Showing posts with label Nicolas Sarkozy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nicolas Sarkozy. Show all posts

Monday, October 11, 2010

Sarko's Vatican show

A profound principle of the French Republic is the separation between the State and the Church. Consequently, many French observers were shocked to see Nicolas Sarkozy behaving outwardly at the Vatican this weekend, in front of cameras, as if he were there on a private religious pilgrimage.

He was seen crossing himself several times, and even mumbling a prayer... which doesn't sound a lot like the everyday Sarko we all know. In any case, many citizens feel that such behavior is inappropriate on the part of the president of a laic republic such as France. It's all the more annoying when we recall that Sarko was visiting the pope primarily with a view to making amends for recent French deportation operations directed at Gypsies.

Since becoming president, Nicolas Sarkozy has had several opportunities of strutting around with celebrities. (He even married one.) He recently told journalists an amusing anecdote about his visit to Buckingham Palace in March 2008.

Apparently, while getting transported around by royal coach in London's chilly air, Sarko had developed a terrible thirst. As soon as he was seated alongside the queen in the magnificent banqueting hall, our parched president was given what he thought was a glass of water. So he gulped it down in one fell swoop. In fact, it wasn't water; it was gin. And, as we all know, Nicolas had given up alcoholic beverages back in the days when he was a young man full of dreams about becoming the president of France. Consequently, the glass of gin had an immediate effect upon him. Sarko told the journalists that he knew he was somewhat inebriated when he heard himself asking his gracious neighbor whether Her Majesty ever got bored by her job. "Well yes, certainly," replied the queen, "but I never admit it."

I wonder what they gave him to drink at the Vatican this weekend. Holy water?

Monday, August 16, 2010

Gift idea for a president

In May 2012, France will be holding its five-yearly presidential election. For the moment, we don't know whether or not Nicolas Sarkozy will be a candidate. In any case, I think it would be nice if people were to start thinking about the kind of gift we could offer the president to celebrate the end of his first five years in office. In fact, if I've brought this subject up today, it's because I've just had a good idea for a great gift, which wouldn't even be all that expensive, if we were all to chip in.

A month before the election, on 10 April 2012, the world will be commemorating the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, just four days into her maiden voyage, after she hit an iceberg.

I've just heard that a British cruise ship, the Balmoral, will be leaving Southampton on 8 April 2012 with the aim of following the itinerary of the Titanic, all the way to New York. The vessel will be carrying living descendants of victims and survivors of the disaster, and it will be halting for a while at the very spot where the great ship went down.

Now, Nicolas Sarkozy has always expressed his admiration for the New World, and even takes pleasure (so it's said) in being designated as "Sarko, the American". The Balmoral will be dropping in at Cherbourg (France) before setting out across the Atlantic. And this will be happening just a month before the end of Nicolas Sarkozy's presidency. I simply suggest that we all get together and raise enough cash to offer Sarko a ticket on this voyage. If all goes well, and there are no mishaps during the trip (one never knows…), he would have ample time to get back to France before the election. In that case, the very idea of his having survived a reenactment (as it were) of the voyage of the Titanic would have a precious impact upon the president's future image and heritage.

Sarkozy wounded by a word

In a recent issue of his Marianne weekly, the distinguished journalist Jean-François Kahn chose a very strong word to designate Nicolas Sarkozy. He referred to him as the "voyou de la République".

[Click the image to access the article, in French.]

This time-honored colloquial term is derived from the Latin via (street, road). A voyou is a hoodlum who hangs about on the streets, often a loutish delinquent.

[TRIVIAL ANECDOTE: In my French family, this word evokes a harmless verbal encounter, long ago, between my charming mother-in-law and me, at a time when my French was not very subtle. Feeling that her questions pried mildly into my personal existence, I reacted with a smile: "Madame, je ne suis pas un voyou."]

