let's face it, a type more classically British than French.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2007