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Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France, doesn't like wine. He doesn't like smelly cheeses. He doesn't like truffles. He likes Diet Coke and candy and big Havana cigars. Such distaste for good taste is widely regarded as unnatural in France, but Sarkozy makes no apologies. He takes pride in his candor, and if it often comes across as uncouth and uncool his attitude is: So what? For example, he likes money. Why not? Who doesn't? But, in France, one is supposed to be motivated by nobler or more frivolous purposes. Read the novels: from Balzac through Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola, and Proust, much of French literature is about the hypocrisies of bourgeois society. The secrets and lies, the twisted desires and the bitterness, that attach to money are at the heart of the drama; and, still today, talking about money—particularly, speaking publicly and favorably, as Sarkozy does, of wanting, earning, and keeping it—is considered vulgar, even sordid. "In America, sex is the taboo. In France, it's money," the philosopher Pascal Bruckner told me. "Even for people on the social and political right, it's a fault—a moral fault." Sarkozy thought that was ridiculous. During his Presidential campaign, he presented himself as décomplexé—unhung-up—about money, but he talked about it so much that he appeared to be mighty complexé, after all. He valorized both labor and profit, and promised to liberate the French from what he saw as their state-sponsored lethargy: the mandatory thirty-five-hour workweek and the mandatory retirement at sixty for public-sector jobs, and all the government subsidies and protections that made such low productivity possible. Much better, Sarkozy said, to strive and to be rewarded, to have and to spend. Increased purchasing power was one of his rallying cries. For talking like that, for his swagger, and for his colloquial bluntness, and because he admired George W. Bush, they called him Sarko the American. "They consider it an insult, but I take it as a compliment," he told a Bush envoy in 2005, according to a diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks. Sarkozy offered himself as a new model of can-do Frenchman, bent on forging a future even better than the idealized past. To the French, this was strange but exciting, and they took a chance on him.
Personally and politically, Sarkozy is such a singular figure that he can seem easy to caricature, but caricature thrives on exaggeration, and he is so overstated that he leaves the caricaturist little to work with. French Presidents are expected to possess an aura of aesthetic and intellectual refinement that dignifies the nation. Sarkozy doesn't pretend to radiate anything of the kind. In the year after his election, in May, 2007, his tabloid domestic life—a sensational divorce and a sensational remarriage—along with his obvious delight in consorting with the super-rich, earned him the nickname President Bling-Bling. His popularity sank, and kept on sinking.
Now, with six months left in his first term, Sarkozy is coming up for reëlection as an underdog, which entails an effort that his advisers have described as "represidentialization." This fall, he presided over the opening of an exhibition of modern art that will travel around the country, to be displayed without admission fees. It was an occasion for Sarkozy to be seen mingling with the people, bringing high art to the common man, and, after contemplating a monochrome orange square painted by Yves Klein, he expressed his admiration: "That costs millions." Then he expressed his wonder: "Is a Klein more than a Léger? Less than a Matisse?" His remarks prompted groans of dismayed mockery in the press. But he flouts etiquette so reliably that you can't call these things gaffes. A few days later, at a gathering of European leaders to discuss the sovereign-debt crisis that threatens to tear apart the European Union, the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, said something that Sarkozy didn't like, so Sarkozy told him, "You have lost a good opportunity to shut up." A few years ago, during an audience with the Pope, he was seen checking his BlackBerry. "He desecrates everything," Bruckner says, and describes Sarkozy as "like a figure from Italian comedy." Taken together, his clownish displays contribute to a deep distrust of Sarkozy, a feeling that he is inauthentic and, worse, not really French enough for his job.
Then again, the job itself is not as French as it used to be, because France is no longer a fully sovereign nation-state. It is one of twenty-seven countries that belong to the E.U. On paper, France has such a strong Presidency that the French regard their leader as a sort of republican king, elected not merely to govern but to reign. But the E.U. doesn't allow that. The writer and economist Jacques Attali was exaggerating a bit when he told me, in Paris this summer, "The Presidency is almost without power." But he was not overstating how things feel to a Frenchman—the sense of political vertigo that has accompanied European integration.
