Ewwww la la

All this, his poll numbers withstood–until Sarkozy fell in love. And that, he is discovering, is more politically perilous than almost anything else he has done. It turns out that an open romance–as opposed to quiet cheating on your long-suffering wife (or possibly not so long-suffering; the French are no Neanderthals when it comes to women’s rights, they’ll be glad to tell you); in particular, a romance exposing M. le président as the kind of klutz who lays his heart (in Dior diamonds and pink spinels) at the feet of a famous beauty within two months of a very public divorce–is unpardonable.

Hiding affairs, lying about infidelities, is par for the course in French political life: It’s expected. Of course Bill Clinton lied about his sex life, the French will tell you. (There is no French equivalent for the so useful “Duh!”) The press and the inside-the-périphérique crowd knew all about Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s photographer girlfriend and Ferrari crashes with milk trucks in the wee hours, about Mitterrand’s second household and “hidden” daughter, about Chirac’s flings with a French-Italian film star and a Japanese gallery owner. Nobody was so uncouth as to actually print anything, officially because France’s stringent privacy laws prevented it, in reality because it would have been such a pedestrian thing to do. (The privacy fines are low enough that show-business celebrity magazines have hefty budgets set aside to pay them and blithely sell hundreds of thousands of copies a week containing the illegal latest on France’s answer to Lindsay, Paris, or Britney.) Not to mention that just about every editor and producer had a similarly complex private life.

The president has been accused of “unseemliness” and “vulgarity” by the lofty souls of the bien-pensant left-wing press, who see no inconsistency with their own well-trumpeted socially permissive and populist sixties roots. The left-wing daily Libération–which early on ran the headline “Président bling-bling” with a full-page cover picture of Sarko in Ray-Ban sunglasses, a cell phone glued to his ear, looking like a Prada-clothed Beverly Hills security guard–jumped on every Sarko-Bruni sighting with a frisson. They were seen (with Miss Bruni’s mother as well as her 6-year-old son, Aurélien) at Disneyland Paris, aka the “cultural Chernobyl”! They dined à deux in expensive restaurants! They holidayed in Egypt and stayed at the five-star Old Winter Palace at Luxor!

It was sometimes difficult to tell what the critics–and everyone jumped on the bandwagon: op-ed pages, bloggers, Internet forums–objected to most: the ostentatious spending (in a country where Socialist party leader François Hollande applies the insult “rich” to anyone earning more than $70,000 a year) or just the fact that no one took the trouble to conceal it.

Piqued, Sarkozy reminded his critics at the Elysée New Year’s press conference that his predecessors were no strangers to luxury holidays, sometimes in the very places he had visited, and at the Republic’s expense, whereas he had paid his and Miss Bruni’s way. Not their plane fare, though: Sarko’s friend, the tycoon Vincent Bolloré, provided a private jet for the trip to Egypt. You might fault the Bolloré freebie, but it certainly wasn’t a secret. By contrast, former president Jacques Chirac may yet be taken to task by the French justice system (although no one is really holding his breath) over two million francs’ worth of plane tickets paid for in mysteriously acquired cash over the years. No one has yet bothered to investigate Chirac’s use of a Quai Voltaire luxury apartment facing the Louvre loaned by the family of the late Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri; his 52 trips to Japan in 10 years; and his stays at world-class locations like the Hôtel du Cap at Antibes, La Gazelle d’Or in Taroudant in southern Morocco, and the Cipriani in Venice. Mitterrand spent most New Year’s Eves at the Old Cataract in Aswan, another fine Egyptian hotel, with his mistress Anne Pingeot, their daughter Mazarine, and a contingent of French gendarmes. It was never held against him.

But then Mitterrand kept his parallel life private. He did so partly by ordering the telephones of numerous journalists, including a le Monde editor, tapped so as to stay abreast of possible rumors (and intimate a few home truths to anyone who might contemplate an exposé). This was perfunctorily investigated years later, with the entire country yawning at the revelations. A compulsive womanizer, Mitterrand fully expected (and was never disappointed) that no one would report the moves he made on any pretty woman on press trips and official visits during his 14 years in office. It made for amusing dinner party talk in Paris, which he didn’t object to–after all, a president with many conquests was a powerful president.

Sarkozy at first seemed to be from this familiar mold. After all, he had famously fallen in love with his second wife, Cécilia, while officiating at her wedding in his capacity as mayor of Neuilly, a well-to-do inner suburb of Paris. He was 28, Cécilia was 26, and her groom–Jacques Martin, France’s answer to Johnny Carson–was 51. Sarkozy later recalled thinking: “What am I doing marrying her off to someone else? She’s for me!” Still married at the time to his first wife, Sarkozy pursued Cécilia relentlessly for four years. Where he departed from the usual pattern was in eventually suing for divorce even though he was mayor of a famously conservative town. It would take him eight years to secure a divorce from his devout Catholic, Corsican-born first wife, Marie; but in the meantime, including his stint as budget secretary under Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, he lived, sometimes in official residences, with Cécilia, who called herself Madame Sarkozy.

No one mistook their final split as having been caused by both parties’ extramarital affairs during their 11-year marriage (and nearly 20 years together). Yes, she left him three years ago to spend a couple of months in New York with the high-profile event organizer of the World Economic Forum. Yes, even before his carefully leaked affair with a Le Figaro political journalist, 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.

