LETTER FROM PARIS: Cherchez La Femme
Harriss, Joseph A.
L e T T e R f R o M P a R I s Cherchez La Femme by Joseph A. Harriss f it is true that femininity is essentially role-playing, Ias Simone de Beauvoir argued in her feminist bible, The Second...
...Sarkozy’s personal life, too, marked a turning point in French mores...
...They got back together, but she was virtually absent from his presidential campaign last spring, not even bothering to vote for him in the crucial second round...
...Gone was the conventional presidential couple-cum-mistress in the Élysée Palace...
...he retaliated by taking up with a lady political journalist who had been covering him, as it were, for some time...
...She was no longer in tune with herself, her relationship was no longer the essential thing in her life...
...He was later infatuated to distraction with Joséphine, putting up with her extravagant spending and wandering eye, alternately throwing jealous tantrums and making her empress of France before finally divorcing her...
...Few noticed that she replied under her breath the French equivalent of “Aw, cut it out...
...there are even rumors of imminent marriage...
...Her justification for leaving—it’s said that Sarkozy, genuinely smitten, spent months trying to persuade her to stay—was redolent of Romantic Feminism...
...The irony of the women’s lib campaign for empowerment by Beauvoir and her short-sighted ilk is that French women already had it...
...Ten years later, President Félix Faure died of cardiac arrest in the Élysée Palace, a smile on his face and rigid fingers French women, with eager male complicity, have historically held sway over their menfolk to an outlandish degree...
...They never moved into the Élysée Palace...
...She is part of me,” he rhapsodized...
...Like that other national soap opera, Britain’s royal divorce of Prince Charles, Sarkozy’s very public marital problems have brought the remote French presidency, for better or worse, into the real world...
...We should have known...
...Now they consider both the presidency and the country better off without her...
...Cécilia and I are reunited for good, for real, doubtless forever...
...Then there was General Georges Boulanger, wildly acclaimed as the savior of France by a Paris mob one evening in January 1889 and urged to stage a coup d’état...
...Not for nothing did the French coin the expression cherchez la femme as the universal solvent of male motivation...
...With his stylish wife Cécilia and their five handsome children from a total of three marriages, Sarkozy formed the very model of a modern major family...
...divorced, as that they didn’t go along with the age-old French Way (see above) in such matters...
...Come to think of it, didn’t Monica Lewinsky wear a French beret...
...They brought the sort of brief, shining, Camelot moment the French have secretly yearned for ever since they went into raptures over John and Jackie in the White House...
...Enter Nicolas Sarkozy, elected on a platform of change, indeed, rupture with the past...
...He warmed up relations with the U.S., even if it meant watching the vainglorious French media wonder publicly, “Do we look too aligned with the U.S...
...The man’s appeal apparently is universal: Following his recent state visit to China, a popular Chinese singer named Yang Erche Namu proposed via Internet, adding, “I’m sure he must be a great kisser...
...Napoleon, a romantic sort, first fell for the sister of his brother’s wife and wrote a sappy short novel about it...
...He told friends on election night last May, “If you liked Jackie Kennedy, you’ll love Cécilia...
...Desperate Housewife...
...But for all his pugnacious, macho modernity, Sarkozy has one thing very much in common with Frenchmen past and present: He is just as toujours l’amour dotty about women as any of the most besotted of them...
...Ever since, influential dames, if not dames, have wielded power behind, and often on, the scenes theoretically dominated by susceptible, salivating, lovesick French males...
...But in contemporary France it took a Socialist president, François Mitterrand, always looking out for the good of the people, to actually set up a parallel wife and daughter in a Paris apartment at public expense during his 14-year tenure...
...The presidential chauffeur dutifully drove him to his trysts while First Lady Bernadette kept house...
...In his otherwise muscular pre-election best-seller, Testimony, he lavished a full chapter on his beloved Cécilia...
...As the first sitting president to go through a divorce, it was another first for the man who would change France...
...She announced to those with ears to hear that the job of being France’s première dame bored her stiff...
...still gripping to his lap the curly head of his alarmed lady friend...
...The French in particular developed it to the point where women, with eager male complicity, have historically held sway over their menfolk to an outlandish degree...
...These ladies typically had their royal paramours wrapped around their little fingers, particularly Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry, respectively Louis XV’s first and second official playmates, whose pillow talk is credited with improving his taste in art...
...Whatever else he does for France, Sarkozy is the best thing that could have happened to the country’s avidly read gossip columnists and people press...