France no longer controls its own currency. France no longer controls its own borders. France has only limited control of its own defense. "We are like in a cartoon, where people see someone still running, not knowing that he has passed a cliff," Attali said. "That's the President." He described France today as "a no man's land"; what's more, he stressed, "we have done this on purpose, willingly, in the process of building a federal European state." And now the success of Europe is so uncertain. "That's the malaise of the French situation," he said, "to have given up the state as the DNA of identity, without acquiring the advantages of a new identity."
Attali is an elder of the Socialist Party's brain trust, so it was striking that Marine Le Pen, the leader of the ultranationalist radical-right party the National Front, described the French predicament in much the same way. "Everything that made up France's grandeur—its dynamism, its innovation, its openness—was completely annihilated by the European Union," Le Pen told me. She declared France "ruined," and rattled off some favorite talking points: "It has 1.6 trillion in debts, an annual deficit of a hundred and forty billion, four million unemployed. It doesn't export anything anymore. It has no specific voice among the nations." (She had her numbers right, but she, too, was exaggerating the problem: France has the world's fifth-largest economy and the fifth-highest volume of exports.) But, while Le Pen and Attali made the same basic diagnosis—that France was being undone by Europe—they reached opposite conclusions. Le Pen wanted to get France out of the euro zone before it was too late, and Attali believed that the only way to insure France's survival was to get in deeper, to forge a more complete political and economic federation.
"Seriously," Le Pen said, "can France be any more diminished than it is today?" Attali believed that it could. He reminded me of what came before the European Union—"First World War, Nazism, Communism, Second World War, et cetera"—and he said, "The nation alone is impossible. We have to be Europe, and that's it." In the early nineteen-nineties, Attali was involved in the drafting of the Maastricht Treaty, the blueprint for the E.U., and he told me, "We didn't put in any chapter providing a way out. No exit. That was on purpose." To Le Pen, that was madness. She claimed that the E.U. was "a straitjacket" that was "strangling" France. In any case, the question of an exit clause seemed moot to her. "I think the euro will collapse," she said. "And if the euro collapses political Europe won't survive." She considered it only prudent to get out before calamity struck. "I demand nothing more than what the rest of the nations on earth count on—a currency, land, the possibility of my people to make their own laws," she said. "We have to stop tricking ourselves."
Until the threat of the sovereign-debt crisis became inescapable, this past summer, Le Pen's grim assumption that a united Europe must fail was laughed off by the French political establishment. Even when every news broadcast was discussing how a Greek default might trigger just such a collapse, mainstream politicians rejected the possibility. Sarkozy's top foreign-policy adviser at the Élysée Palace, Jean-David Levitte, told me, "We are condemned to succeed, because we cannot abandon the euro." But what was to be done? Nobody in Paris could say. As the crisis deepened through the fall, Sarkozy compensated with ever more forceful rhetoric. In mid-October, with Greece reportedly just days away from default, he told parliamentarians from his party, the center-right U.M.P. (Union for a Popular Movement), "Our destiny will play out in the next ten days," and, later, in Nice, he warned, "Those who destroy the euro will take responsibility for the resurgence of conflict on our continent."
By then, it was clear that the survival of the euro depended on Germany, Europe's supreme economic power. Only Germany could afford to bail out the euro zone, but Germans were tired of paying for their neighbors' spendthrift ways. France was itself swamped by debt, and, by talking of war and peace, Sarkozy was compensating for his lack of leverage and putting the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, on notice that she had no acceptable alternative. At the same time, he was laying the groundwork for his reëlection campaign. When he came to power, in May of 2007, the French economy was thriving. His campaign slogan was "Together everything becomes possible." No wonder the French felt let down. Sarkozy's greatest domestic victory has been to raise the retirement age from sixty to sixty-two. Now, in a time of strict austerity, almost nothing seems possible—which clearly won't do as a slogan. But if he could say that he had saved the Republic, had averted economic annihilation, had safeguarded France from the spectre of war—that would be something to run on.
Because he is small and grandiose; because he thinks France should lead Europe and that Europe should lead the world; because he is brazen and ruthless in pursuit of power, and autocratic and shameless in exercising it; because he is self-dramatizing, an exhibitionist and an opportunist, as well as able, shrewd, and adroit; because he represents himself as both a conservative and a reformer, and is driven not by ideology but by instinct and impulse; because he was not born or bred to rule but stormed the establishment as an outsider, convinced of his destiny to enter history by altering history's course; because he comes off as contemptuous of snobbish élites, and because he also craves the acceptance of those élites; because he thrives in crisis and is prone to floundering when he's not under extreme pressure; and because he seeks to project French influence abroad to boost his own stature at home, Nicolas Sarkozy is often described as a would-be Napoleon. This is not, as a rule, a term of admiration. Karl Marx pretty much insured that calling someone a Bonapartist would be a slur, when he wrote of Napoleon III, with reference to his uncle Napoleon I, that all great world-historic figures recur, first as tragedy and later as farce. Many French people these days will tell you that Sarkozy is both.