Kahn's harsh words concerning the president are motivated above all by Sarkozy's treatment of recent urban unrest in the nearby city of Grenoble. The police shot and killed a young bandit who had just returned from an armed attack of a casino in the region. Companions of the deceased bandit then assaulted police forces and behaved riotously for several days and nights. Apparently judging that the rioters belonged to families with origins in the Maghreb (prior to becoming naturalized French citizens), the president dared to evoke the notion that offenders of this kind might be deprived of their French nationality. Now, you don't need to be a expert in French and international law to realize that this idea goes against the grain of certain fundamental republican principles: above all, the legal equality of all French citizens, regardless of their origins. It goes without saying that any attempt to change this principle in France would immediately bring to mind the ugly epoch of Pétain and Laval, when the authorities made a distinction between "pure" French people and those with foreign origins…

In Sarkozy's reactions to the violence in Grenoble, he gave the impression that the killing of a French police officer is "worse", from a legal viewpoint, than, say, the murder of an old lady. If the first killer happened to be of Maghrebi origins, he could be condemned to a stateless existence, whereas the murder of the old lady would remain French. In his anger, Sarkozy even evoked the curious idea that parents could be punished for the delinquency of their offspring.

A few years ago, this same weekly, Marianne, contested strongly the idea that Sarkozy might be compared with George W Bush, as a dogmatic and sectarian ideologist. On the contrary, Sarkozy was designated as follows: "He is a pragmatic and talented Bonapartiste (the best candidate put forward by the Right for ages). He is capable, if he thinks it's in his personal interests, of stigmatizing the 'big bosses' or criticizing capitalism. However, the giant proportions of his swollen ego, the amplification of his self-adoration, and the force of his almost unlimited quest for power and control are close to madness. And they represent a threat for our conception of democracy and the republic."

The present article by Jean-François Kahn gives the impression that Sarkozy will be judged severely for his excessive reactions in the aftermath of the Grenoble rioting. It's important to understand that Kahn states unequivocally that the president is certainly neither a Pétainiste, a racist, a xenophobe nor a Fascist. No, he's simply an urban delinquent, a voyou. Here are Kahn's conclusions concerning Sarkozy, which I've translated freely into English:

"No ideological or ethical constraint ever reins him in. No transcendental principle or moral imperative ever affects him. No Freudian super-ego ever stops him in his tracks. To conquer and to stay in power, he is capable of anything. Absolutely anything at all… in the style of a suburban gangster. In fact, equipped with the talent that such a mentality requires, and the necessary sense of taking risks, Nicolas Sarkozy is a voyou. He is a suburban gang-leader, whose suburb happens to be Neuilly. [Neuilly is an elegant residential neighborhood on the Western outskirts of Paris.] Seen in this light, it is typical of Sarkozy to 'declare war', in all kinds of situations, against rival gangs!"

It was quite unusual that an August issue of a political weekly should have created such a stir, when most French people are away on holidays. I don't have the impression that things will quieten down soon for the president. Henceforth, in evaluating Sarkozy, there'll be two time references: before and after Grenoble 2010.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Chirac style of handling rumors

An Australian article sent to me by my old friend Bruce Hudson was my first encounter with rumors about Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni [display]. There was however a basic error in that article when it evoked "the French media in a frenzy over speculation the singer and her husband are both having extra-marital affairs". The truth of the matter was that the rumor hadn't really surfaced at all in France at that time, so nobody was in a frenzy. Today, it's the president and his entourage (including his wife) who are in a frenzy trying awkwardly to quell tardily this storm in a presidential teacup. And they're simply not doing a very good job of stamping out this silliness. Sarkozy's weak point (his Achilles heel) is emotions. He never stops getting bowled over by emotional matters, which often get the better of his intellectual powers. Consequently, we cannot exclude the possibility that the people who launch rumors such as this are indeed smart guys who know exactly how to lead the president into a sticky mess.

This fellow, named Pierre Charon, is in charge of communications at the Elysées Palace. It goes without saying that he's a little upset by the apparently empty rumors that have been circulating throughout the world about the president and his wife. As for Pierre Charon, he's convinced that these rumors are part of a conspiracy. Funnily enough, back at the time when Jacques Chirac was the mayor of Paris, Pierre Charon was handling communications at the city hall. The weekly Nouvel Observateur of 29 September 2009 related a lovely anecdote revealing the art of Chirac in the face of rumors. The mayor found himself face-to-face with his director of communications at a cocktail party.

Chirac : "Monsieur Charon, I want you to accompany me back to the city hall."

Charon : "Certainly, Monsieur le Maire."

The two men got into the mayor's official automobile.

Chirac : "Monsieur Charon, I want you to do me a favor."

Charon : "Certainly, Monsieur le Maire."

Chirac : "I would like you to stop spreading gossip about my daughter Claude getting into bed with every guy in Paris." There was a long silence, then Chirac tapped his driver on the shoulder, saying: "Monsieur Charon will be getting out at the next red traffic light."

