Sarko the sex dwarf

France's hapless former prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, once told a Le Figaro journalist that what France really wanted was to be raped by a strong leader. "La France veut qu'on la prenne," said the suave diplomat: France wants to be taken by force. While Villepin's record for taking his nation's temperature is pretty poor, it seems that on the matter of France's deepest desires, he was probably right.

In some ways, Nicolas Sarkozy's strategy—or 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 citizens to vote for la rupture.



When the French chose Sarkozy in May 2007, they made a choice in favour of a certain violence to themselves. What form that violence would take, no one was quite sure. For some, 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. At the one-year mark his ratings were at an all-time low, with 72 per cent of the population dissatisfied with him. When asked about the reasons for this, most people cited not his reforms but his style of governance, in particular his médiatisation or celebrity status. The French did not want a rock star as head of state. They still seemed to prefer a kind of godhead—aloof, disembodied and unaccountable.

After two years of Sarko, the situation is more complex. A recent poll revealed that 75 per cent consider Sarkozy-the-man to be "courageous" and 60 per cent credit him with "a sense of statesmanship." At the same time, 73 per cent think that Sarkozy-the-president is not listening to them enough and 67 per cent think he is "not providing solutions to the problems of French people." The cliché that France is a nation of adolescents in search of a strong father figure against whom they can rebel appears to hold in this instance.

Yet in spite of the dissatisfaction, France, a country supposedly immune to change, has swallowed a large quantity of reforms. In his first year Sarkozy managed to push through, with no major industrial action, unprecedented change 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 was a deep and subtle mutation beginning to take place in French society, simply by virtue of the fact that, in electing Nicolas Sarkozy, the population was capitulating to a force it had long resisted. His lightning conquest of Carla Bruni (known as "the predator" for her voracious sexual appetite) confirmed this magnetism.

I suspect that over and above its individual achievements, Sarkozy's presidency will be remembered as the turning point in French history, the moment when the hegemony of left-wing ideology began to die. Since the 1789 revolution, the dominant morality—with the exception of the fascist interlude of Vichy—has been socialist. In schools, l'éducation civique, an obligatory subject from the age of 13, teaches the values of the Republic and encourages pupils to engage in political debate. And there has always been a broad consensus that socialist values and republican values were synonymous.

Despite Sarkozy's proclaimed Gaullist lineage he is clearly not the general's heir. He does not share de Gaulle's mistrust of Americans, nor his contempt for money, nor his obsession with national reconciliation. From his first moment in office, Sarkozy set about dividing and conquering. He hijacked the most charismatic figures of the "bourgeois left"—from Dominique Strauss-Kahn to Bernard Kouchner to Jack Lang—simply by offering them better jobs. He delivered a body blow to the left from which it is still reeling and challenged the view that the left-right divide was inviolable in France.

Thus Sarkozy set the tone for two years of what his detractors now call his "Sarkozigzagging." He has been dubbed the "omni-president," "the hyper-president," the "tele-president" and his global posturing has earned him a reputation as "one of the most dynamic political leaders of our time." Whatever his enemies may say, Sarko's hyperactivity, on the international scene at least, has produced results. During a successful EU presidency he revived the floundering Lisbon treaty and carved out an agreement on global warming. His intervention in the Russo-Georgian crisis drew admiration both from Presidents Medvedev and Obama. The G20 summit offered him the perfect stage on which to show that France was now the US's valuable ally and not its vassal.

On the domestic front, of course, things would not be so easy. The sheer force of Sarkozy's will is not enough to effect change. But he has, more than any leader since de Gaulle, managed to trigger a fundamental shift in the political landscape. The idea that left-wing and republican values are one no longer goes unchallenged. This may not seem like much but until Sarkozy, a silent majority was forced to sit by and watch as the mainstream media upheld the mainly leftist values and interests of the chattering classes. This is why analysts were so stunned by France's "no" vote in the referendum on the European constitution: no one had been reporting it.