In the beginning, he was the most popular French President since the establishment of the Fifth Republic. Today, he is the most unpopular. This summer, his disapproval ratings approached eighty per cent; in polls, the Socialists consistently defeat him by solid margins; and for a time, last spring, Marine Le Pen, too, was running ahead of him. Given the bleakness of the economy, that might seem natural. These are hard times everywhere for incumbent heads of state, and the abrupt, forced resignations last month of George Papandreou, of Greece, and Silvio Berlusconi, of Italy, have given their surviving European counterparts even more reason to be anxious. But Sarkozy's popularity collapsed well before the economy. What turned the French off was not so much his policy as his style. The antipathy is personal.
"He's hated," Saïd Mahrane, a political reporter at the weekly magazine Le Point, told me. "And why is he hated? First of all, because he aroused crazy hope." It is easy to forget the excitement that Sarkozy once inspired as a figure of national renewal and transformation. But the fervor with which he is now rejected can be properly understood only in relation to his original appeal—as a measure of disillusionment. "I adore Sarkozy," a former member of his staff told me, "but I'm very, very, very disappointed with his Presidency." He had over-promised, and then he did not deliver on his program, the ex-staffer said: "I think that, in reality, he had no intention of doing it. At bottom, finally, he's an old-school politician . . . a man of campaigns, a man of war, a man for taking power." But he never learned to harness the machinery of government, the ex-staffer said, so "there are many battles he didn't join because he didn't know how to fight them." As a result, "he hasn't done anything—nothing but nothing."
Pascal Bruckner, too, found plenty to regret about Sarkozy, but he felt that the ferocity and crudeness of much of the Sarkozy-bashing was also regrettable. To the large majority of French people who could not stand their President, he said, "Everything about him is detestable, even his physique, his smallness." The physical contempt amounted to a kind of "racism against small people," he said, and added, "There's also surely a bit of anti-Semitism—not admitted, because it can't be said, but in the collective conscience he's a foreigner, not from here."
He was born Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bócsa. His father, Pál István Ernő Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa, was a stateless refugee, an untitled Hungarian aristocrat who fled with his parents to Nazi Germany after the Red Army's invasion, in 1944, returned home to find that the family's estate had been seized, and, in 1948, fled again. This time, he fetched up in Austria, where he was recruited into the French Foreign Legion. He served for five years, and was about to be shipped off to Indochina when a doctor in Marseilles—a fellow-Hungarian—gave him a medical discharge. His next stop was Paris, where he arrived penniless and, he has said, shoeless, and spent his first nights sleeping in a Métro station. Before long, he was working in advertising, and prospering. He settled in the posh suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, just beyond the Bois de Boulogne, and later he bought a country house with what he said were the winnings from a baccarat game against Yul Brynner at the Deauville Casino. He started his own ad agency, and went on to run campaigns for big fashion and cosmetics houses, but he remained stateless until 1975, when he took French citizenship.
Last year, at the age of eighty-two, Pal Sarkozy published a memoir, in which he described himself, rather gleefully, as an insatiable sex addict, hellbent from the time he seduced his nanny at the age of eleven on bedding new women at every opportunity, at least until he married his fourth and current wife, a model, forty years ago. Nonetheless, he recalled being outraged on his first wedding night to find that his bride was not a virgin. She was Andrée Mallah, a doctor's daughter of Greek Jewish and French Catholic descent. They had three sons before the marriage fell apart, in 1959, when the middle child, Nicolas, was four.
Sarkozy has said, "What made me who I am now is the sum of all the humiliations suffered during childhood." He suffered from being short, with divorced parents and—even after abbreviating it, and dropping the umlaut—a foreign name. He flunked out of the first lycée he attended and transferred to a Catholic school. He has said that he saw little of his father, and that in his mother's home there was never enough money—"He never took care of us when we needed him. . . . I had to work to pay for my studies," he told the journalists Nicolas Domenach and Maurice Szafran—claims that both his parents have denied. Regardless, he went on to earn law and business degrees before enrolling at Sciences Po (the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris), one of the Grandes Écoles, whose alumni make up most of the French ruling class. Sarkozy is not one of them; evidently, he could not master English sufficiently to meet the graduation requirement.
