Another quote on the Sarkozy’s politics of flashy nothingness:
FRANCE IS another country; they do things differently there. Or do they? The enduring popular belief that the French hold the franchise on emotional intelligence when it comes to love, sex, marriage and fidelity has been very publicly - and quite untypically - put to the test by their new president, not to mention the two women who have most recently commanded his hormones and his heart: his ex-wife, Cecilia Sarkozy and his new maybe-wife, Carla Bruni, whom he married secretly in a civil ceremony in the Elysée Palace on January 10.
[…] Has President Sarkozy been "globalised"? Has he become both exploiter and victim of the celebrity culture and tabloid values which are more typical of British and American public life than that of France? If so, then he has his defenders, mainly among his political allies. "The French people will have to get used to modernity," his education minister, Xavier Darcos, has said. "There is nothing more natural than to show ourselves as we are, to be transparent, open, as you would expect a modern couple to be."
Hmm. But whose modernity does Sarkozy espouse? The personal style of one French politician and his consort may be no more than passing entertainment for the rest of the world, like the showy uxoriousness of Tony and Cherie Blair or (pre-Lewinsky) Bill and Hillary Clinton. But to the introspective French, ever jealous of their national identity, ever ready to man the barricades against its corruption by the forces of popular culture and global standardisation, the president's behaviour is worryingly aberrant.
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