The Secret Life of France (20 page)

As in most Latin countries, France's judiciary follows the inquisitorial system. Heir to the infamous Catholic Inquisition, this system places a magistrate in charge of the police investigation. He or she leads the investigation, accumulating evidence both for the defence and the prosecution, right up until the hearing. When it comes to court, only the evidence presented by the investigating magistrate will be up for discussion. To some, this provides useful supervision to police work and thereby reduces the chances of police brutality during the investigation; to others, it merely slows things down and places too great a burden on a single – potentially corruptible – individual. Indeed, French judicial blunders tend to come not from police malpractice but from the fallibility of the
investigating magistrate, who snaps under pressure. Bruguière, who comes from a long line of magistrates, stretching back through eleven generations, is immune to self-doubt. Known to his friends as ‘The Admiral' since his escapade to Tripoli and as ‘Sheriff' to his enemies (for his perceived sycophancy towards the FBI), Bruguière is said to love secrecy and conspiracy. He has, for many years, wanted Yves's former job as head of French counter-terrorism (DST), but has been passed over many times for less flamboyant men.

A firm believer in the policy of ‘kicking the anthill', Bruguière's method, when it comes to Islamic terrorism, is to organise massive police operations resulting in large numbers of what he calls ‘preventative arrests'.

‘The goal is to keep constant heat on the Islamists,' he explained to me. ‘By doing this you prevent networks from forming and deal with the problem before it happens.'

In July 1998 Bruguière mounted a police operation to dismantle suspected GIA sympathisers in France: 138 people were arrested in one day and Bruguière was broadly congratulated in the press for this deadly blow to terrorism. As it turned out, Bruguière's colleague Gilbert Thiel, who was forced to take over the investigation, dismissed thirty-four of the cases due to lack of evidence and released a further fifty-one people who had been sitting in prison for several months awaiting trial.

My lunches with Bruguière, though hugely diverting, did not provide me with any details of the cases he was
investigating. I had to look elsewhere for those. An arch manipulator like the people in the intelligence world he so admired, Bruguière quite fittingly decided to have a run at political office. In March 2007 he rallied behind Nicolas Sarkozy's candidacy and ran for MP in the department of Lot-et-Garonne, where he tasted defeat, possibly for the first time in his life.

France’s hapless former prime minister Dominique de Villepin once told an eminent journalist from
Le Figaro
that what France really needed was to be raped by a strong leader: ‘
La France veut qu’on la prenne
,’ said the suave diplomat who is compared to Chateaubriand by his friends and the emperor Nero by his enemies:
France
wants to be taken by force
.

Villepin’s record for taking his nation’s temperature is pretty poor. He was the man responsible for proposing and then withdrawing the labour reforms (CPE) of 2004 after six weeks of student mayhem and political deadlock. It seems, though, that on the matter of France’s deepest desires, he was probably right.

In some ways, Nicolas Sarkozy’s strategy – or at least posture – was to ‘take France by force’. His presidential campaign was peppered with pugnacious, coercive vocabulary. He claimed to be answering what he called the nation’s long-suppressed ‘need for order, authority and firmness’. Distinguishing himself from the motherly, reassuring messages of his opponent, Ségolène Royal, he invited French citizens to vote for
la rupture
. When
France chose Sarkozy, she made a clear choice in favour of a certain violence to herself. What form that violence would take, no one seemed quite sure at the time.

For some, Nicolas Sarkozy would herald the breaking of the last levees against globalisation. For others, he would enable France at last to benefit from the buoyancy of the global economy. So far, and unsurprisingly given the economic context, he has done neither. One year on, his ratings were at an all-time low, with 72 per cent of the population dissatisfied with his performance. When asked about the reasons for their disapprobation, the majority of French people cited not his reform record but his
style
of governance, in particular his
médiatisation
or celebrity status. The French do not want a rock star as their head of State. It seems that they still prefer a kind of godhead (legacy of the divine right of kings) – aloof, disembodied and unaccountable.

It is interesting to note that in spite of the general dissatisfaction, France, a nation supposedly immune to change, has swallowed a large quantity of reforms. In his first year in office Sarkozy managed, with no major industrial action, to push through unprecedented legislation on France’s traditionally immutable education system, as well as reforms to the labour code and the welfare system. But far more fundamental than all this is a deep and subtle mutation taking place in French society, simply by virtue of the fact that, in electing Nicolas Sarkozy, the population capitulated to a force that it had long resisted. More than its individual achievements and reforms, Sarkozy’s
presidency will be remembered as the turning point in French history, the moment when ideology began to die.