"As a boy, he told his father that he wanted to grow up to be president," the 2005 WikiLeaks cable reported. "He said his Hungarian-born father retorted, 'In that case, go to America, because with a name like Sarkozy you'll never make it here.' Proving that wrong, Sarkozy said, was a touchstone for his efforts both to succeed and to transform France."
A tolerance for humiliation, even an appetite for it, is a prerequisite for high office in a modern democracy. The trouble comes when a politician gets numb to humiliation—ceases to fear it, or feels immune to it. The French playwright Yasmina Reza accompanied Sarkozy for a year as he campaigned for President, and recorded her impressions in a book. In her account, there is little more to Sarkozy than his will to power—the freakish energy, the retail politician's compulsive need to impose himself on crowds and win their love, the all-consuming drive to attain what the French like to call "the supreme power." What exactly he means to do with it is never declared. Reza depicts his quest as existential—the man becomes his own context—and this rings true to Sarkozy. In his own campaign book, "Testimony," he states, "I don't claim to be putting forth any new theory or new intellectual framework. I simply want to tell the story of a life in which the desire to act decisively and get results plays a big role."
At the age of twenty-two, as a young activist in the party of the neo-Gaullist right, Sarkozy won a seat on the municipal council of his home town, Neuilly, where his mother was the mayor's secretary. Five years later, in 1983, the mayor died, and an established Gaullist elder in Neuilly asked Sarkozy to manage his campaign to fill the empty post. Then the elder fell briefly ill, and Sarkozy ditched him to enter the race himself. He won, and served as mayor for the next nineteen years. It was not a full-time job, and it made an excellent platform for Sarkozy to cultivate his political networks. The Socialists were in power, under President François Mitterrand, and the de-facto leader of the opposition was Jacques Chirac, the mayor of Paris. Sarkozy turned to him as a mentor, and as the two men grew close Chirac adopted him as a political son. In his business-law practice, too, Sarkozy cultivated powerful men on whose experience he could draw—the Italian press baron Silvio Berlusconi was one of his clients—and he began to earn well.
Still, he remained an apprentice, toiling in obscurity, until he became instantly famous throughout France, in 1993, when a man strapped with explosives and calling himself "the human bomb" entered a kindergarten in Neuilly, took the children hostage, and threatened to blow them up. Sarkozy rushed to the scene, passed through the police cordon, and entered the school alone. After a while, he emerged with some of the children. Then he went back in to negotiate for more. He made eight such trips over forty-six hours before police who had sneaked into the building shot the hostage-taker dead.
During his Presidential campaign, years later, Sarkozy engaged in an interview with the philosopher Michel Onfray, who challenged Sarkozy's claim that he sometimes found consolation in going to Catholic Mass. "Religion is an irrational construct," Onfray said. Sarkozy returned the challenge: "What is your vision of philosophy—carpe diem, who cares about tomorrow?" Onfray said, "I believe in knowing yourself." Sarkozy didn't miss a beat: "But such knowledge is impossible, it's absurd!" He recalled his encounter with the human bomb. "Eight times I was frightened in a different way," he said. "We never know ourselves completely."
Sarkozy had been married for a year when he became mayor of Neuilly, and a year later, while officiating at another man's marriage—Jacques Martin, a fifty-one-year-old television host—he fell for the bride, Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz. She was twenty-six years old, a former model of foreign parentage (a Moldovan Jewish father and a Spanish mother), and nine months pregnant. Sarkozy has reportedly said that as he married her to Martin he thought, Why? She's mine. The Sarkozys and the Martins became friends; the Sarkozys had two sons, and the Martins had two daughters, and the families vacationed together. In 1988, the Martins divorced, but it was not until 1996 that the Sarkozys did the same. Sarkozy's wife had refused to release him, even as he and Cécilia, as everyone in France refers to her, established a life together.
