La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (30 page)

On another campaign stop, at a cheesemaking factory in the French Alps, Sarkozy wrapped an arm around the shoulder of an apron-clad female employee and kissed her on both cheeks. “I’m kissing you, eh,” he said. “Look how good-looking we are! My heart is pounding!”

In a book about her year on the campaign trail with him, the playwright Yasmina Reza described how hard Sarkozy worked to convince her of his seductive side. Seated next to her at a dinner in Nice, he smiled at her and recounted his conversation with the blond woman sitting on his other side. “She’s telling me, ‘I dream about you every night,’” Sarkozy told Reza. “Isn’t that moving?”

Sarkozy put his hand on the woman’s bare back and continued: “She’s charming, this girl. Have you seen how this one’s decked out? Nothing cheap there.” In the next breath he asked Reza: “Have you tried the white chocolate mousse?”

Reza replied, “Nicolas, behave; don’t forget you want to be president.”

But restraint is not in Sarkozy’s DNA. France has a ministerial system with a clear division of labor: the prime minister is responsible for day-to-day governance while the president is more remote and above the fray, leading the country and taking responsibility for foreign and defense affairs. Sarkozy felt he had to do both jobs. Policy was run out of the Élysée, not the ministries. In a sense, France lost its president, because the president was trying to run the country himself; it also lost its prime minister because the president had crushed him.

Sarkozy’s meddling in the tiniest of policy decisions fuels his short temper. This is a man who is so impatient that he has whistled to get the attention of aides, called for the elimination of the Foreign Ministry because it is “useless,” and branded his press spokesman an “
imbécile
” during an interview on American television, before walking off the set.

One of the most detailed critiques of Sarkozy’s governing style came in a series of classified U.S. diplomatic cables disclosed by WikiLeaks in the fall of 2010. They portrayed him as a “hyperactive,” “mercurial,” “authoritarian,” and “thin-skinned” leader who tyrannizes his ministers and staff. Charles Rivkin, the American ambassador to France, said in one cable that Sarkozy functions in “a zone of monarch-like impunity,” surrounded by advisers often too afraid to give him honest advice, and too impatient to plan or consult with other countries before launching “impulsive proposals” that often go nowhere. Rivkin also reported that Sarkozy’s aides were so fearful of angering him that they supposedly rerouted his plane over Paris in 2009 to avoid his seeing the Eiffel Tower lit up in the colors of the Turkish flag in honor of an official visit by Turkey’s prime minister. (Sarkozy opposes Turkey’s bid to join the European Union.) In another cable, a U.S. diplomat said that Sarkozy seemed “less than gracious” during a visit to Saudi Arabia, refusing to try traditional Arab food and looking bored during the televised arrival sword ceremony.

“I shouldn’t say this because it’s politically incorrect,” a Foreign Ministry official once told me. “Sarkozy—he’s very un-French. It’s not like the good old days with the formal politesse of the educated French, like all those American movies where the French servant is saying, ‘
Oui, monsieur
.’ Courtesies and rituals don’t cross his mind.”

Subtlety also eludes him. According to Tom Fletcher, the private secretary to the former British prime minister Gordon Brown, Sarkozy once told Brown, “You know, Gordon, I should not like you. You are Scottish, we have nothing in common, and you are an economist. But somehow, Gordon, I love you.” Sarkozy felt he had to qualify his love, adding, “But not in a sexual way.”

Before meeting King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Sarkozy had to be told—gingerly—by his aides not to touch the body of the Saudi monarch in any way. When he tried to hug German chancellor Angela Merkel, her aides made clear that she needed her space. She couldn’t stand his touching her all the time. Eventually, Merkel tolerated Sarkozy’s hugging and sometimes even hugged him back.

There were times, however, when Sarkozy successfully used his style of “soft power” like a weapon of war. In 2008, during France’s term as the holder of the rotating European Union presidency, he defused a crisis between Russia and Georgia. He went into action mode, traveling to Moscow and Tbilisi and persuading the Russians to agree to withdraw their troops from key positions in Georgia. He returned France to the military wing of NATO after more than forty years, was instrumental in creating the G20 group of industrial nations, and took decisive measures when the financial crisis hit France.