Since the 1789 Revolution, the dominant ideology – with the exception of the fascist interlude of Vichy – has been socialist. In French schools, Civic Education – an obligatory subject from the age of thirteen – teaches the values of the Republic and encourages youngsters to engage in political debate. The fact that both the creators of this discipline and its teachers were left-wing never seems to have posed a problem, for there has always been a broad consensus that socialist values and republican values were synonymous. The fact that there was a huge (silent) portion of the country that believed otherwise never appeared to bother the chattering classes, whose values and interests were consistently upheld by the media. This political reality explains why analysts were so stunned by the result of the referendum on the European constitution: no one predicted a ‘No’ vote because the press and television had so clearly supported a ‘Yes’ vote.

The remarkable thing about Nicolas Sarkozy is that he managed to get elected
without
the media. Sarkozy, who has long denounced the media’s lack of objectivity, managed to ride out its powerful opposition to him and appeal directly to voters. Over the years he has gathered around him a heterogeneous array of supporters from right across the political spectrum and from all walks of life, thereby gaining a reputation as a freethinker. It was no doubt this image that appealed to many of his younger supporters (including my own son, Jack), who
were bored by the ideological stranglehold of the post-’68 generation.

It has long been Sarkozy’s wish to annex the moral high ground from the left, which has held it firmly ever since the Occupation. Indeed, Nicolas Sarkozy is the first French politician since Pétain to dare to invoke the values of order, work, merit and reward, claiming that these are the values of
common sense
, not of ideology. The recent political demise of Jean-Marie Le Pen (who lost many of his voters to Sarkozy) indicates that the president has had a measure of success in reclaiming the moral high ground for the right. With Le Pen, the left lost a very useful bogeyman, one which had long enabled them to stifle any serious debate.

Since becoming president, it has become clear that Sarkozy’s offer of rupture was above all the offer of a break with ideology. For half the nation, the prospect of no longer having to take sides in endless and fruitless political debate is a welcome relief. For the other half, it means the end of life as they know it. All the reforms that Sarkozy managed to slip past the Assembly during the torpor of the first
Grandes Vacances
of his presidency threaten to put an end to the reign of ideology. But the most important of these reforms, the one that targets the beating heart of received ideas in France, is the reform of the university system.

Here, Sarkozy relied heavily on support from that element of French youth that is fed up with the legacy of May ’68. Much has been written in recent years about the generation of bourgeois intellectuals, known as
les
soixante-huitards
(sixty-eighters), who led the student uprisings against de Gaulle’s stultified order. This is the generation that has fashioned the French political landscape, runs the mainstream media, has lived off the fat of the land and squandered a thriving economy in the process. Once the heroes of a glamorous revolution, the
soixante-huitard
is perceived, increasingly, as a selfish, hypocritical champagne socialist (
gauche caviar
).

For the hitherto silent majority that voted for him, Sarkozy is a self-made man who was not fashioned by the dominant ideology of his generation. On the wrong side of May ’68, Sarkozy was never a member of the
gauche
caviar
that lost its soul in the financial corruption scandals of Mitterrand’s reign. Nor did he go to one of the
Grandes
Ecoles
, those hot-houses of the French Republic that have, for centuries, churned out generations of politicians, both left and right, branding them with that special self-importance common to all members of France’s elite. He is a truculent upstart and as such detested by a large portion of the bourgeoisie. At least, he must
appear
to be detested. For as one friend put it, ‘The Sarkozy vote is a guilty vote [
vote honteuse
],’ and the many millions of bourgeois who did vote for him do not admit to it.

To echo my son Jack’s theory, the upstart Sarkozy is the conquering hero, the Nietzschean superman, whose extraordinary will to power, for a time, set him above the constraints of conventional French morality. This profile, for Jack, explains his election and his massive, though
short-lived, popularity, as well as his ability, where all others have failed, to push through unwelcome reforms. It was Sarkozy’s will to power combined with his conquering libido which, more than his policies, won the hearts, if momentarily, of the French people. His conquest of Carla Bruni, known as ‘The Predator’ for her voracious sexual appetite, only confirmed this popularity.

I would go one step further than Jack, however, and – borrowing from my sisters’ rich vocabulary when it comes to the categorising of male sexual stereotypes – describe Nicolas Sarkozy as a
sex dwarf
. To my mind, what defines France’s little president and explains his magnetism is not simply his ‘will to power’, but the particular circumstances that drive it: his small stature and his large sex drive.

In a culture unreconstructed by either of the great movements that have fashioned Anglo-Saxon society (Protestantism and feminism), the libido is still a force to be reckoned with, and the strange currents that brought Sarkozy to power would suggest that Dominique de Villepin was right: France did indeed wish to be taken by force.

It was widely observed that the last presidential elections were not a battle between left and right but rather a contest between two ‘styles’ – one gentle, the other tough; one consensual, the other coercive; one feminine, the other masculine. In the end, the French opted, not for the reassuring arms of Ségolène Royal and her ‘gentle revolution’, but for Nicolas Sarkozy, the libidinous sex dwarf, and his promise of ‘rupture’.