Meanwhile, Sarkozy was named Minister of the Budget in the government of Prime Minister Édouard Balladur. Chirac had pushed him forward. But, in 1995, when Chirac ran for President, Sarkozy backed Balladur. When Chirac won, he cut Sarkozy out of the government, calling him a traitor. "In the eyes of the media I had gone from 'the Mozart of politics,' with all the promise of success, to a treacherous and false-hearted Iago," Sarkozy told Onfray. He read widely at this time, he said, and found solace in Seneca's letters to his disciple Lucilius: "Reading this book amid my problems moved me because it was at once simple and very profound." From the novelist Albert Cohen he took the notion that "the idea of pain is worse than the pain itself." Rather than being held back by fear, Sarkozy let the prospect of happiness be a spur. "I tell my children: 'Never wait,' " he said. So he was a carpe-diem man, after all, and he saw himself as a figure of defiance, not only an outsider but also a survivor.
For decades before the current crisis made the fear of national decline painfully real, the French have suffered agonies of self-doubt, calling into question not only the nation's identity but its prospects for survival. Endless public-opinion polls reflect the pervasive sense of decline—the feeling that it has never been so bad to be French, and the fear that it can only get worse. This attitude is almost the opposite of the spirit expressed, in 1954, by the father of the Fifth Republic, Charles de Gaulle, in the opening paragraph of his "War Memoirs"—a paragraph that a lot of French people, in de Gaulle's time, could recite by heart: "All my life, I have had a certain idea of France. This is inspired by sentiment as much as by reason. The emotional side of me tends to imagine France, like the princess in the fairy stories or the Madonna in the frescoes, as dedicated to an exalted and exceptional destiny. Instinctively I have the feeling that Providence has created her either for complete successes or for exemplary misfortunes. If, in spite of this, mediocrity shows in her acts and deeds, it strikes me as an absurd anomaly, to be imputed to the faults of Frenchmen, not to the genius of the land. . . . In short, to my mind, France cannot be France without greatness."
This romantic paean was the creation myth of postwar France. A fairy tale, de Gaulle calls it, on a par with the Immaculate Conception. He wasn't kidding. The country had just endured a colossal defeat and disgrace—capitulation to Nazi occupation—and de Gaulle speaks of it as "an absurd anomaly." "Mediocrity" is far too kind a word for the outrages of the war years. But de Gaulle had led the Free French Forces, then rallied France to make itself over in the image of his own legend, as a nation of resisters. His creed—if it's not great it's not French—offered a way out of the past. It was habitable. Laboring under de Gaulle's idea, the French achieved the three decades of buoyant postwar growth and prosperity that they call les Trente Glorieuses. But since then the challenge he laid down, greatness or death, has given way to an increasingly morbid mood. The idea now is that France has no certain idea of itself or, worse, that it has no unifying idea but uncertainty.
"French people are very pessimistic by nature," Marc Weitzmann, a novelist who used to edit the cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles, told me. "It's a sign of narcissism. They're obsessed by their own identity, and everything else is 'We're threatened, the future is going to be awful.' " In fact, despite France's chronically high unemployment, its citizens enjoy an uncommonly high quality of life. But Weitzmann, who is fifty, said that his generation is wistful for the time of its childhood, in the latter years of les Trente Glorieuses. "Those days certainly look better from here," he said. "But think where the wealth came from back then. A good part of it came from the globalization of the time." He meant France's vast former empire in Africa and Southeast Asia, over much of which France continued to exert enormous power, with steadily diminishing returns, into the nineteen-nineties. "So what we call globalization today is just the fact that globalization has turned against us," Weitzmann said. "It's really global now, because it's not one-way any longer."
The same sense of contraction obtains in art, literature, and philosophy. Who, outside France, now looks to Paris first to define our moment, much less the way forward? Weitzmann told me that the realization that France is no longer really important weighs heavily on his fellow-intellectuals. "The narcissism I was talking about has something to do with a feeling of illegitimacy," he said. "They don't feel right, the French intellectuals. There's this sense of 'We are not really what we pretend we are,' and you have to compensate for that with a lot of narcissism and self-promotion." For Sarkozy's government, too, there is no escaping the fact that France is now a small country. As his chief of staff, Xavier Musca, put it cautiously when I visited the Élysée Palace, "We realize now that France alone can't play what it considers as its historical role."