Sometimes the rush to act has translated into damaging impulsiveness—the antithesis of both realpolitik and traditional French diplomacy, with its carefully plotted
opérations séduction
. Impulse was what led him to bound up several flights of stairs and burst into a conference room in Moscow after a meeting with Vladimir Putin. Sarkozy found himself on stage before the world’s media, their cameras and recording devices trained on him. He was so winded, so off-balance that he was unable to speak clearly. Commentaries accompanying video clips posted on the Internet suggested that he was drunk. (He doesn’t drink and never has.)

Even when he tried to be gallant he could be clumsy, as he was the time he kissed the hand of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As she walked up the steps of the Élysée Palace, Sarkozy took her right hand, raised it up too quickly toward his lips, and did not bend over far enough. He followed with a handshake and a pat on the back. She was so destabilized by all the movement that she lost her right shoe.

One way to understand Sarkozy’s approach to seduction and politics is through his relationships with three tall, thin, beautiful brunettes who have been, or are, important in his life. There is the one who opposed him for the presidency in 2007, Ségolène Royal; the one who left him for another man, Cécilia Sarkozy; and the one who simultaneously stepped into the roles of wife and first lady, Carla Bruni.

When the storm over
La princesse de Clèves
first broke during the presidential campaign, Pierre Assouline, a leading novelist, biographer, and journalist, suggested on his blog for
Le Monde
that one of the reasons Sarkozy so disliked the fictional heroine was that she reminded him of Ségolène Royal. Assouline called it likely that Sarkozy saw in the princess the “unbearable metaphor” of the opposition candidate, who was called, among other things, “the woman in white,” “the singing nun,” “Snow White,” “the socialist Immaculate Conception,” and “Joan of Arc.”

Ségo drove Sarko crazy right from the start. With her elegant profile, elite education, and stratospheric approval ratings, she seemed to have all of the seductive gifts that eluded him. Her imagined France was one of pleasure seeking. The title of her campaign association and website, which she described as a dialogue with the French people, was Desires for the Future. In two early polls, she edged past Sarkozy in a hypothetical runoff for the presidency.

Royal, however, was running on a Socialist Party ticket in a time when unbridled market capitalism seemed globally triumphant. A political infighter with a sharp tongue, she was not universally loved even within her own party. And as the first female presidential candidate from a major party, she was challenging tradition. “Who will look after the children?” quipped Laurent Fabius, a former Socialist prime minister. Another prominent Socialist, Jack Lang, declared, “The presidential race is not a beauty contest.”

Ségo played with her sexuality, sometimes flaunting it, sometimes hiding it, a constant manipulation that for a while boosted her mystery and appeal on the campaign trail. She had work done on her mouth. When she had an upper tooth straightened, the newspaper
Libération
labeled it an un-French act, writing, “The French people’s favorite Socialist is now endowed with an American smile.”

The summer before the election, a celebrity gossip magazine published photographs of Ségo emerging from the sea in a turquoise bikini. Her breasts were ample and firm, her thighs cellulite-free. Her tummy gave no hint that she had borne four children. Later, the stand-up comic and actor Jamel Debbouze said he hoped that if Royal were elected president, the bikini photo would become her official portrait in every French police station.

As the campaign began in earnest, however, Ségo buttoned herself up and shed the flouncy skirts and gamine-like spirit that had led swooning male commentators to compare her to Audrey Hepburn. For the presidential debate with Sarkozy shortly before the election, she donned a tailored suit and a severe manner, aware that this was her best chance to prove herself.

Royal was on the offensive from the start. She interrupted Sarkozy with the line, “Let me finish,” and defended her moments of anger.

“Calm down,” he told her at one point.

“No, I will not calm down!” she replied. “No, I will not calm down! I will not calm down!”

