[FRANCE] SARKOZY, Cécilia, Carla, Jean, ...

For the French President, it was hardly the endorsement he had been looking for.
As Nicolas Sarkozy grew ever more publicly vocal this week in his
protestations of love for model Carla Bruni his former wife delivered
her own, damning, verdict.Sarkozy is "ridiculous, badly behaved and not fit to be
president" Cecilia Sarkozy says in a new book, adding for good measure
that the women in his life are just a 'bunch of slappers' (or des petasses fardees, as the French would have it).
Even the president's female political colleagues do not escape her
barbed tongue: they are just "boring wallflowers, and now that there is
no First Lady, he needs to surround himself with pretty young things
dressed in Dior". It has taken just a few short weeks for the revenge of Cecilia to begin.
Sarkozy, 52, began dating Bruni, 40, just one month after his
divorce from Cecilia following a 12-year marriage and his election last
May as France's new president.
Now it is Carla who stays with the president at the Elysee
Palace and has been given a £10,000 ring - embarrassingly similar to
one he once bought Cecilia. Her highly damaging remarks about her former husband come in a
biography of her by French journalist Anna Bitton. But Cecilia is now
trying to prevent publication on the basis that the conversations she
had with Bitton were private and, she says, not for publication.
Bitton rejects this and adds her own verdict on Cecilia, whom
she describes as an "ice-cold, blue-blooded empress' and a 'poor little
rich girl who is addicted to shopping". So the French are treated to an embarrassing farce being
played out at the highest levels. The ex-model and ex-wife damns the
ex-model soontobe new wife while the president rushes around like a
love- sick teenager.
He's been president less than a year and already three books
and a deluge of magazine articles have been devoted to his love life. Scroll down for more ...

Besotted: Nicolas Sarkozy and his model girlfriend Carla Bruni


It is not at all what the French expect from their head of state. As
one Paris-based friend of mine remarked, Sarkozy has "betrayed the
national code of honour".
Despite its sybaritic image, France is a fundamentally
provincial country which respects social order and prefers affairs to
be secret - a situation helped by draconian privacy laws. "Sarkozy has opened the curtains on a country which was
happily eating cheese and climbing up the backstairs to visit
mistresses," says my friend gloomily. "France likes hypocrisy. It does
not like sexual openness. We are not Italy."
Sarkozy, of course, has a different interpretation. "I broke
with a deplorable tradition in our country, that of hypocrisy and
lies," he said yesterday.
"With Carla, we decided not to lie. We don't want to hide."
So are we witnessing an enormous cultural shift in France or a president who has taken leave of his senses?
Scroll down for more ...

Sarkozy with Bruni on a trip to the pyramids


Sarkozy was shattered by Cecilia's decision to leave him weeks
into his presidency. He worshipped this beautiful, highly strung woman,
introducing her to the world as a modern-day Jackie Kennedy. Indeed, after their divorce in October, Sarkozy was secretly
admitted to hospital, suffering from a stress-related throat abscess
and a fever. He called pitifully for his wife to visit him. Cecilia
came but would not return to her husband. She is believed instead to
have taken up with her old love, the Moroccan-born PR executive Richard
Attias. Then, last November Sarkozy met Carla (often referred to as
'The Maneater') at a private dinner. Within weeks, he was said to have
proposed to her before whisking her off to Egypt and Jordan in a
friend's private jet. On Tuesday, he arrived back from his holiday to tell the
nation that this was a "serious relationship" and to hint that a
wedding was imminent. His behaviour - cancelling meetings, housing his new lover in
the Elysee Palace with her own music room and telling the world that he
is in love - is upsetting Sarkozy's political colleagues. The Prime Minister, Francois Fillon, reportedly complains:
"When you talk to the president he doesn't always listen. He cancels
meetings, which is not like him. I wonder how this is going to end." The French public have their suspicions, and his personal
popularity is plummeting, not helped by the fact that Carla's past
conquests include Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger and Donald Trump. Laetitia Cash, who is a well known figure in Euro society and
a prospective Tory MP, fears that Bruni could become the president's
nemesis. "Is she going to knuckle down to being a First Lady or will
she be indulged like a kind of Marie Antoinette? The French expect
women to have their place, they will not want someone who is an
emotional drain on the president."
Unfortunately the phrase "low maintenance" does not apply to
Bruni. Even in her modelling days, her privileged background - she is
the step-daughter of an industrialist in Turin - was apparent to
everyone. "It was always clear that she didn't have to be doing this,"
says one fashion editor who worked with her. "Carla was perfectly
professional but if she was tired or bored, then everyone knew about
it."
Her tastes were never cut-price. At the end of one fashion
shoot she was asked if she would like to keep any of the skimpy pieces
of fabric she had been wearing. She chose instead a full-length fur
coat. Sarkozy, on the other hand, has rather ascetic tastes. Aides
say that he is not interested in food, he barely drinks and is a
workaholic.
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Sarkozy and Cecilia in happier times