The starkest measure of the French retreat from hope may be the rise, since the late nineteen-eighties, of the National Front. Until Marine Le Pen took over, in January of this year, the Front was led by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who got his start in politics as a fascist street brawler in Paris in the late nineteen-forties. When he first ran for President, in 1974, Le Pen won less than one per cent of the vote. But in 1988, and again in 1995, he jolted the French system, winning nearly fifteen per cent of the vote, to finish in fourth place. These were sensational results for a party that was led by a convicted Holocaust negationist, who had unsuccessfully challenged reports that he had committed torture during the Algerian War, and who had no apparent political program beyond booting out all immigrants, legal and illegal.
Although power in the Fifth Republic has always been held by either the center right or the Socialist left, voters typically have many parties to choose from, so Presidential elections are conducted in two rounds—first, an elimination round, then, a fortnight later, a face-off between the two front-runners. In 2002, when Chirac ran for reëlection, he was deeply unpopular and under investigation for corruption, and the Socialist Party, hobbled by infighting and incoherence, was in no better shape. Although Chirac won the first round, Le Pen scored an upset victory over the Socialists, taking second place. On Election Day, shamefaced Socialist voters turned out in multitudes to carry Chirac to a landslide victory, but Le Pen took nearly a fifth of the vote, an astonishing number. Le Pen hadn't evolved much over the years; it was France that was changing.
As Chirac entered his second term, he invited Sarkozy to serve as his Interior Minister. He had not forgiven Sarkozy for campaigning against him in 1995, and he did not like or fully trust him. In his recent memoir, Chirac describes Sarkozy the way nearly everyone in French politics does who has no reason to fear him: "nervous, impetuous, bubbling over with ambition, doubting nothing, least of all himself." Although their working relationship was often abrasive, Chirac recognized Sarkozy as "one of the most gifted politicians of his generation." It was universally assumed that he would run for President after Chirac, and he owed his rise, in part, to the perception that he was the politician who might best check Le Pen. His public image was as a fierce law-and-order man, with a firmly right-of-center posture on immigration, a gift for political oratory—sometimes scrappy, sometimes soaring—and an infallible ability to make headlines.
In the autumn of 2005, when the immigrant ghettos of the Paris suburbs were set aflame in riots that spread across the country, Sarkozy orchestrated the police crackdown, declaring that he would clean the streets of racaille by means of a Kärcher. Racaille means "rabble," but in French ghetto slang the word has a jagged edge of racial derogation, and a Kärcher is a high-pressure water blaster for power-scrubbing buildings and sidewalks—a tool that would shred a person.
Sarkozy's remarks were denounced as inflammatory, even as a call for ethnic cleansing. But Sarkozy knew that his swagger excited more of the French electorate than it turned off. In the South of France, the next spring, as he told an enthusiastic U.M.P. rally about his plans to fight crime, he looked up from his prepared speech, grinned, and said, "When I think about the grief they gave me for saying racaille . . . " The crowd interrupted him with loud applause and laughter, and Sarkozy tightened his grin. "If you were to hear what I really think of the people I called that," he said, raising a hand to jab at his chest, "racaille is still too affectionate."
Sarkozy presented himself, in his Presidential campaign, as the antidote to the nation's anxiety. "France has been going through a fundamental crisis of confidence," he wrote in "Testimony." "The main characteristic of our society is the absence of hope, whereas the very goal of politics is to provide hope. I reject the notion of inevitability. I cannot stand the word, the idea, or the consequences of the concept."
To Sarkozy, work was the cure. Everyone could see that he was the hardest-working man in French politics—working factory floors and hospitals, plunging into crowds—and they could see that he loved it. It invigorated him, and he said that if the French worked more France would be reinvigorated. That was the difference between him and the Socialists, he maintained: while they stood for unemployment and alienation, he stood for the positive value of work. He said, "Over time, we have denatured the Republic by saddling it with egalitarianism, social levelling, and charity." He said that France needed "to turn its back on misérabilisme," and he said, "I want to be the President who will strive to moralize capitalism."
In her book, Yasmina Reza describes Sarkozy and his speechwriter Henri Guaino riffing as they work out the text for his nomination acceptance speech. Sarkozy is "on a high, on his feet, improvising," saying, "France shouldn't just be nostalgia. Bowing and scraping to the past should not obscure the future . . . Great nations hampered by a long history will forget the future . . . China is wedded to the future! . . . Okay, Okay! Okay! The running thread is work! For me, there are two ideas, France is not finished, and work."