...That was the only indication that it would be their last official appearance together before a cryptic autumn communiqué pronounced the end of their 11-year marriage...
...The nominally celibate clergy followed suit, idolizing the Virgin Mary and covering the landscape with churches dedicated to Notre Dame...
...He showered her with so much public affection that you would have sworn she must be his mistress...
...gleefully headlined one Paris newspaper, in English, as she drove off in her black Mini Cooper on the road to Freedom and True Love...
...All of whom are delighted to play cherchez la femme at the lovelorn Élysée Palace...
...Rumors inevitably are rife about the steroidal president who doesn’t mind being called a chaud lapin, or hot rabbit, always a much-sought accolade among French politicians...
...Joseph a. Harriss is an American writer in Paris whose latest book is About France (iUniverse...
...A millennium before Jean-Paul Sartre’s lover graduated from the Sorbonne, amorous French knights were on their knees swooning before ladies of the court, putting them on an absurdly high pedestal (from which, to be sure, most scurried down as fast as their voluminous skirts allowed...
...Rebelling against a destiny that pushed her into the unwanted spotlight of public life, she was unwilling to live a lie, she told an interviewer...
...The tradition remained through monarchy, empire, and republic...
...So unprecedented was it that constitutional experts debated for days whether a president could legally get divorced while in office...
...From tax reform to labor law, education to pension plans, he boldly began taking on the taboos, entitlements, and vested interests that made France the sick man of Europe...
...Cécilia had telegraphed her intentions for months, if not years...
...These things just happen...
...f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 6 1...
...For sympathetic women’s magazines she was a frustrated MarieAntoinette, Flaubert’s suffocating Emma Bovary, a Princess Diana lonely in a public marriage...
...Isn’t she beautiful...
...It became official in 1444, when Charles VII acknowledged the beauteous Agnès Sorel as his extracurricular squeeze, thereby adding a maîtress en titre to French kings’ perks...
...he preferred Louise-Renée de Keroualle f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 5 9 Head Column ChDisLig Byline Column J o s e P H a . H a R R I s s to keep a date with his mistress, the felicitously named Madame de Bonnemains...
...His successor, the ineffable, insufferable Jacques Chirac, nicknamed “three minutes, shower included” by those who should know, admitted he had loved many women “as discreetly as possible...
...Then there’s an attractive feminine member of his cabinet Rebelling against a destiny that pushed her into the unwanted spotlight of public life, she was unwilling to live a lie...
...who gets so much fond attention from him in public that she’s known as Sarkozette...
...he announced theatrically to hundreds of assembled guests and media at last July’s Bastille Day garden party at the Élysée...
...Even that wasn’t enough to sate Mitterrand, who occasionally visited three lady friends of an evening, chivalrously referring to them as his “hors d’oeuvre, main course, and dessert...
...Aides got used to his calling or texting her several times a day and interrupting meetings to take a call from her...
...Brittany-born Louise-Renée de Keroualle, for example, was sent across the Channel in the 17th century to seduce Britain’s King Charles II and influence his policies toward France, becoming Countess of Fareham, Baroness Petersfield in the process...
...Not a day has passed that we have not spoken to each other...
...L e T T e R f R o M P a R I s Cherchez La Femme by Joseph A. Harriss f it is true that femininity is essentially role-playing, Ias Simone de Beauvoir argued in her feminist bible, The Second Sex, it must be admitted that the Latins play it with flair...
...Sarkozy’s whirlwind courtship of Carla Bruni, a willowy model-turnedpopsinger whose previous companions include Mick Jagger and Donald Trump, has the French agog...
...As befitted the Sun King, Louis XIV had three mistresses, Mesdames de la Vallière and De Montespan for fun and, after he publicly renounced pleasure, the pious Madame de Maintenon for, um, comfort...
...They had already broken up in 2005 when Sarkozy was interior minister and she took off for New York with a French executive...
...Most French, fed 6 0 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 L e T T e R f R o M P a R I s up with her capricious game of hide-and-seek at official functions, were appalled by the public rudeness of her failure to attend the picnic with the Bushes in Kennebunkport last summer, leaving the embarrassed Sarkozy to stammer something about his wife’s sore throat...
...The only difference is that, instead of the usual division of labor in these matters, he treated Cécilia as both wife and mistress...
...Now she was returning to her true self...
...The unfortunate reality was that she was, after The surprise was not so much that the Sarkozys all, more midinette than mistress...
...France has even exported its mistresses like some national specialty...
Vol. 41 • February 2008 • No. 1