Jacques Chirac was a classy gentleman, so different to screaming Sarko, who wears his boring heart on his shoulder.

POST SCRIPTUM: Happily, in French, there's a nice succinct way of saying "I don't give a screw". The magic French formula for expressing explicitly one's near-to-zero concern for the private life of the president and his first lady: "Je m'en fous."

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Sarkozy profile in English

You'll have to listen to this quickly, because somebody will surely get around to fixing the bug. You'll hear a woman reading out the English version of the personal profile of Nicolas Sarkozy. OK, that's nice for web users who can't read, but the female voice is pronouncing the English words as if they were French. Hilarious...



Thursday, January 28, 2010

Smear trial

I've already mentioned a messy high-profile court trial in Paris referred to as the Clearstream affair, because of the name of a Luxembourg bank [display]. Nicolas Sarkozy saw himself as the victim of a smear campaign in which Jacques Chirac's former prime minister Dominique de Villepin seemed to have played an evil role.

Sarkozy had even committed the fault, at the start of the trial, of publicly stigmatizing DDV (as Villepin is often called) as "guilty". And he had also threatened to have the culprit hung up (metaphorically, we assume) on a butcher's meat hook. Well, the verdict was announced this morning, and DDV was cleared of all charges. Needless to say, this outcome is a significant moral blow for the president.

Sarkozy reacted by announcing that he did not intend to lodge an appeal. On the surface, that looked like a charitable decision, designed to end the feud and bring about appeasement. In Sarkozy's announcement, however, there's just one tiny mistake of a legal nature, which is quite unexpected in the mouth of a former professional barrister. In this kind of trial, French law simply does not allow the plaintiff (seeking symbolic damages) to lodge an appeal. This blunder, while of no practical significance, is surprising. Is the president flustered? Does he need a holiday break?

BREAKING NEWS: The state prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin has just announced that an appeal (emanating, not from Sarkozy, but from the prosecutor's office) will indeed be lodged. It will be interesting to see whether this extra display of judicial ferocity will have a favorable influence upon Villepin's thinly-disguised plan to be an opponent of Sarkozy in the presidential election of 2012. The former prime minister might end up being cast in a positive underdog role. Having said this, I should point out that the term "underdog" doesn't sound quite right in the case of a distinguished Gaullist gentleman and former French diplomat whose full name is Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin. Son of a senator, Villepin is not in fact a member of the French aristocracy. It was only during the 19th century that this high-sounding name was concocted out of the quite ordinary surnames of paternal and maternal ancestors. But his elegant style as an orator, his noble political principles (concerning, for example, the US invasion of Iraq) and his silvery mane of hair make him out to be a most racy underdog.

Friday, October 30, 2009

Jacques Chirac to stand trial

For the first time ever in the history of the Fifth French Republic, a former president will be put on trial. It's alleged that, when he was the mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac used public funds to pay the salaries of 21 alleged municipal employees who were in fact his political agents.

Shortly after learning that Chirac would be brought to trial, former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal provided a surprising demonstration of the unusual state of current political feelings in France by saying publicly on radio that Chirac should be left in peace. One has the impression that the regal behavior of Nicolas Sarkozy—including above all his recent legal pursuit of Chirac's former prime minister Dominique de Villepin—is causing a lot of people to look back upon Chirac's presidency with fond nostalgia.

On 30 December 1941 in Ottawa, Winston Churchill evoked defeatist French generals who had expressed their belief that, within three weeks, England would have her neck wrung, by the Nazis, like a chicken. He pronounced simple words that drew applause from members of the Canadian parliament: "Some chicken, some neck."

In the context of the Clearstream affair, Sarkozy recently blurted out that the individual who tried to smear him through falsified computer listings would be "hung up on a butcher's hook".

Seeing the popularity of Dominique de Villepin, who's starting to look like a presidential candidate for 2012, I'm tempted to paraphrase Churchill: "Some carcass, some cut of meat."

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Sarko's son not in airship

A few days ago, there was consternation in Paris because of rumors that the president's son might be aloft, all on his own, in a giant airship named the Bling Blimp soaring over the continuation of the Champs Elysées to the west of the capital.