“To be president of the Republic, you have to be calm,” Sarkozy said, his voice taking on a patronizing tone. The scene was reminiscent of a couple bickering at the breakfast table, with the husband barely restraining his sense of superiority and the wife attacking him for not listening to her. The impact, though, was to rob Royal of her sensuality. Sarkozy kept his notorious temper in check; he neutralized her appeal, and when the votes were counted, he defeated her soundly.

When Sarkozy won the presidency, the first lady he brought along was Cécilia. He had met her twenty-three years earlier while officiating, as mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, at her wedding—to someone else. She was in her midtwenties at the time and very pregnant; her groom was a French television personality and singer almost twice her age. She and her husband began socializing with Sarkozy and his first wife. The two couples became close—until Nicolas and Cécilia took up with each other, then moved in together.

In their first days at the Élysée, admirers called Nicolas and Cécilia the French Kennedys: the president outdoorsy and athletic, the first lady beautiful and designer-dressed, the passel of children smiling and photogenic. A four-page spread in
Elle
on Cécilia (who had once moonlighted as an in-house model at Schiaparelli and Chanel) posed the question, “Something of Jackie?” The article ran side-by-side photos of the two first ladies, pointing out that Cécilia, like Jackie Kennedy, was “adept at minimalism,” had “a prima donna style,” embraced sports “as a way of life,” and had “always been casual.”

Le Figaro
splashed an Internet poll on its front page under the headline, “The Sarkozy style seduces the French.” Their detractors suggested that the Sarkozys were less like the Kennedys than like Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his clan: showy, vulgar, acquisitive, more
nouveau riche
than old money.

Sarkozy’s first act on the night of his electoral victory was to dine with Cécilia, other family members, and friends at Fouquet’s, the glitzy century-old Champs-Élysées restaurant that had been bought by a luxury hotel group. His postelection victory trip with Cécilia and their son Louis aboard the yacht of a billionaire friend was mercilessly criticized. “You cannot identify with General de Gaulle and behave like Silvio Berlusconi,” the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut wrote in
Le Monde
.

Soon Cécilia was missing from the presidential picture. Rumors came, with uneasy persistence, that she had left home. She was a no-show for a picnic lunch with President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, in New England.

Cécilia had left Sarkozy once before, for Richard Attias, an events manager, in the summer of 2005. But she had returned several months later, and the couple had again appeared devoted. “Even today, it’s hard for me to talk about it,” Sarkozy wrote of their months apart in his 2006 campaign book,
Testimony
. “I never could have imagined being so devastated.” He also said they would never again part, adding, “We’re incapable of being apart. It’s not that we haven’t tried, but it’s impossible.”

Now it was clear that she had left for good, to marry Attias and move to New York. “France elected a man, not a couple,” she said in an interview with the regional newspaper
L’Est Républicain
. “What happened to me has happened to millions of people: one day you no longer have your place in the couple.”

The French embraced the news of the divorce with sangfroid and a collective shrug. In a poll conducted after the news broke, 79 percent declared
le divorce
of “little or no importance” in the country’s political life. But without a woman by his side, Sarkozy was humiliated. His solitary existence became the butt of jokes. On Europe 1 radio, the comedian Nicolas Canteloup, impersonating Sarkozy, asked the host for help with a lonely-hearts ad. “I am going to put down, ‘young man, athletic man, practicing jogging, recently divorced, in a good situation, looking for a serious woman for a relationship,’” he said.

The comic was interrupted by a call from a woman who identified herself as Ségolène Royal, who by this time had broken off with her own longtime partner, François Hollande. “It’s not Madame Royal, but Mademoiselle Royal,” the woman (also portrayed by Canteloup) said. She added that for some time she had wanted the job of France’s first lady but confessed that Sarkozy was not her “type of man.”

In the real life drama of Nicolas Sarkozy, the stage was set for Carla Bruni.

The “
Bonjour
” came out soft and smooth, part whisper and part song. As the mouth uttered the second syllable, the lips moved forward to form an O, and the O lingered on her breath. She said the word over and over, to the two pilots, the three security officers, the communications technician, the photographer, and the two journalists traveling with her on the thirteen-seat French military jet. The movement of these lips mesmerized. I couldn’t stop staring at her mouth, waiting for the next word to fall.