La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (29 page)

Toward the end of his presidency Chirac suffered a slight stroke. Afterward, he appeared less virile, indeed, like an old man. He sported a permanent tan and, according to some accounts, blackened his gray hair. When he was out of sight on vacation in Canada one summer, the puppet satire television program
Les Guignols
ran a skit speculating that he was off having a face lift.

As Chirac left office, his legacy was tainted by a string of corruption charges and unkept promises, but it was not long before he was once again beloved. An overwhelming majority of the French approved of his handling of foreign affairs, particularly his role as the European leader who had led the opposition to the American-led war in Iraq. In the age of Sarkozy, the French were nostalgic for Chirac’s lack of pretense, his appetite for country cooking, his unabashed promotion of France, his gentlemanly demeanor. It seemed that the results of a 2002 poll were still true: more French women wanted to have dinner with Chirac than with any other politician.

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s personal
opération séduction
was not enough to get him reelected for a second seven-year term in 1981. He had been the youngest president of the Fifth Republic and also the youngest ex-president. In his early years in office, he had projected an image of youthfulness. A bourgeois technocrat, he started out as a reformer and modernizer. He removed much of the formality and ceremony from high office, made use of television to promote his agenda, walked through the streets of Paris to official appointments, and organized meetings with ordinary folk, usually over the dinner table of a country auberge. Tall and slim, he wore soft cashmere V-necked sweaters and corduroy velvet pants.

There were stories about an active sex life, and I know women who claim they had to fight him off. He was rumored to have had a liaison with Sylvia Kristel, the star of the
Emmanuelle
soft-porn films. But after his defeat in 1981, Giscard took it as his mission to convince the French that he was more than lovable—that he was downright sexy—and that they had made a mistake in voting him out of office. He sought to burnish his image by writing a sentimental, melodramatic sex novel.
Le passage
, published in 1994, tells a story of hunting and of love in which Charles, a solitary, passive middle-aged man, becomes obsessed with Natalie, a mysterious blond twenty-year-old hitchhiker.

The first time he sees her, he drives past her, even though it is love at first sight. The second time he sees her, she is sitting by the side of the road and he stops and takes her home. She stays with him for a few weeks. Then one day she leaves abruptly. The book ends.

It is a classic sexual fantasy: a man stops on the side of the road to pick up a beautiful young hitchhiker and then seduces her. It also indulges a second, more complex fantasy: the older man seduced, then abandoned by a younger woman.
Le Monde
said that the novel “possesses a singular quality: its total absence of originality.” Years later,
Le Monde
took another jab at it, branding it “an unintentional comedy.”

In his eighties, Giscard remained determined to promote his image as a sexually potent male. In 2009, he published a second novel, which titillated readers with the suggestion that he might have had a love affair with Britain’s Princess Diana.
La princesse et le président
relates the “violent passion” between a French head of state and a British royal named Patricia.

In the book, President Jacques-Henri Lambertye, a sex-driven widower, meets the princess at a banquet at Buckingham Palace. Like Diana, the fictional princess is trapped in an unhappy marriage to the unfaithful heir to the throne; she throws herself into charitable work while carrying on her own love affairs on the side.

Passion begins with
le regard
. “I stood up and I pulled back [my chair] to allow the princess of Cardiff to be seated,” the president says. “She thanked me for it with one of those oblique looks that put me under her spell.” Then comes a
baisemain
. “I kissed her hand and she gave me a questioning look, her slate-grey eyes widening as she tilted her head gently forward,” the president continues. The princess becomes confessional, telling him, “Ten days before my marriage, my future husband told me he had a mistress, and that he had decided to continue his relationship with her.”

In real life, Giscard is known to have been charmed by the young princess, but they did not meet until years after the end of his presidency. After spending an evening with her at an event at Versailles in 1995, he told a French women’s magazine that she “is much more beautiful in real life…. I discovered she was also a cat, a feline. She moves without noise.”

On a train ride back to Paris from a commemoration of D-Day, the fictional President Lambertye begins to seduce his princess. They make love for the first time at the Château de Rambouillet, where, as president, Giscard liked to hunt.

As narrator, the president is too discreet to describe his lovemaking with the princess: “I would not know how to do that. I only remember a great softness of warm skin, and being submerged in this flood of tenderness that I had felt coming at the end of the day and that had turned into an ocean.”

Later on in the novel is a one-night stand with a beautiful Corsican doctor who ministers to the president after he survives an assassination attempt. He is less reticent here: “Her lips were opened and I felt, in her saliva and in mine, the acid net of desire…. It is that evening that I experienced love with the Venus de Milo, her strong shoulders and her sumptuous legs.”