When the airship came back down to earth, everybody was immensely relieved to discover that the youth was not inside. Apparently he had been hiding all along in a luxury penthouse at an unknown address somewhere in Neuilly. In a TV declaration on Friday night, Filius rejected suggestions that this happening might have been a presidential reality show orchestrated by Pater. Doubts subsist however, fueled by the lad's fuzzy reply to a journalist's question about the hypothesis of a conspiracy involving the father and the son: "If your question is whether I talked with the president, the answer is no. If your question is whether I talked with my father, the answer is yes."

We've always imagined that the chief was unique, but he's visualized here as a duality. And, since the son is said to be a clone, that gives rise to a trinity. Clearly, this affair is getting out of hand. Maybe the whole thing was a religious hoax of a new kind, designed to replace alleged apparitions of the Virgin (which have gone out of fashion)...

Monday, October 12, 2009

Don't tell Mum...

... that Dad hopes to get me a fabulous job. She thinks I'm a struggling student trying to plan my future in an egalitarian republic.

Members of the French political and business world are upset. They're astounded that the 23-year-old son of the French president is being offered a professional position on a silver plate: chief of the organization that governs the great economic zone of La Défense, on the western outskirts of Paris.

Yesterday it was bling-bling: a mere fantasy. Today it looks more like nepotism, which is generally viewed by genuine republicans as a fault.

Meanwhile, there's a new French Twitter game known as Jean Sarkozy partout (Jean Sarkozy everywhere), which consists of imagining our favorite father's son in all kinds of novel situations. If I were an adept (which I'm not, since the brevity of Twitter is definitely not my style), here's a possible contribution: Jean Sarkozy wants to acquire the Vatican as a future retirement village for his dad and step-mum. Or another: Spielberg signs up Sarkozy Junior for an avant-garde version of the Prodigal Son. Music: the star's step-mother. Promotion: his father.

POST SCRIPTUM THOUGHT: Just as the Nobel for Peace was awarded to President Barack for the future wars he's going to end, I reckon that our Prince Jean, Dauphin de la Défense, should have received the Nobel in Economics for all the marvels he'll surely be introducing, as soon as possible, into the heart of French industry and business. The two men are brimming over with potential.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

French presidents are funny fellows

Instead of "funny", I was about to write "horny". Thinking of male political candidates eager to win (girl)friends and influence people, Confucious might have said: Every election is an erection. But it would be a mistake to highlight the purely sexual aspects of what I have to say. In French presidential funniness, horniness is no doubt a significant element, but it's not the sole driving force.

You can never predict what a French president (or ex-president) might do next. Look at Nicholas Sarkozy, for example. Who would have imagined that, shortly after his election, when his legally-wedded first lady walked out on him, he would promptly get himself linked, for the better or for the worse, with a young Italian pop singer? Today, he's involved in a different kettle of fish: the Clearstream affair.

Using all his presidential might, the French president is currently pursuing, in the law courts, a former prime minister, Dominique de Villepin. In a nutshell, Sarkozy claims that somebody tried to frame him, with electoral ambitions in mind, in the context of a Swiss-based banking scandal. So, there'll be lots of legal fun and games in France (for TV audiences) over the next month.

Concerning Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, I can't figure out yet whether the funniness is basically primitive horniness, or whether there might have been (past tense) something far worse at stake, such as a fuzzy desire to be accepted as a vigorous potential pretender to the British throne. For me personally, if were called upon to choose between Prince Charles (accompanied by Camilla) and Giscard (accompanied by Anne-Aymone), I would hesitate for a long moment. All these people have the stuff of monarchy... but there's an obvious passport obstacle in the case of Giscard. Maybe he was trying to solve this problem by means of a union with Lady Diana. I haven't had time to examine all the details of the situation, but I would imagine that the following scenario could have been enacted at that epoch:

Phase 1: Giscard, having seduced Diana, obtains a divorce from Anne-Aymone. The president can therefore marry his English princess, and they have a splendid son, say Nicholas Dominique d'Estaing. Automatically, at the desire of Diana, Giscard and their baby are naturalized as British citizens.

Phase 2: The English-speaking people of the planet (even in faraway outposts of the ancient empire such as my native land) are so overcome by the sheer beauty of this new entente cordiale between England and France that they launch a plebiscite aimed at replacing Charles by this glorious dauphin named Nicholas Dominique d'Estaing.

Phase 3: In fuzzy circumstances coordinated by the efforts of the European community in Brussels, with a little help from George Bush (who never really understood the possible consequences of what he was doing), Elizabeth accepts the idea that the next king of England should be Nicholas I.

