Outside there is a very Parisian scene. A long, open boulevard, trees stripped of their leaves, a grey light on the grey facades of the 19th-century apartment blocks, and, predictably, the road beneath obscured by thousands of marchers.
The demonstration passing beneath my windows is against a new law that allows small businesses to hire young people on short-term contracts. A small enough change, you might think, certainly not something that will make a major impact on a legal framework offering far greater job security than anything in the UK or pretty much anywhere else in Europe. But enough, nonetheless, to bring several hundred thousand people on to the streets. A young communist hands out leaflets calling on everyone to fight against précarité
There is a whole lexicon of French political words for which there is no direct equivalent in English and the one most in evidence these days is précarité (precariousness, insecurity). The word is spattered across the scores of banners, and hundreds of pamphlets, and crackles out of the loudspeakers and bullhorns on the floats. And it is a good word to keep in mind for anyone interested in understanding modern France.
On the television in my office there are live pictures of the demo spliced with images from a heated debate at the National Assembly. Dominique de Villepin, the urbane French Prime Minister, is explaining the need for the new law. It is about modernising the country, he is saying. The world has changed and France must change with it. A lot of people apparently disagree with him. Beside the Prime Minister, impassive, arms crossed, in a blue suit and blue tie, is Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister, and the man who, perhaps more than anyone else in the country, wants to change France.
Sarkozy is another word that anyone wanting to understand modern France needs to keep in mind. Sarkozy and précarité.
Oddly, it is Sarkozy, not de Villepin, or even the weakening President Jacques Chirac, who is the most visible politician in France these days. His short, stocky bustling form is everywhere. His immediately recognisable features, so easy to caricature that French cartoonists say they are bored of drawing him, are on posters slapped up over walls, on the front page of newspapers, on trashy talk shows and serious discussion programmes. Though most journalists in France continue to scrupulously respect the division between public and private life, Sarkozy's turbulent marriage is a topic of conversations in bistros and bars. A 'romantic novel', a thinly disguised and salacious account of his relationship with his beautiful 'soul mate' wife Cécilia, is selling tens of thousands of copies. The issue of Paris Match which revealed last summer that Cécilia was flat-hunting in New York with a 'new friend' (she had left her husband apparently because she did not want to be France's First Lady) was one of the highest-selling of 2005. Last week Cécilia, it was breathlessly reported in otherwise serious newspapers, was seen at Place Beauvau, the interior minister's official residence, confirming the couple's much-rumoured reconciliation.
Sarkozy is a phenomenon as much as a politician. He is hated and loved, feared and admired with a passion that far exceeds his actual deeds or statements. For some 'Sarko' is the only man who can save France. For others - one of the marchers outside my window actually spat on the wet Tarmac when I asked him what his opinion of 'Sarko' was - he is all that threatens the country. Yannick Noah, the former tennis star and one of the most popular men in France, has publicly said that if Sarkozy is elected President next year he will leave the country. Nobody is indifferent to Sarkozy. Somehow he has managed to push his stubby fingers deep into all the fault lines and wounds of French politics and society - and then twist hard.
Sarkozy was born in 1955 in the utterly bourgeois 17th arrondissement of Paris close to where he still lives. The second son of a wealthy Hungarian immigrant, he was largely educated privately. He is not, as some like to claim, an outsider in terms of the French political elite. Though trained as a lawyer, his first love was always politics and he started campaigning for the French conservatives at the age of 19. Socialists are few and far between in the 17th arrondissement.
In 1983, at the astonishingly young age of 28 and a year after marrying for the first time, he was elected mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, close to where he was born in Paris. In 1984 he met Cécilia Ciganer Albeniz, then 27 and a Sorbonne-educated concert-standard pianist, part-time model and public relations specialist. In 1988 he became a deputy in the National Assembly. Five years later Cécilia left her husband, Sarkozy left his wife and in 1996 the pair were married.
Sarkozy's first taste of real media attention had come in 1993 when, as mayor of Neuilly, he had successfully negotiated with a bomb-carrying crank who was holding a nursery school hostage. The nation watched him leaving the school with a small child in his arms. I saw the images recently on a French television show devoted to 'historic moments of our times' as chosen by viewers. The young Sarkozy walks out of the school, straight towards the cameras, with the same efficient muscular strut he has now. He is the impatient man of action, sleeves rolled up, risk-taking, a player and a thinker and a fighter. As the cartoonists have got tired of drawing him, so commentators have got tired of the adjective 'Napoleonic'.