The media mused about whether it was logistically possible for Giscard to have bedded Diana or whether it was an old man’s imagination run wild. “Total fiction, writer’s dream, true story? Only the author has the key to this enigma,” wrote
Le Figaro.
“The book may sell but it won’t win any prizes unless there is an award for bad taste,” the
Times
of London said.

On Europe 1 Radio, the comic Nicolas Canteloup did an impersonation of Giscard’s haughty, marble-filled voice. “I used to be called the ‘big gun’…,” he said, “I confirm it: Lady Di, I had her.”

“You were with Lady Di?” the mock interviewer asks.

“To be frank, she’s not the only one I had. I won’t list them all.” Then, the royalty-obsessed “president” goes on to list them: “I had the Princess of Luxembourg, the Duchess of York, Maria of Russia. I don’t have the complete list.”

Giscard ignored the criticism and insisted that the book was fiction. “It’s a novel!” he exclaimed the day my researcher, a French woman in her early twenties, and I met him in his study. “Just let your mind go! The French president is not I. It’s not my character. The British princess—I don’t tell the whole story of Princess Diana. I tell you what one felt when one met her. It’s a novel!”

The book ends with the president and the princess living happily ever after in Tuscany. Giscard said that he considered ending the book with the president going off with the Corsican doctor. “I thought about it, but I didn’t do it because of Diana,” he said. “Because I said to myself that this would be an insult to her memory if the president went off with the doctor. And well, this book, it’s completely an invention, naturally, but Diana said to me—I knew her a little, but not much, a little, like that, in conversation—and she said to me, ‘But you should write what would happen if there were a love story between two great leaders of the world.’”

So there he was, this man in his eighties, with wrinkled hands and a balding head and a lined face, enjoying his fantasy about a love affair with a young and beautiful princess. There was something poignant about Giscard holding on to a dream of gallantry and ideal love.

When we were saying our good-byes, his hand seemed to rest for a second on the derriere of my young researcher. It was not aggressive. Perhaps it was accidental. Perhaps it never happened. Then it seemed to happen a second time.

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was not the only French president to get entangled with a princess. Nicolas Sarkozy had his own story, a brief but painful encounter with the heroine of
La princesse de Clèves
, a seventeenth-century novel of unrequited love. Like Princess Diana, this princess was young, beautiful, trapped in an unhappy marriage, and suffocating in a protocol-driven royal court. While Giscard was smitten with his princess, Sarkozy was contemptuous of his.

La princesse de Clèves
was written by Madame de Lafayette, a countess close to the court of Louis XIV. It is considered the first authentic French novel and is a favorite on required reading lists in French high schools.

The story was daring for its time. A sixteen-year-old girl, brought up in the strictest morality by her mother, makes her entrance at court. A prince falls in love with her and asks for her hand, and she dutifully marries him. Then the unexpected happens. At a court ball one night, she exchanges looks with the rakish Duc de Nemours, and they fall immediately and passionately in love.

The princess comes to understand that the duke is “too seductive,” a classic “infidel” who will abandon her for future conquests if she begins a liaison with him. The rituals of the court require the princess and the duke to see each other every day; the tension between them builds as they are forced to hide their feelings. Tormented, the princess confesses to her husband her love for another man and asks to be freed from appearing at court. She hopes that this will help her remain faithful. The prince, convinced that his wife has betrayed him, eventually dies from jealousy and sorrow.

In the end, an extreme sense of duty wins out over love. Instead of running off and finding happiness with the duke, the princess renounces what she considers a debased love. She enters a convent.

Sarkozy found
La princesse de Clèves
excruciating. During the presidential campaign, he railed that an official who decided to include questions about the princess in an exam for people applying for public-sector jobs was “a sadist or an idiot—you decide.” He huffed that it would be “a spectacle” to ask low-level ticket agents their opinion of this difficult work. After he was elected president, Sarkozy felt compelled to attack the princess again, this time using a peculiar phrasing. “I have suffered a lot on her,” he said.

But taking on the princess was not a wise political move in a country that prizes the rituals of seduction, romance, and intellectual discussion. Sarkozy was branded a literary midget for attacking what is considered one of France’s best-written and most psychologically sophisticated novels.

I had my own theory: that the literal-minded, impatient, and thrice-married Sarkozy could not accept the ending. Unlike so many of his countrymen, he did not believe in foreplay that seemed to go nowhere. Without gratification, and as instantly as possible, the effort was not worth it.