Ah, if only events had happened like that! The world at large would have had fabulous reality resources for TV, and idiots like me would have been able to talk at length about these celebrities on the Internet.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Sarko-slanted persuasion

The French government has the right, indeed the duty, to persuade citizens that they should take the trouble to visit the polling booths on June 7 for the European elections. And it's normal that they use a video clip to get their persuasive message across. Naturally, any evocation of Europe is going to allude to a long list of legendary political figures who have played a major role in the building of Europe: Robert Schuman, Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Georges Pompidou, Simone Veil, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl, Jacques Delors, Jacques Chirac...

At the end of the video clip, the briefest glimpse of a certain French would-be Euro-historical personage appears to be premature...



The Socialists Harlem Désir and Benoît Hamon have asked France's Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (Audiovisual High Council) to suspend the broadcasting of this video clip, which they see as blatant publicity for candidates from the political party of Nicolas Sarkozy.

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Sarkozy insists upon results in London

Nicolas Sarkozy has made it perfectly clear that, if the outcome of London's G20 summit is not acceptable, he will simply get up and leave. "The crisis is too serious to permit having a summit meeting for nothing." Sarkozy is insisting, above all, on the installation of regulatory procedures in the international financial domain. This desire for regulations is shared by the German chancellor Angela Merkel, and also by the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, who declared: "One of the goals, accepted at Washington, is that no institution or major financial entity should remain beyond control and supervision. That is what I hope to see confirmed and consolidated in London."

Furthermore, as France's minister of Finance Christine Lagarde has pointed out, the French president is adamant that tax havens throughout the world must be eradicated. The latest rumors, expressed on French TV this evening, are optimistic, in the sense that Britain's prime minister Gordon Brown has echoed Sarkozy's belief that tax havens should cease to exist in the modern world. The big question, of course, is whether Barack Obama will be prepared to acknowledge the priority of these European themes.

In France, current events have caught up with the G20 syndrome. It was revealed today that several large French corporations appear to have been using a bank in Liechtenstein to whitewash money that should have normally been declared in France as taxable profits. In this context, news broadcasts in France today evoked the whistleblower, Heinrich Kieber, who was responsible for unleashing a planetary affair by revealing the identity of tax fraudsters in the above-mentioned bank. For the last twelve months, there has been a persistent rumor, aired once again today on French TV, that this wealthy gentleman—formerly a skilled data-processing professional—has ended up in a luxury hideout, under an assumed identity, down in a big sunburned country in the Southern Hemisphere.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Rural roots

Once, when I was chatting about family-history research with my father-in-law Jacques Mafart, he told me that such investigations would inevitably be dull and fruitless in the case of his ancestors. "Although I don't have many facts concerning my early ancestors in Brittany, I'm fairly sure they were all members of ancient Breton farming families who rarely moved far away from the villages where they grew up." As an Australian, whose ancestors had left the Old World and sailed out to the Antipodes (just as I had made the reverse trip—in largely more comfortable conditions—in 1962), I wasn't accustomed to the notion of ancestors remaining fixed in the same place and leading the same kind of agricultural existence for generation after generation. I was conditioned into considering that ancestors were primarily, if not necessarily, pioneers who spent their time jumping from one spot on the globe to another, and changing constantly their lifestyles. To put it bluntly, in spite of all my personal family-history research, I had never really learned the profound everyday sense of the concept of roots. Rural roots...

Napoleon Bonaparte described England (borrowing an expression invented by the Scottish economist Adam Smith) as a nation of shopkeepers. I don't know if anybody got around to making such a sweeping generalization, but France might have been described, at that time, as a nation of farmers.

Today, as you cross the French countryside in high-speed trains that are a modern marvel of engineering, you can still see to what extent France has remained a great agricultural nation. Rural France is a vast patchwork quilt of pastures, fields, woods and vineyards, crossed by a dense networks of highways, roads, lanes and tracks. Seen from the windows of a train, the French countryside is a splendid visual poem, evolving subtly at all times of the year. Personally, whenever I travel by train in France, I never bother to bring along something to read, because it's always an intense visual pleasure for me to spend my time watching the magnificent landscapes. The various buildings on each farm property, even when glimpsed fleetingly for a few seconds, tell stories. You obtain at a glance a train's-eye view of what kind of a family it is: their basic agricultural activities, their relative prosperity or poverty, the nature and state of their residence, their life style...