A year after the siege came Sarkozy's first real taste of power with an appointment as a junior finance minister. A few injudicious - and unlucky - political calculations left Sarkozy out of major appointments in the late 1990s and he turned his undoubted energy to building his support base in the heart of the biggest right-wing political party - the UMP - instead, eventually becoming its president. In 2002, the newly re-elected President Jacques Chirac appointed him Minister of the Interior. He has not been out of the public eye since.
Chirac, most French commentators agree, is political carrion. Sarkozy, who is 'obsessed' by the presidency according to one biographer, has made little secret of his desire to run for France's highest office. De Villepin, who has never actually contested an election, is likely to be his main rival for the right-wing vote. The latter, a part-time poet who favours a more conciliatory and aristocratic style, rarely plays the media game with the same skill as his busy rival (although during the UMP's summer conference he managed successfully to leave Sarkozy waiting at a breakfast table in full view of the TV cameras while he, stripped to the waist, finished a well-photographed swim). De Villepin does however reassure many voters. Whether the two potential candidates detest each other or, like a pair of gladiators, grudgingly respect each other's different talents is unclear.
But though his rise has been swift, little in his actual career sets Sarkozy apart from many other French politicians. Apart from the fact that he did not go to one of the major schools that groom the vast majority of the French elite and his parents were immigrants, his is a standard political man's background. It certainly does not explain why Sarko arouses such visceral loathing or admiration among his compatriots.
When I arrived in Paris six months ago, a friend told me about the bread served at breakfast in her local cafe. 'Some days it's good,' she said. 'Other days, if the baker's lost on the horses or rowed with his wife, then it isn't.' At the time I did not recognise that, very gently, she was giving me the key to understanding modern France and the modern French world-view. She was saying was what many French people feel. France is defiantly not part of the consumerist, capitalist, US-led economic and cultural wave that is engulfing the world. France is different. My friend spoke of two other elements which were new to me. She described herself as neither from left nor right but 'a republican', and spoke of the importance of a multi-polar world. The implication was that the leaders of the pole opposed to the 'Anglo-Saxons' would be the French. 'Anglo-Saxon' is another word you hear often in France. It means Anglophone, economically liberal, rampantly capitalist. It means the brutish British with their powerful economy and low taxes, their lower levels of unemployment but higher levels of poverty. It means the unsophisticated, insular, ignorant, crassly self-confident Americans who have somehow - and this is apparently an historic injustice of enormous proportions - managed to become the world's only superpower. It means a threat. It also means, of course, an overweening sense of précarité.
One of the things that struck me most on arrival in France was this sense of external threat and internal crisis, despite the fact that the nation is still quite evidently one of the most successful states of the modern world. I started counting 'crises' - the crisis of wine, of textiles, of the press, of the railways (the latter immeasurably better than the UK's shambolic, expensive and filthy system) - and then gave up. As for threats, the biggest threat of all, that which apparently menaces all that France stands for, is globalisation, something that I had largely considered as a relatively benign process that brought countries closer together. Not for many in France. The destruction of distance, the melting of frontiers, was seen by many as a potential disaster. Even the project of the European Union was seen as a sinister Anglo-Saxon led 'liberal' plot to undermine the French social model and its cultural and economic traditions. The spread of the English language was an appalling loss to the world, not a means to greater international communication.
All is thus insecure, threatened, precarious, whether jobs or a way of life. This explains, to a degree, the intensely powerful myths that surround French agriculture - even if France's future clearly lies not in producing steak and turnips but in capitalising on its incredible reserves of knowledge, thought and culture.
The latter cannot fail to impress. If you want one difference with the UK, you will find it in the general level of popular conversation. In Bobigny, in the famous Paris banlieues - the celebrated department 93, scene of so much of the trouble last autumn - I spoke to a taxi driver who, after comparing rap lyrics to those of Corneille, the classic French playwright, explained to me the history of politically engaged French songwriting since the 1940s. In a poor provincial town in eastern France, the local mayor and backbench MP talked to me about different concepts of urban planning, making rapid references to major sociologists. He, incidentally, was a Sarkozy supporter. Everywhere the general level of public conversation is several notches higher than it is across the Channel and immeasurably superior to that found across the Atlantic.
