Philippe Cohen, Richard Malka and Riss
LA FACE KARCHÉE DE SARKOZY
155pp. Éditions Vent d’Ouest/Fayard. 15euros.
978 2 7493 0309 3
Nicolas Sarkozy
TESTIMONY
France, Europe, and the world in the twenty-first century
Translated from the French by Philip H. Gordon
211pp. HarperPress. £20.
978 0 00 726780 4
Eric Hazan
CHANGEMENT DE PROPRIÉTAIRE
La guerre civile continue
177pp. Seuil. 15euros.
978 2 02 096165 3
Catherine Nay
UN POUVOIR NOMMÉ DÉSIR
442 pp. Grasset. 6.95euros.
978 2 253 12340 8
Yasmina Reza
L’AUBE LE SOIR OU LA NUIT
186pp. Flammarion. 18euros.
978 2 08 12096 9
"Je les ai tous niqués” was Nicolas Sarkozy’s quip on becoming mayor of
the smart Parisian suburban town of Neuilly at the age of twenty-eight,
against the express wishes of the Gaullist party hierarchy. A desire to
“screw them all” has since become the trademark of this hyperactive,
pugnacious, and tormented politician: first as Édouard Balladur’s henchman
between 1993 and 1995, when he deployed all means to promote his mentor’s
(unsuccessful) bid for the Presidency – including threatening to investigate
the tax returns of politically unsympathetic journalists, bullying his
ministerial colleagues, and spreading rumours about Madame Chirac’s
financial dealings; from 2002, as Minister of the Interior, when as “Speedy
Sarko” he made the fight against crime and illegal immigration his
priorities, memorably describing the rioters of late 2005 as “racaille”
(scum), and vowing to clean up their neighbourhoods “au kärcher” (with
high-pressure hoses); and finally, in the run-up to the Presidential
elections of 2007, when he likened his own party leader Jacques Chirac to
the Bourbon monarch Louis XVI, flapping helplessly in Versailles as his
people clamoured for reform. In her brilliantly evocative L’Aube le soir ou
la nuit, written after following Sarkozy on the Presidential campaign trail
for a year, the novelist Yasmina Reza summed up the candidate as “un
amoureux de l’adversité”. The recent wave of strikes in the French transport
system, accompanied by a resumption of violent clashes in the banlieues over
the past few days, suggest that Sarkozy is set to encounter further
adversity – perhaps even more than he bargained for.
How and why did the French people elect this “political warrior”, as their
President once described himself, and what does his meteoric rise reveal
about the state of French politics? For Sarkozy’s adversaries, there is
little doubt: 2007 marks the consecration of an ambitious and vindictive
figure, for whom political intercourse amounts to little more than a
Schmittian battle to the death. Sarkozy’s bullish image as a hard man has
been gleefully appropriated by French caricaturists, most notably by Les
Guignols, the French version of Spitting Image; and it is the dominant theme
in La Face karchée de Sarkozy, a comic-strip satire of Sarkozy’s political
career written by the Marianne journalist Philippe Cohen, the lawyer Richard
Malka, and Riss, a cartoonist at Charlie-Hebdo. Sarkozy is presented here as
an obsessive, paranoid and ruthless figure. His gangster-like physique is
exploited to great comical effect, notably in a reprise of the celebrated
scene from The Godfather, when he places the severed head of a horse in
Alain Juppé’s bed, in an attempt to get him to rally to Balladur’s
candidacy. The Sarkozy of La Face karchée is a man of no set political
convictions, latching on opportunistically to whatever creed he believes
would best suit his personal interests, and armed with a simple mantra: “un
jour je les niquerai tous”.
For the radical Left, the election of Sarkozy in 2007 was a watershed, marking
the triumph of a more confident and ideologically assertive French Right.