With roots like that, it's hardly surprising that one of the biggest happenings of the year in Paris is the agricultural show.

For politicians, it's a must to show up and be photographed at the Paris agricultural show... otherwise they run the risk of losing the support of the vast hordes of electors with rural roots, including those who still live on the land. In years to come, no doubt, politicians will find it more worthwhile, from an efficiency viewpoint, to be seen at technology shows. For the moment, though, it still pays to drop in to the biggest farm in France. Jacques Chirac—seen here in 1975, when he was the prime minister—played a major role in elevating this annual visit to the rank of a sacred ritual.

Charles de Gaulle had evoked jokingly the difficulties of governing correctly and calmly a nation that produces 246 varieties of cheese. Chirac, on the other hand, took pleasure in taking the reins of a nation with countless varieties of cattle, horses, sheep, goats, etc. Young people laughed at Chirac when he referred to a computer mouse (apparently an unknown item in his personal environment) by the rural term designating a field mouse. But everybody forgave the French president for not being a computer geek. On the other hand, people would have been discouraged without the reassuring image of Chirac fondling farm animals, and chatting with rural folk as if he were one of them... which he was, in a way.

For Nicolas Sarkozy, the obligation of visiting the agricultural show, and trying to caress tenderly the nose of a cow as if it were a woman, is a cross he must bear.

The president knows full well that nobody in France is likely to imagine their president as a rural lad, so he doesn't have to take himself too seriously... which is fine for everybody, since the phenomenon of Sarko taking himself seriously is even more unpleasant than stepping into fresh cow shit.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Scapegoat

"And the Goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a Land not inhabited." [Leviticus 16:22]

When there's trouble in Sarkozia, Nicolas needs a scapegoat. On 12 January, during the president's visit to the Norman town of Saint-Lô, there was trouble in the form of rowdy demonstrations.

Not to be outdone by Dubya, Sarko even succeeded in collecting a couple of old shoes.

Logically, according to Sarkozian mathematics, somebody would have to pay. This morning, the right man in the right place was found: the republican prefect in that corner of Normandy, Jean Charbonniaud. The nice thing in this kind of situation is that the poor chap didn't actually get sacked. That would be unthinkable in the case of such a distinguished servant of the French Republic. No, he got suddenly transferred to a new job, as a member of a prestigious state committee somewhere in the backwoods of Paris: a republican version of Purgatory... or Coventry, as they say in England.

A Norman politician considered that the prefect had been discarded by the president like a used Kleenex. The Centrist leader François Bayrou described Sarkozy's manner of getting rid of the prefect as the "prerogative of a prince". In my opinion, this kind of Sarkozian act is on a par with shooting a messenger who brings bad news.

BREAKING NEWS: A second scapegoat has been designated for this trivial affair. Philippe Bourgade, director of public security in the Manche department, has received a new appointment.


People throughout France have criticized Sarkozy's decision to blame these two civil servants for not taking adequate steps to prevent the president from encountering the protesters at St-Lô. Meanwhile, the distinguished journalist Alain Duhamel has put out a book that compares Sarko with a certain Corsican soldier, prompting the magazine Le Point to design its cover on this theme.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Union for the Mediterranean

It would be extraordinary, in many ways, if today's summit meeting organized by Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris were to be a prelude to success concerning the creation of a Union for the Mediterranean. Throughout history, this great sea in the middle of the planet Terra has been a place of violence.

As recently as 1962, when I first set foot in France, bombs were exploding in Paris as a final consequence of a terrible conflict between France and Algeria. Anecdote: I'll never forget hearing and seeing the outcome of an explosion, one February evening, opposite my hotel in the Rue des Ecoles, which destroyed a bookshop window into which I had been gazing a few minutes earlier.

For the moment, it's too early to guess whether Sarkozy's daring initiative might bear fruit.

On French TV this evening, Bashar Al-Assad was interviewed by the journalist Laurent Delahousse, and my overall impression was more positive than what I might have expected. The Syrian leader certainly sounds like a less bellicose man than his late father. Before the Mediterranean becomes a sea of peace, however, a lot of water will flow through the Strait of Gibraltar.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Ségolène in attack mode

The recent behavior of former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal has been unexpected, indeed disturbing. First, when everybody was jubilating about the release of Ingrid Betancourt, Ségolène threw a spanner in the works by declaring publicly that Nicolas Sarkozy had played no role whatsoever in that operation. In fact, Ségolène's opinion was justified. Like many observers, I was shocked when I saw Sarkozy making a TV appearance with Ingrid's children in tow, just an hour or so after the message of her release was flashed on our screens. But Ségolène's outspoken opinion on this affair struck many people as "politically incorrect", since Sarkozy had been attempting constantly to obtain the release of Ingrid Betancourt, but with no success.