All the iconography of the presidential campaign pointed to the subliminal forces that were dominating the battleground. Picture Ségolène Royal on the eve of the second round of the elections, dressed all in white, as if in homage to that alliance of virginity and female power embodied in such icons as Elizabeth I and Joan of Arc. Now picture Sarkozy, short and strutting in an oversized and sweat-stained suit, like France’s favourite dictator, the potent and charismatic Napoleon Bonaparte.

Sarkozy, like Bonaparte, has all the characteristics of the sex dwarf: he is short, shamelessly flirtatious and tireless in his pursuit of women. Despite the fact that no record of his sexual conquests has ever been allowed to see the light of day, I don’t need documentary evidence to prove that Sarko is a sex dwarf. I sensed it myself in 1996 when I was writing an article about French Protestants. As mayor of Neuilly he attended a fête being held by the Protestant community and somebody introduced us. I noticed as he shook my hand that he had the disquieting quirk common to many sex dwarves, which is that they look at your mouth when they’re talking to you. His sexual magnetism has been broadly discussed, and his conquest of Cécilia, when, also as mayor of Neuilly, he officiated at her marriage to one of his closest friends, has become legend. It has been suggested that their affair began in that moment and that Cécilia’s first husband ‘had horns’ even as they were exchanging their vows.

The next time I encountered Nicolas Sarkozy was in
2006 at a press conference that he gave as minister of the interior in order to trumpet the successes of the police forces under his command. I thought I had grown out of my tendency to blush, but throughout the event I thought,
Either I’m pre-menopausal or this person is going
out of his way to embarrass me
. Hard as it is for me to admit, sitting in the tiny minister’s line of vision for two hours was among the most erotically charged experiences I have had, and when he ended the conference and swept out of the room with his aides running behind him, I was left in a state of Victorian agitation. (If I had had a fan, I would have been waving it furiously.)

Afterwards, I asked a female colleague from French radio if she had noticed the minister’s behaviour.

‘Oh,’ she said with a smile. ‘He always does that. He finds a woman in the crowd and then undresses her with his eyes.’

My own feelings of attraction–repulsion during that press conference left me in no doubt: France’s diminutive president is unquestionably a sex dwarf.

There is something baffling about Nicolas Sarkozy’s meteoric rise to power, not only to the millions of people who didn’t vote for him, but for many of the millions who did and who now, like my own children, regret it. His success can only really be explained in psychosocial terms. I suggest that it was the collective desire of the French people to be represented by a dominant and libidinous male, rather than a dominant and matriarchal female. This particular fantasy could only have found an outlet in a society
unreconstructed by feminist ideology; in short, a Patriarchy. France, despite her many powerful women, is resolutely still a Patriarchy. The story of Ségolène Royal’s political rise and fall is a perfect illustration of this.

When it became clear that a woman was emerging as the Socialist Party’s candidate for the presidency, there was a ripple of excitement. Journalists, in particular, foresaw a more diverting contest than the uninspired locking of antlers they had come to expect; for many voters, either for or against her, the presence of a female candidate seemed to herald a new era in politics, a fresh start. It appears, however, that France was not quite ready for a female head of State.

Once the novelty had worn off, the matter of Royal’s femininity began to undo her. Throughout, it was the leitmotif of her campaign, though not one of which she was always in control. Her gender was used as a weapon by both camps, either to aid or to hinder her rise to power. Her supporters brandished her feminine credentials, alternately championing the nurturing mother of four or the powerful and independent working woman, her opponents often attacking her for the same attributes. The most shocking assaults, however, came from her own camp. Jean-Luc Mélanchon, a colleague from the Socialist Party, on hearing of her triumph in the primaries said, ‘The presidency of the Republic is not a beauty contest.’

And Laurent Fabius, her rival in the leadership contest, asked, ‘Who will look after the children?’

As testimony to the confusion surrounding the issue of Royal’s gender,
Libération
– which has always been resolutely anti-Sarkozy – referred to Royal, in as early as October 2005, as
La Maman de Fer
(the Iron Mother).

This kind of gender stereotyping would be unthinkable in Britain or America. In France it is routine. Too busy emancipating herself from her symbolic patriarch de Gaulle, France never actually took on the patriarchy itself.

When the time came in the Anglo-Saxon world for the roles men and women play to change, there was an unspoken agreement in France for them to stay the same. In the public sphere, things have advanced (France is only a little way behind Britain when it comes to the number of women in parliament), but in private, nothing much has moved. Men still feel they can accost women in the street to compliment them on their beauty and, as my own daughter has shown me, most women wait for the man to make the first move. Few people, even those who have fought for women’s rights, refer to themselves as feminists, and the word sexist as a term of abuse is rarely used.