Written from the combined perspective of a neo-Marxist internationalist, and
an inhabitant of the cosmopolitan Parisian neighbourhood of Belleville, Eric
Hazan’s Changement de propriétaire is a vigorously acerbic chronicle of
President Sarkozy’s first hundred days in office. Hazan argues that
Sarkozy’s social programme (which includes the expulsion of 25,000 illegal
immigrants each year, and increased punishment of petty crime) is likely to
exacerbate the French “civil war” which erupted in the banlieues in 2005. He
also writes interestingly about Sarkozy’s cosy relationship with the French
media, and in particular his closeness to the Lagardère and Bouygues
conglomerates – and this is no idle conspiracy theory: in 2005, after
publishing a photograph of Sarkozy’s then wife Cécilia with her lover in New
York, the editor of Paris-Match, Alain Genestar, was fired at Sarkozy’s
behest. Hazan’s overall argument, which represents a common left-wing view
of the new President, is that Sarkozy’s politics are drawn straight out of
the “neoliberal” textbook: closer alignment with the US and Israel, and –
behind the appealing slogan of putting the country back to work – an
unprecedented ambition for a French politician: the adoption of a business
model of the state, with low taxation, reduction of the size and scope of
the public sector, and comprehensive deregulation as the key objectives.
Sarkozy himself would not disagree with much of this characterization. Unlike
his predecessors, he is not ashamed to call himself right-wing. In
Testimony, his hugely successful pre-electoral programmatic pamphlet, he
declared: “I am convinced that deep down in French society there is a strong
demand for the restoration of certain values of the republican right: work,
respect for authority, family, and individual responsibility. And I’m
convinced that the reason the right has been losing for years is that it
regrets not being the left”. Sarkozy is also candid about the need for
France to learn from the successes of others: from the Scandinavian
countries’ affluence, from Britain and its record of high economic growth,
and even from the United States. Sarkozy believes that France was right not
to join the Americans in invading Iraq, but he also wants to work towards a
Franco-American rapprochement (while Minister of the Interior he paid a
controversial visit to George Bush at the White House; he returned for a
state visit in early November 2007, and received a rapturous welcome). To
the accusations that he is “ultralibéral” (meaning too much of an
Americanophile), he responds in two ways. First, he notes that while he
admires certain aspects of social and economic life in the USA (the
promotion of free enterprise, social mobility and affirmative action), the
“American model” is also profoundly inegalitarian and unjust, and therefore
unsuitable for France – for example, in its provision of health care.
Second, he highlights the dismal failure of the so-called French model, with
its crisis of social integration, high unemployment, low growth, rigid
labour market, exorbitant public debt and failing universities; as he notes
despairingly, one of the best French universities, the École Polytechnique,
does not even appear in the rankings of the top 200 higher education
institutions worldwide. It should also be added that, despite his anti-May
68 rhetoric, Sarkozy is not a true social conservative: he has no overt
religious, anti-gay or anti-abortion agenda, and is resolutely opposed to
capital punishment. One of his great achievements in 2007 was to pulverize
the National Front. Indeed, far from pandering to the Islamophobia which is
increasingly fashionable in some French intellectual circles (both on the
Left and Right), Sarkozy as Minister of the Interior took on France’s
secular establishment by creating a French Council for Muslim Cults, to
oversee the clerical organization of Islam in France; and since his election
as President he has brought in women of immigrant origin into senior
government positions, most notably Rachida Dati as Minister of Justice. The
French Left dismisses this as tokenism, but it says something about the
Socialists’ abysmal record on this issue that they found even tokenism to be
beyond their reach.
Sarkozy’s apparent predisposition to swim against the current is consistent
with his adversarial conception of politics, and his proclaimed intention to
provoke a “rupture” in French political culture. This provides the cue for
Catherine Nay’s biography, Un Pouvoir nommé désir, which effectively
portrays Sarkozy as a “politicien hors normes”. Whether he turns out to be a
paradigm-breaking President is a matter for the future (and we should
remember that six months into their Presidencies, we knew little about how
de Gaulle, Mitterrand or even Chirac would turn out). But by focusing on
Sarkozy’s background, personality and mind-set, Nay suggests a number of
ways in which he is already different from the French political archetype.