Richard Descoings, the director of the elite Institut d’études politiques de Paris, known as Sciences Po, agreed with that notion. “No action, no result,” he told me in explaining the president’s antipathy for
la princesse
. “This is not a crime novel where at the end you know who kills the victim.”

For many people in the academic and literary establishment, reading the book became an act of revolt against Sarkozy, whose blunt rejection of artistic pursuits and liberal political ideas had already made him a magnet for scorn. Sales of the book soared. The Paris book fair one year sold out of blue-and-white badges saying, “I’m reading
La princesse de Clèves
.”

By 2009, the book had become a symbol of rebellion among university faculty protesting Sarkozy’s proposed package of economic reforms. At an informal seminar at the University of Chicago’s Paris campus, Sophie Rabau, a Sorbonne professor who had taken up the cause of the princess, described Sarkozy’s statement that he had suffered a lot “on” the princess as a “lecherous” and “concrete” sexual allusion. “He is the horseman and she is his horse,” she said. “A man is sweating on top of a woman, which contradicts the ethereal literary universe of the princess.”

The truth is that Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa is unskilled as a seducer in the classic French mode. Sarkozy is frank rather than indirect, prone to naked flattery and insults rather than subtle wooing, perpetually in motion rather than taking time for
le plaisir.
He is contemptuous rather than enamored of the complicated codes of politesse. Unlike François Mitterrand, who used language to caress and mesmerize, Sarkozy contracts his words and salts his sentences with rough slang. In a country where food and wine are essential to the national identity, he prefers snack gobbling to meal savoring.

Sarkozy is more than just a departure from the historic pattern of seductive leaders in France. He is a case study in anti-seduction.

Sarkozy’s refusal to fit the expectations of French refinement stems in part from a lifelong habit of underdog belligerence. The son of a minor Hungarian aristocrat who abandoned the family, the grandson of a Sephardic Jew who converted to Catholicism, the product of France’s outdated state university system and not its
grandes écoles
, he wears the pain of the outsider as both a burden and a badge of honor.

Sarkozy is so sensitive about his short stature (the Élysée is secretive about his height, but I would say he is no taller than five feet seven) that he uses a variety of techniques to appear taller. He wears shoes with thick heels. He has been known to stand on a stool when delivering a speech. (That trick has prompted cartoonists to portray him perched on a chair, or even more cruelly, as a dwarf.) Then there is the tiptoe maneuver. Sarkozy sometimes walks on the balls of his feet, a habit that gives him a distinctive, slightly off-balance bounce. The British tabloid
Daily Mail
ran a photograph of Sarkozy on his tiptoes with the much-taller Barack Obama in Strasbourg in 2009. To make sure the readers got the message, the paper circled Sarkozy’s feet.

Sarkozy has called himself a “little Frenchman of mixed blood,” even though he shortened his name to make it sound less exotic. His father, after all, had told him that with his foreign-sounding name, he would never be president of France. “For that,” he said, “you have to go to the United States.”

But Sarkozy worked his entire professional life through the party structure of the center-right UMP, and the party delivered. He ran an unusually disciplined campaign—American style—for president in 2007, and he hid his temper from public view.

The presidential election took place when the go-go economies of the United States and Britain made the French worry about being left behind. With the specter of economic stagnation pushing away other concerns, it was the right moment for the anti-seducer of French political life to make his move. In running for president, he sold competence over style and promised to break the chains of the past. He won not by reciting poems about beauty but by making promises that resonated with voters of different ages, classes, and priorities. Older, conservative men and women believed he would bring more law and order; younger voters felt he would make it easier for them to compete in the world economy; workers thought he would put more money in their pockets.

A believer in globalization, hard work, raw ambition, and the man on the street, Sarkozy at times seemed more American than French. “Subtlety is a French trait, as much as energy is an American trait,” said Bertrand de Saint Vincent, a style columnist for
Le Figaro
. “We are less fat, we are less strong, but we compensate with subtlety. The French trait is a lightness and grace that can seduce. That’s why Sarkozy isn’t into seduction; he’s into strength, and that’s more American. The American bombards; the Frenchman is driven by lightness.”

When Sarkozy spoke about France’s future, he looked across the ocean to the United States. “The dream of French families is to have their young people go to American universities to study,” he told an audience at Columbia University in October 2004, when he was finance minister, an exceptionally startling admission for a French cabinet member and one that he repeated as president. “When we go to the movies, it is to see American films. When we turn on our radios, it is to listen to American music. We love the United States!”

During a trip to the United States two years later, when he was interior minister, Sarkozy worked so hard to fit in that he struggled to speak English. I overheard him trying to make conversation with Nicholas Scoppetta, the New York City fire commissioner, at a ceremony honoring New York firefighters. This is what Sarkozy said: “I run. This morning. In Central Park. With T-shirt firefighters.”