But the French love affair with words has its drawbacks. A Swiss journalist friend spoke of the 'logorrhoea' of the French, which is unfair, but does indicate the degree to which words are favoured over action. There is a strong sense that if the ideas are there, and expressed in the right words, then actions are superfluous. So, during the riots of last year, which pitted angry, unemployed, alienated, disenfranchised youth from ethnic minorities against not angry, employed, fully franchised white policemen, the refrain 'the Republic is not racist' was everywhere. This was true: the principles of the French Republic are inspiring, the institutions are impartial, the laws are stunning in the simple elegance of their justice. But there is liberté, égalité, fraternité and there is réalité. As another French friend commented: 'We are interested in pourquoi (why), the Anglo-Saxons are interested in comment (how).'
Which is where Sarkozy comes in.
The problem with talking about Sarkozy is that, despite his extraordinary media exposure, he is something of an unknown quantity. To some he is a dangerous, dictatorial demagogue without ideology. A man who described the rioters in the banlieues as 'rabble', who says he will clean out bad estates with a sand-blaster, who favours zero tolerance policing, harsh immigration policies, an extension of the powers of the President (should he hold the job) and whose power base is in the none-too-gentle world of the French hard, though not the extreme, right. His detractors, and even some of his friends, say that he is 'psychologically fragile', pointing to his wild statements around the time of his break-up with Cécilia (and his consoling relationship with a journalist). But, though some of this may be true, Sarkozy has also spoken about the need to revamp France's fundamental law of secularism to allow mosques to be funded with state money to prevent extremism. He wants to give votes to non-naturalised immigrants in local elections and has come out strongly for positive discrimination for ethnic minorities, a measure that the French left, hobbled by their adherence to Republican values and their antipathy to anything Anglo-Saxon, has opposed. He has also, his supporters say, shown a resolve and a practical intelligence that few can rival on the French political scene. 'He is not an opportunist,' Camille Servan-Schrieber, a political adviser, tells me. 'He is a pragmatist. He is interested in the best solution at the best time.'
Whether Sarkozy is the best solution to France's problems depends in part on how you view those problems. One of the debates currently obsessing the French is the supposed 'decline' of their country. In recent months there have been furious rows between the 'declinologues' and their adversaries. The message of the former is that it is about time France woke up, got rid of its antiquated and expensive social model, its ossified bureaucracy, its over-powerful trade unions and began engaging with, and competing in, a fast-changing world.
A cultural, political and economic Maginot line will be no more effective than its military predecessor, they say. Such thinking is not just limited to the right. Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Medecins sans Frontiers and popular centre-left politician, said last week that France was suffering from 'severe arthritis'. But those who oppose the declineists say they are aggressive right-wing capitalists (or left-wing sell-outs), Anglo-Saxon in attitude and sympathy, who are wrong about the state of the nation. France is not 'falling down', they say, but the sole hope of global resistance to the planetary dominance of new-liberal economics and American culture. According to them, the decline-ists are just capitalists looking to strip the French people of all the hard-fought winnings of centuries of social struggle.
And this bitter division explains - as well as his colourful personal life - the astonishing profile of Sarkozy in French society. If the hour is one in which France is declining, then Sarkozy, with his talk of a 'clean break' with the past, is the man. If France is not declining, then Sarkozy is just another ambitious, and possibly dangerous, politician who shoots from the hip. There are powerful currents in France supporting either analysis. In the coming months and years we will see which triumphs. One thing is sure: the boulevards are likely to see many more marches before the contest is resolved.
Need to know
Born Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa (nicknamed Sarko) on 28 January 1955 in Paris.
Position Minister of the Interior and President of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP).
He says 'Nothing will lead me astray from the path that I have chosen.'
They say 'He calls problems by their real name, and he makes promises he intends to keep.'
Stephane Rozes of the polling firm CSA
I will never forgive him. And to think that I have seen him in his boxers.'
President Jacques Chirac
![[Valid Atom 1.0]](/signs/images/valid-atom.png "Validate my Atom 1.0 feed")