Remarkably, Sarkozy managed to get elected without the media. Having long denounced their lack of objectivity, he rode out their opposition and appealed directly to voters. Over the years he has gathered a heterogeneous array of supporters from across the political spectrum and from all walks of life, thereby gaining a reputation as a free thinker. This image appealed to many younger supporters, who were bored by the ideological stranglehold of the post-'68 generation.

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Sarkozy's wish to annex the moral high ground from the left has driven many of his decisions. Indeed, he 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 political demise of Jean-Marie Le Pen (who lost many of his voters to Sarkozy) indicates that the president has had some measure of success. With Le Pen, the left lost a useful bogeyman. Now, thanks to Sarkozy's manoeuvring, the Socialist party is further hobbled by a spectacular upsurge in the extreme left, which has, since the beginning of his presidency, been slowly sapping the opposition's strength.

Since becoming president, it has become clear that Sarkozy's offer of rupture was above all the offer of a break with the dominant ideology. His response to the economic crisis has been to fall back on the old, Colbertist solutions: investing in infrastructure, wealth redistribution, state regulation. He will not concede these trusted policies to the left: they are timeless values, he suggests to his electorate.

For much of the nation, the prospect of no longer having to take sides in endless and fruitless political debate is a welcome relief. For the rest, it is the end of life as they know it. Many of the reforms that Sarkozy has slipped past the Assembly threaten France's egalitarian imperative. But the most dangerous, the one that targets the beating heart of received ideas in France, is his reform of the university system. Postponed until 2010, Sarkozy's attempt to give universities greater autonomy in selection and setting fees has met with a barrage of resistance from a caste that has held power over l'éducation nationale for more than 30 years. But Sarkozy knows he has the support of those who are fed up with the '68ers.

Much has been written about the generation of bourgeois intellectuals, known as les soixante-huitards, who led the student uprisings against de Gaulle's stultified order. They fashioned the French political landscape, still run the media, and have 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 increasingly perceived as a selfish, hypocritical gauche caviar (champagne socialist).

For the hitherto silent majority that voted for him, Sarkozy is a self-made man who was not moulded by the dominant ideology of his generation. He was never a member of the gauche caviar that lost its soul in the corruption scandals of Mitterrand's reign. Nor did he go to one of the grandes écoles, that have churned out generations of politicians, both left and right, branding them with that special self-importance common to France's elite. He is a truculent upstart and as such detested by a large portion of the bourgeoisie.

My son, Jack, a French philosophy graduate, has a theory to explain the president's success: the upstart Sarkozy is the conquering hero, the Nietzschean superman, whose will to power sets him above the constraints of conventional French morality. This, for Jack, explains his election and his massive, if short-lived popularity, as well as his ability, where others have failed, to push through difficult reforms.

I would go one step further, however, and suggest that it was also Sarkozy's conquering libido which, more than his policies, explain the labels "courageous" and "dynamic." Borrowing from my sisters' rich vocabulary of male sexual stereotypes, I would describe Sarkozy as a sex dwarf. To my mind, what defines France's 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.

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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 in France. The last presidential election was 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. All the iconography of the presidential campaign pointed to the subliminal forces in the battleground. Picture Royal, 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.

No record of his sexual conquests has seen the light of day, but I don't need documentary evidence to know 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 widely 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 at that moment and Cécilia's first husband "had horns" as they exchanged their vows.

The next time I encountered Sarkozy was in 2006 at a press conference that he gave as minister of the interior. I thought I had grown out of my tendency to blush, but throughout the event I felt that either I must be pre-menopausal or this person was going out of his way to embarrass me. Hard as it is to admit, sitting in Sarkozy's line of vision for two hours was among the most erotically charged experiences I have had. 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.) I asked a colleague if she had noticed his 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 feelings of attraction-repulsion during that press conference left me in no doubt: France's president is a sex dwarf. There is something baffling about Nicolas Sarkozy's 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: 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. For France, despite its many powerful women, still wants to be controlled by a man.