“Wonderful! Excellent!” Scoppetta replied, as if Sarkozy were a pre-schooler who needed positive reinforcement. Then Scoppetta turned to me and said, in a voice low enough that Sarkozy could not hear: “His English? He’d be the first to say he’s a little embarrassed by it.”

Sarkozy’s unvarnished enthusiasm about imitating the United States seemed at first to work. But it was unlikely to endear him in the long run to the French, whose sense of national character is deeply imbued with notions of their superiority. And it looked a bit foolish when the Americans and British were hit hard by the bursting economic bubble in 2008, setting off a global financial meltdown.

A bigger problem is that even though they voted for him, the French just didn’t fall in love with Sarkozy. They may not even have liked him. Once he was in office, economic events, the fear of change, the paralysis in the French economic system, and Sarkozy’s own imperial style of governing all worked against him. Without a seductive aura to protect him, he was vulnerable. The pragmatist with a determination to modernize France now appeared as a cynic with a shifting set of beliefs and an overactive alpha-male personality. He couldn’t stop himself from launching reforms that were ill-planned and smelled of desperation. Most of them went nowhere.

As he had never had a classic love affair with the woman that is France, the French people turned on him. Within a year they ranked him the worst president in the history of the Fifth Republic. And as the 2012 presidential election drew near, his popularity remained at historically low levels. Even so, nothing motivates Sarkozy like challenges and confrontation. “The more they attack me,” he once said, “the bigger I become.”

I never found Sarkozy a seductive interview subject. Indeed, it would not be going too far to say that he could be a boor. I saw that firsthand on the eve of the summit of the G-8 industrialized countries in June 2007. It was his third week in office, and he invited one journalist from each of the seven member countries other than France to the Élysée Palace for his first encounter with the foreign media as president.

He worked hard to be informal. Too informal for those of us who were used to elegance and protocol in interviews with heads of state. Sarkozy arrived more than thirty minutes late—in shirtsleeves. Before the hour-long conversation started, he ordered us to turn off what he called “these things”—the recording devices we had laid out on the long, wide table. The Élysée was not recording the interview either. There would be no transcript, no record of his first interview as president with foreign journalists. That gave him total deniability.

We needn’t have worried; in terms of its content, the interview was unenlightening. More revelatory was Sarkozy’s personal behavior. We did not have a relaxed man in front of us. He shifted uncomfortably, as if his body could not be contained in the gilded, brocade-covered armchair in which he sat. He casually leaned back in his chair and propped up one of his legs on the other, an incongruous sight in such a formal setting. At one point he swallowed whole a white pill almost an inch in diameter—without the benefit of water.

Even more surprising were his manners. On the table before him were four small china plates of assorted French charcuterie and cheeses. He ate from two of them but did not pass them around or offer them to us. The table was exceptionally wide, and so it would have been awkward for us to dare to serve ourselves. So we sat there watching as he chewed and talked, talked and chewed, without appearing to take a breath.

My second interview with him was even more unsettling. It was three months later, on the eve of his first trip as president to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. When Alison Smale, executive editor of the
International Herald Tribune
, and I arrived, Sarkozy greeted us with stiff handshakes and curt
bonjours
. He limped so noticeably that I almost asked him what was wrong. There was no smile.

During the hour-long interview, Sarkozy rocked back and forth in his armchair as if he couldn’t wait for us to leave. He gripped the backs of the chairs on either side of him. His jaw muscles twitched. He stumbled twice on the word “multilateralism,” laughing like an embarrassed schoolboy the second time he did so. Jean-David Levitte, his national security adviser, had to finish the word for him.

Sarkozy interrupted and even insulted us. At one point, when I pressed him on France and NATO, he replied, “I want to pay homage to your stubbornness, to the concern you have for raising burning issues in a perfectly banal way.” I scribbled in a note to Alison, “Something is really wrong.” We learned afterward that his marriage to his wife, Cécilia, was shattering that week.

The cold demeanor and nonstop movement vanished during a brief photo session afterward in his private presidential office next door, only to be replaced by another version of tone-deaf behavior. He closed the distance between us, gripping his arms around our shoulders and pulling us close for a photograph. “Mmm. I have a good job,” he murmured. Sarkozy needed to make clear that he was the man, and we were the women.

It was a tactic he had used on the presidential campaign. At a café in the tripe pavilion at the massive Rungis food market outside of Paris, he kissed a waitress on both cheeks. Then he put his arms around two women in his press entourage, proclaiming, “I have an enormous success with girls!”