She dwells on the fact that Sarkozy is an outsider in two critical senses:
first, he is not a product of the Grandes Écoles system (he is a lawyer by
training), and so did not enter the political elite through the conventional
route of joining a cabinet ministériel (he is the only President to have
begun his political career at grass-roots level, as an ordinary party
activist). And second, he is the son of immigrants: his father Pal came to
France after the Communist seizure of power in Hungary in 1948, and his
maternal grandfather was a Sephardi Jew from Salonika. To add to the young
Nicolas’s sense of otherness, his parents rapidly divorced, and he freely
admits that for most of childhood and adolescence he felt a sense of
“shame”. This sheds light on one of the real differences between Sarkozy and
the traditional French political elite: his relative lack of intellectual
interest in the past. Hitherto, French politicians have tended to define
themselves by reference to a political tradition (Left or Right) and a set
of historical experiences (wars, social conflicts such as May 68, internal
political reconstructions). Not so Sarkozy: his engagement in politics, as
he acknowledges in Testimony, was not driven by any “particular meeting,
event, book, or article . . . it just happened”. He occasionally cites some
French historical figures (de Gaulle, Clemenceau, Georges Mandel, and – to
annoy the Left – Jaurès and Blum), but they are not in any way models he
seeks to emulate. For this man in a hurry, the past can occasionally serve
as an instrument of legitimation, or as a useful negative myth – but
generally it is either an irrelevance, or an obstacle to adaptation and
change.
This is confirmed by Yasmina Reza’s observations of the candidate Sarkozy
between the summer of 2006 and his election in 2007. L’Aube le soir ou la
nuit shows him at his hollowest when giving a speech about Joan of Arc,
pretending to visit the Churchill Museum (he could not care less), and
inviting the press to observe him “meditating” at the tomb of de Gaulle at
Colombey-les-deux-Églises. The epic mode does not really suit him (this is
where the analogy with Bonaparte breaks down, even though his relationship
with Cécilia was very much akin to Napoleon’s with Joséphine – except that
the Emperor divorced her, whereas Cécilia left her husband). Reza’s
fly-on-the-wall political diary is captivating because of its
impressionistic style, which superbly filters out the ambient political
noise. But she is uncertain about what sense to make of the residue. Despite
the remarkable access she is given (she attends all the meetings of his
inner sanctum), and Sarkozy’s commitment to play the game of transparency,
he remains elusively opaque. The book thus moves from its original quest for
political meaning to become a contemplation of a man struggling with the
evanescence of time. This is the campaign trail as we have never seen it
before: we catch glimpses of Sarko being abused – “putain de ta mère” – by a
woman in Marseille, being lectured on Palestinian rights by the Algerian
President, Abdelaziz Bouteflika; cursing at his entourage for failing to
meet his expectations (he really does swear a lot); describing, without any
apparent sense of irony, his enthusiasm for the film The Silence of the
Lambs; musing idly about love; listening in a childlike trance to a piece of
jazz; making jokes in the poorest of taste about Jacques Chirac’s hearing
difficulties; and, all the while avidly, relentlessly, obsessively craving
Reza’s approval. She is struck by his smugness: “si je n’existais pas il
faudrait m’inventer”. But behind the bluster, she also senses a real
fragility, a “sentiment d’insuffisance” which drives him forward, ever
seeking to reach the mountain summit. And what lies behind it? The promised
land, perhaps – but also the possibility of a vast, unending, ineffable
emptiness.
Sudhir Hazareesingh's edition (with Eric Anceau) of the late Vincent
Wright’s Les Préfets de Gambetta was published earlier this year. He is a
Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. A French translation of his study of
Napoleonic civic festivities, Saint-Napoléon, was published in Paris earlier
this year.
