When I moved to France, I told myself that I would stick it out for five years, then come home. That was 20 years ago, and I'm still here. Even today there are few things about the culture I enjoy. I dislike French television, French pop music, French humour (such as it is). French theatre is irrelevant and overblown, and contemporary French literature seems dull and elitist. But there is one aspect of life in France I have come to value: the sanctity of a person's private life. The poetic term for this inviolable sense of privacy—which applies to husbands, wives and public figures alike—is "le jardin secret," the secret garden.
It seems, however, that the Anglo-Saxon fascination for the lives of other people is finally taking hold of the French imagination. Our Protestant taste for transparency; our snooping tabloids; our intrusive, fly-on-the-wall documentaries; our fixation with the sex lives of our politicians, celebrities and even next-door neighbours—all appear to be spreading to France, where it is often said of someone who is routinely unfaithful simply that they are a "chaud lapin," a hot rabbit.
It is a measure of the influence of Anglo-Saxon morality that the French presidential couple have chosen to divorce. In the past, the "d" word was simply not an option. In the French Catholic spirit of compromise, all presidents since the war—with the exception of the dour de Gaulle—were known to be unfaithful, and their wives either suffered in silence, or, as in the case of Danielle Mitterrand, cultivated their own jardin secret. But French public opinion on the extramarital shenanigans of Nicolas and Cécilia Sarkozy has undergone a subtle shift. The Protestant ideal is beginning to encroach on both the public and private spheres.
In recent years, French celebrity magazines, modelling themselves on publications like Hello and OK!, have dramatically increased their sales. "Closer" (pronounced Clo-soeur) saw its circulation rise by 55 per cent in the year to July 2007. In the run-up to the presidential election, the magazine printed photographs of Ségolène Royal in her bikini while on holiday with her family, an intrusion that would not have occurred in the more austere days of the fifth republic. The photos caused outrage among the chattering classes, who felt that French politics was becoming contaminated by Anglo-Saxon prurience.
Celebrity culture, then, has been slow to arrive but it appears to be here. For many, Nicolas Sarkozy—with his Rolex, his Dior suits and his glamorous, peripatetic (ex-) wife—is to blame. The old guard despises Sarkozy and his family for what they call the Hollywoodisation of the French presidency. Cécilia and Nicolas chose to live their lives in the public eye, inviting Paris Match into the Elysée and putting their children on display. Sarkozy's very public mediation of his marital difficulties are a far cry from the discretion of Mitterrand—who for years managed to shame the French press into silence not only over his numerous infidelities but also his "secret family" with Anne Pingeot.
Unlike the private Mitterrand, the 52-year-old Sarkozy is a perfect product of Guy Debord's "society of the spectacle." The first French president to claim a mistrust of intellectualism and a partiality to action over ideas, Sarkozy is not afraid to use the press to bolster his image. He does so in a way that seems archaic to a British audience, but then the French media does not have a long history of independence. Like most of the presidents of the fifth republic, Sarkozy feels a kind of regal entitlement when it comes to the press. A signal of this was the removal of Paris Match's editor, Alain Genestar, by the magazine's owner Arnaud Lagardère, a friend of Sarkozy's, after the magazine published photos of Cécilia with her lover.
Sarkozy's attempts to manipulate the media can be overly blunt. When he was interior minister, he asked one of his aides to roll his son Louis's ball into the room during an interview so that the little boy could run in after it and have his father playfully throw it back to him. He made the mistake of using the same trick again, and word got out. This kind of posturing would have been unimaginable under Pompidou, Giscard, Mitterrand or Chirac.
There is strong resistance from the Parisian bourgeoisie to the subtle moral shift made manifest in the new presidential style. A recent editorial in Libération expressed alarm at the president's capacity for marrying "the two worlds of politics and la société du spectacle." The writer went on to lament the couple's lack of what the French call "pudeur," a word that expresses the dual notion of shame and modesty: "They descend from their private jets and walk the corridors of power as a family, visibly preyed upon by their personal crises, their childhood neuroses, their staged obsessions."
Just beneath this criticism of Sarkozy's histrionics is an underlying disgust for the display of wealth. Indeed, as our own recent history has taught us, the first stage in the elaboration of a fully blown celebrity culture is the destruction of any taboos associated with the accumulation of money. France, through the person of her president, is taking the first steps towards complete equanimity about the filthy rich. It seems that in order for celebrity culture to flourish, there must first be broad acceptance that the accumulation of wealth is a worthy goal. In France's culturally Catholic society, this has never before been the case.
Hence the outrage from a small section of France's elite when Sarkozy chose to spend his much-publicised post-election "studious retreat" on the yacht of one of his billionaire friends. For millions of other French men and women, however, the sight of their new president sunning himself off the coast of Malta was a welcome change from the dour austerity of his predecessors.
In the spirit of Blair in his Cool Britannia days, Sarkozy never misses the opportunity for a manly embrace in a packed stadium with France's home-grown megastar Johnny Hallyday. This is the kind of display most French people are looking for. They no longer identify with the fake austerity of the Socialist party, and when Royal and the younger members of the party clamour for modernisation, they are calling not for particular reforms so much as an unabashed embrace of the Anglo-Saxon society of the spectacle.
Today, it is clear that most of the French electorate would rather see their president embracing their beloved "Johnny" in the Stade de France than watch a bunch of champagne socialists go to Bourgogne to climb Mitterrand's favourite rock, as they do every year in desperate homage to the fifth republic's first socialist president, and no doubt its last.