More recently, Ségolène shocked many people when she suggested that a couple of criminal intrusions into her Paris flat might be linked in a causal manner to her public criticism of Sarkozy's style of reigning over France. In speaking in this way, she did in fact come very close to blaming the Sarkozy clan for a misdemeanor, but without supplying any explicit proofs for such an accusation.

Some of Sarkozy's political associates have suggested that Ségolène has "blown a fuse", and lost control of herself... but I'm not convinced that her detractors really believe what they're saying. It's quite obvious that Ségolène, faced with the phenomenon of Sarkozy, has decided deliberately to step up her carefully-planned provocations and move into attack mode, so that French citizens see her clearly, from now on, as an aggressive opponent of the president. There are no limits, as it were, to the ways and means by which she seeks to vent her anger against Sarkozy. In any case, as far as I'm concerned, Ségolène's anti-Sarkozian outbursts are perfectly logical and politically sound. There would be no point in her trying to be nice and polite with a protagonist such as Sarkozy. In any case, she's unlikely to get hurt, from a popularity viewpoint, by adopting a strategy that consists of being systematically nasty with respect to the president.

Friday, May 23, 2008

Official portrait

In Great Britain, where official portraits of royalty and other distinguished folk are a serious business, Cecil Beaton was one of the most celebrated photographers. Even here in the French Republic, the concept of official portraits exists, but solely for one individual: the president. Photos in this category have always amused me. Between an official portrait and an ordinary photo taken by a news photographer, there's the same difference as between the bright smiling face in my blog photo and me in the bathroom mirrror when I get up in the morning.

Now, the reason I've brought up this subject is that I'm happy to publish this photo, taken by Natacha last weekend, that corresponds ideally to what might be termed an official portrait of Sophia.

I have the impression that Sophia, reclining majestically upon her big wickerwork throne, is making an effort to look like a dignified dog. As if she'd just been elected president, or raised to the status of Royal Duchess of Gamone.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

A new story every day

Nicolas Sarkozy appears to be running France in much the same way that I write this blog. One tries constantly to imagine new themes, to tell new stories. Apparently, Sarko's communications specialists have convinced him that this is a good approach for a president of France who needs to convince the people that he's perpetually active, and doing something new. When I was a child, adults used to tell us: An apple a day keeps the doctor away. For Sarko, it's a story a day. Every 24 hours, with the help of his advisors, he invents a new tale to tell.

His latest theme is the history of slavery, as far as it affected France and her overseas territories. The president has decided spontaneously that this subject must be included in school curricula, and that the abolition of slavery will be commemorated annually, henceforth, on May 23.

French people recall the publicity of a celebrated department store in Paris: "A tout instant, il se passe quelque chose aux Galeries Lafayette." (At every moment, something happens at the Galeries Lafayette.) Nicolas Sarkozy behaves in the same spirit. But it's not at all certain that this behavior has made him popular. Nor is it certain that the challenges of France can be tackled ideally in this style.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Two heads of state

It's rare to see a photo of an encounter between the respective leaders of France and Australia.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd met up today at the NATO summit talks in Bucharest, Romania. Although Australia is not a member of NATO, the prime minister is attempting to persuade European nations to step up their participation in the conflict with the Taliban in Afghanistan. France was a founding member of NATO, but Charles de Gaulle decided to withdraw from the integrated military structure of the organization in 1966. France has nevertheless remained one of the five nations that finance three-quarters of the NATO budget.

France is, of course, one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. In that domain, Kevin Rudd was pleased to learn, from Sarkozy, that France will support Australia's candidacy for admission as an elected (temporary) member of the Security Council for the two-year period 2013-14. One has the impression that Rudd's Australia intends to play a more active role on the international scene, particularly in a European context.