Yet he borrowed a private plane from a rich friend to fly Bruni to
Egypt and is buying her wildly expensive jewellery. It is almost like
watching Dodi Fayed woo Princess Diana. Those who know Bruni say that she needs to be indulged and entertained. She also has no intention of playing second fiddle.
"She likes always to be the centre of attention," says a French acquaintance of hers.
But she has already made some concessions to her partner. She is
taller than he is, 5ft 9in to his 5ft 5in, and now appears only in flat
shoes. Sarkozy wears his two-inch stacked heel formal leather shoes,
however casually he is dressed. The title of 'Maneater' was bestowed on Bruni after a very
Left Bank entanglement during which she fell in love with the son of
her boyfriend. The son, a philosophy professor called Raphael Enthoven, left
his wife, Justine Levy. Justine immediately wrote a best-selling novel
about a husband stealer - "beautiful and bionic with the eyes of a
killer". Bruni retorted grandly: "I'd prefer to be described as a
predator than an old hag." Bruni had a son by Enthoven but they later
separated. To be fair, Carla has hardly been hunting the president. His
pursuit of her has been relentless and frantic. There are two theories about this. The first is that he has
simply fallen head over heels in love with her and needs a First Lady
for his state visits - including, intriguingly, a forthcoming stay at
Windsor Castle with the Queen in March. The second, for which there is much evidence, is that poor
Sarkozy is still obsessed by his unfaithful ex-wife and that Bruni is a
trophy replacement paraded to get his own back on her.
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Bruni and Sarkozy are happily affectionate with one another in public


Bruni has the same high cheekbones and cat-like eyes as Cecilia.
Worryingly, she has the same characteristics of impetuosity, wilfulness
and disregard for convention. Some political commentators claim that Sarkozy is a man of
action and that he is sorely in need of a First Lady. A source from
Sarkozy's political party, the UMP (Union for Popular Movement), says:
"A new wife is his primary concern."
Sarkozy was disappointed that the Pope declined to receive him
with his new girlfriend. Under Vatican protocol it was deemed
"inappropriate" for a head of state to meet the pontiff on an official
visit, accompanied by a girlfriend. Meanwhile, the Indian government, which is receiving Sarkozy
as a guest of honour at the Republic Day Parade in New Delhi on January
24, has released a half-hearted statement, saying: "It is for the
French to decide whether Miss Bruni should be treated as First Lady or
not."
It will be fascinating to see what happens when Sarkozy arrives
in Britain for the state visit in March. Since the Entente Cordiale -
the end of centuries of war between Britain and France - was signed in
1904 every French leader on a state visit has been accompanied by a
First Lady.
Yet some question whether the romance will last even that long.
If you believe that Sarkozy is still in a battle with his last wife,
the Bruni romance has an air of doom about it. The marriage between Sarkozy and Cecilia was about as peaceful
as those between Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, if you believe the
biographies out this week. According to Ruptures, by Yves Derai and Michael Darmon,
Cecilia gave her husband's advisers marks according to their loyalty to
her and once said: "All women dream of being in my place and I dream of
getting out of here." In Cecilia: The Hidden Face Of The Ex-First Lady,
Sarkozy is almost destroyed by his wife. A UMP source confirms the suffering of the president. "There
is absolutely no doubt that divorce forced the president onto a
hospital bed," he says. "He was convinced that his differences with Cecilia could be
resolved and that she would become a respected First Lady. He so wanted
to make the relationship work. Instead, she left him sad, humiliated
and - finally - extremely ill. "Cecilia came close to destroying him at what should have been
the most uplifting time of his life and career. She just didn't seem to
care any more, either about him as a person, nor about the presidency.
For Nicolas, it was perceived as utter betrayal - something that he
will perhaps never get over."
Friends and supporters of Sarkozy are delighted to see him
cheerful again and hope that Bruni will bring laughter to the Elysee
Palace. After the initial public disdain for her reputation, Bruni's
natural supporters - academics, artists, 'beautiful people' - are also
speaking up for her. "After years of stuffy old men running France with faceless
old bats in tow, the thought of a sexy model-turned-pop-singer taking
centre stage might at least give us a more exciting world image" says
one Paris university professor. It is a high-risk strategy. Sarkozy's ambitions for France
have a Napoleonic scale to them. He may remould France through radical
social reform - but his love life could destroy him in the process.