It is showing vulnerability that is the cardinal mistake. Like the Romans, the French despise a loser; vae victis obtains in professional as well as in personal life. This explains why apologies have no place in our culture: They are seen as a fatal admission of weakness. The only time Sarko’s presidential bid seemed in danger of faltering was in 2005, not so much because his wife had left him but because he seemed so affected by it.

This is perhaps the real reason why the French, whose society is structurally averse to risk, object to the Sarkozy-Bruni whirlwind romance: Sarko has been taking very public risks from the start of his presidency, and Bruni was the riskiest choice of all.

For one thing, Bruni was on the other side politically. During the presidential campaign she criticized Sarkozy’s policies and sang at a rally for his Socialist opponent, Ségolène Royal. Sarko finally met Bruni last fall when she came to the Elysée as part of a delegation of artists supporting a White Paper on fighting Internet piracy. Apparently impressed, Sarkozy asked a mutual friend, the grand old spin doctor from the Mitterrand years Jacques Séguéla, to include Bruni in a dinner party at Séguéla’s home being thrown to lift the lonely president’s spirits. “I’m rattling about the Elysée all alone at night,” Séguéla said Sarkozy told him. “I’ll invite some left-wing pals, you can have a discussion,” Séguéla replied.

At first, Bruni declined. When she finally agreed to come, she flatly refused to bring her guitar, though Séguéla pleaded, knowing Sarkozy’s taste for after-dinner singing with friends.

One guest at the dinner recalls that Sarkozy was seated between Mme Séguéla, on the president’s right as is proper, and Bruni. “Sarko greeted Mme Séguéla and said: ‘I must apologize to you, there’s something I need to talk about with Miss Bruni.’ He then turned his back on his hostess and never stopped talking with Carla–he looked at no one else. They had this four-hour intense, private conversation, which everyone was staring at. You could see she started laughing after a while, but he could as well have been blown off by her in front of everyone else. Nobody dared leave, and afterwards they complained that it was like royal protocol, you had to remain until they’d risen from the table; but in truth they were mesmerized. He was in the cage with the tigress. And he charmed her.”

In this guest’s mind, Sarko’s recklessness lay less in Bruni’s political opinions (after all, Sarkozy had stuffed his government with left-wing ministers from the routed Socialist camp) than in her past love life (Mick Jagger, Donald Trump, Kevin Costner, Eric Clapton, and so on) and in her famous statement about “not understanding the concept of monogamy.”

That was only the beginning. The two met again the following day and haven’t left each other’s side since. Bruni moved into the private apartments at the Elysée in a matter of weeks, and soon was organizing the presidential Christmas party, traditionally a prerogative of the president’s wife. At this affair, her son’s father, the philosophy professor Raphaël Enthoven, from whom she separated a couple of years ago, mingled with Bruni’s pianist mother and film director sister and all three of Sarkozy’s sons. One flabbergasted witness says he saw the president throw a friendly arm around a rather shell-shocked Enthoven’s shoulders, telling him as if they’d known each other from childhood, “Don’t worry about Aurélien, old bean, I’ll take good care of him. I love kids, I’m a very good father.”

Sarkozy in fact was a complete stranger to the Enthoven circle, itself romantically complex. Enthoven had left his wife, Justine, the daughter of celebrity thinker Bernard-Henri Lévy, after falling for Carla, who was at the time the girlfriend of his own father, Jean-Paul Enthoven. Needless to say, nobody was married to anybody. The entire Left Bank had followed the drama with delicious glee, especially since Justine Lévy wrote a bitter roman à clef about the whole betrayal. That’s the way things used to be done in Paris: intricately incestuous, with elegant literary accounts, spiked with insider knowledge and spiteful indirection, written by and for a self-appointed elite.

But this in-your-face, very public carrying on? It simply isn’t done. Every pundit and commentator is criticizing “la people-isation de la vie politique,” meaning the invasion of the political sphere by the celebrity culture (celebrities are known as “les people” in France, a term traceable, via a gossip column called “People” in the weekly L’Express, to its original in the Time magazine of the 1960s). For years, the French protested that they were not interested in public personalities’ private lives. But as the proliferation of celebrity magazines and television programs in the past decade (the one bright spot in an otherwise declining publishing sector) should have made clear, they always were.

Before Sarko-Bruni, there was Ségolène-François, the Socialist power couple whose union did not survive her run for president. Having protested until her presidential defeat that they were still living in blissful, if unmarried, happiness, Ségolène Royal abruptly kicked François Hollande, her partner of 23 years, the father of her four children, and the secretary general of her own party, out of their home last summer. He hadn’t supported her sufficiently, she said. Oh, and he was having an affair.

Hollande subsequently tried to sue a gossip magazine for its reporting of said affair, but his case was thrown out. The judge ruled Hollande should not have stage-managed his private life to boost his then-partner’s public image. This is a considerable innovation in French privacy law, figuring nowhere in the Legal Code. Similarly, Cécilia Sarkozy lost last week in court when seeking an injunction to ban an unauthorized biography, with the judge offering the same reason: that she and her then-husband had repeatedly invited the media to report on their family life, so they could not invoke a right to privacy.

Precedent isn’t supposed to matter as much in French law as it does in the United States, but these rulings will. Sarkozy may end up dragging France into the 21st century in more ways than he expected.

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, a journalist in Paris, is the author of William et Harry, dernière chance pour la couronne (Editions Télémaque).