In Bucharest, the French leader got back in contact with George W Bush. This encounter provided the US president with an opportunity for making yet another of those typically crazy declarations for which he is celebrated. In referring to Sarkozy's trip to America last November, Bush likened the Frenchman to... a reincarnation of Elvis Presley! Somebody should tell Bush that it's not Nicolas who sings, but rather his wife Carla. No, better still: Our French King of Bling should be persuaded into getting all dressed up and recording a karaoke version of one of the great hits of the King of Memphis, such as Love me tender or It's Now or Never. Such a video would make a delightful farewell gift for the US president when he leaves office.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Concept "bling-bling"

In November 1963 [date of Kennedy's assassination], when I started work as an assistant English teacher at the Lycée Henri IV in the ancient heart of the Latin Quarter in Paris, my closest friend happened to be an Italian colleague, the same age as me, named Benito Italiani. [Having nearly been christened Winston, I sympathized with the naming case of my friend.] As a typically naive Australian with zero worldly culture, I was surprised to learn from Benito that the concepts of right and left could be applied, not only to political people and situations, but to all kinds of everyday entities, contexts and events. For example, since we foreign students in Paris used to spend a lot of our time watching movies, I was particularly interested to learn from Benito that there were both right-wing and left-wing literature and films. Indeed, just as God had invented males and females, He had apparently gone on to organize the Cosmos into right-wing and left-wing things. And it was up to each of us (for reasons I could hardly be expected to understand at that time and place) to decide where we best fitted in.

Unfortunately, my Italian comrade was left with no time to attenuate a little my inbred Aussie ignorance, if not educate me in a broader sense. In the summer of 1964, I visited Benito and his American wife at their home in Pescara, on the Adriatic coast. In the following winter, I was shocked to learn by a letter from his wife that my friend had died in a skiing accident in the Apennine mountains of his native Abruzzo. Apparently Benito was an expert skier, who had the habit of venturing off the beaten track. At the base of a gentle slope, he slid into a concealed stream, and his skis got stuck. Another skier found him there, almost frozen, but was unable to set him free. He gave Benito a cigarette and dashed off to seek assistance. When they returned, Benito was slumped over on the snow, lifeless, and his unconsumed final cigarette had fallen from his lips.

Today, if he were still with us, I can imagine Benito informing me [with his charming Italian accent, which still rings in my ears] that the bling-bling concept is a universal phenomenon, which can be found in all kinds of individuals, from pop stars to presidents and princesses, and in everyday objects such as wristwatches, necklaces and computer mice. A legend concerning the origin of this expression is particularly amusing. It appears that "bling bling" is an onomatopoeia representing the jingling sound of abundant metallic jewelry. Well, a certain mohawk-haircut black American actor [a guy who once got shit belt out of him by Rocky] claims that he invented this behavior back in the days when he was a bouncer in a rough club. Every evening, there were brawls, and males tend to lose their jewelry in such circumstances. The Mohawk bouncer decided to pick up metal jewelry left lying around at the end of an evening's brawling, and exhibit it the next day by actually wearing it, so that rightful owners could reclaim it immediately at the door of the club. Nice, no?

Who on Earth [in France, let's say, to limit the research] could have had the sordid idea of referring to Nicolas Sarkozy, for the first time, as President Bling-bling? And why? I have the impression that this association has more to do with the glitzy-glinky atmosphere of a certain DisneyLand apparition than with wearing ostentatious Rolex watches... although the two contexts might combine their effects. Somebody said that Carla Bruni told a friend that she wanted a man "with nuclear power". Be this apocryphal [as it surely is] or not, the problem for fairytale people like the Sarkozy-Bruni couple is that onlookers are no longer concerned by the frontier between facts and fiction. Bling-bling, sing-song, thing-thong, ying-yong, ding-dong... Are French citizens in general still prepared to look upon Nicolas Sarkozy and the new first lady as serious individuals? I hope so, but I have my doubts.

Back in my Paris days, an awesome daily vision was the formidable construction known as the Conciergerie, with is massive torture tower, where a notorious Skeffington personage had once been imprisoned. The dungeons of this Seine-side fortress include the dismal dank cell where Marie-Antoinette, the wife of Louis XVI, was held. She was the mindless woman who suggested, when throngs of starving Parisians demanded bread, that they might eat cake.

When the hated Austrian princess was led from this cell, to be beheaded, the atmosphere was not exactly DisneyLand!

An impressive pageant on Marie-Antoinette has just opened in Paris, with assistance from the museum of Versailles, at the splendid Grand Palais. In this morning's press, a journalist has referred to Marie-Antoinette, cruelly and pointedly, as Queen Bling-bling.