He began his bid a year before Barack Obama began his, and although their politics and characters, their stories and styles, could otherwise hardly be less alike, Sarkozy, too, defined himself as a transformational leader: a child of half-foreign ancestry, whose very candidacy was an affirmation of the Republic's ideals. In January of 2007, when he received the U.M.P.'s nomination, Sarkozy said, "At this moment where everything for me is changing, I can't keep myself from thinking of those who made me dream of another destiny, of a larger life, of a more exciting future." They were, he said, "the heroes of the Resistance and Free France, those men with whom I took my first steps in politics, those men who came from an era in which politics was mixed up with patriotism and epic sagas." He waxed lyrical about those men, de Gaulle above all, and their courageous readiness to "rupture with the received ideas and the established order when they lead France toward decline."
Sarkozy promised that his Presidency would be such a rupture, and, by claiming the mantle of the French Resistance heroes, he was presenting himself not merely as a candidate but as a savior. "They taught me—me, a little mixed-blood Frenchman—to love France and take pride in being French," he said. "For a long time these were feelings that I kept for myself, like a treasure hidden in the depths of my heart. . . . I thought a strong man had to overcome his emotions. I've since understood that a strong man lives his truth." He said, "I changed because power changed me. Because it made me feel the crushing moral responsibility of politics. The word 'moral' doesn't frighten me." And, of course, he said, "This isn't about me, but about France."
Although he invoked de Gaulle, Sarkozy represented a sharp break with the Gaullist political tradition, particularly with respect to foreign policy. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, in a snub to America, de Gaulle withdrew France from the NATO military command. His idea was to establish France as an independent force in global affairs, mediating between East and West and able to deal with all sides. The most dramatic post-Cold War expression of this posture was the resistance of Chirac and his Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, to George W. Bush's war against Saddam Hussein. Sarkozy broke ranks. Though he never supported the Iraq war, he denounced his government's campaign to delegitimatize it. "Chirac and Villepin flexed their muscles against Bush," he told the journalists Domenach and Szafran. "They enjoyed themselves, but what did they get for it? Nothing. Zero." By contrast, he argued, returning to NATO and strengthening ties with America would enlarge France's stature on the world stage.
At the same time, Sarkozy rebuked the cronyism and corruption of the French political establishment. He stood for an "irreproachable democracy." He didn't care that his heterodoxy made many of his party's old hands uneasy. His objective as he campaigned for the first round was to eliminate the National Front. He spoke constantly of law and order, of deporting illegal immigrants, and argued that legal immigrants who did not wish to embrace French identity as fully as he did had no place in the Republic. "I won't accept those who wish to live in France without respecting and loving France," he said. In addition to the nationalists, he appealed to protest voters who felt disenfranchised: "My France is that of the French who vote for the extremes not because they believe their ideas but because they despair of being heard. I want to extend my hand to them." In the first round, he gutted the National Front, and, for the second round, he appealed to the left. "My France is that of workers who believed in the left of Jaurès and of Blum," he said, invoking the patriarchs of French Socialism, Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum, "and who don't recognize the static left that no longer respects work."
After his last campaign appearance, Yasmina Reza finds him shuffling through a stack of newspapers that declare his victory to be imminent, and he says, "I will have a palace in Paris, a castle in Rambouillet, and a fort in Brégançon. That's the way it will be." Is he gloating, or marvelling, or bewildered? Reza doesn't comment. In the days before the vote, Sarkozy had announced that if he won he would mark his victory by withdrawing from the crowds for several days of solitude in a monastery. "I'll think, rest, retreat," he tells Reza. "I must prepare myself to occupy this place. I need calm and serenity to find the necessary distance." Instead, he threw a lavish and exclusive Election Night bash for a small throng of rich supporters and power brokers at Fouquet's, a swank brasserie on the Champs-Élysées. And the next morning he flew off with his family to cruise the coast of Malta on a two-hundred-foot yacht owned by his friend Vincent Bolloré, a billionaire corporate raider.
Fouquet's and the yacht: even now, when the French discuss their contempt for Sarkozy the conversation tends to turn quickly back to the impression he made in those first few days after his election—the ostentation, the exclusivity, the strutting, nouveau-riche vulgarity. In his defense, Sarkozy loyalists will remind you that his marriage was breaking up, and that his impolitic behavior was born of his attempts to save it. Cécilia had left him before; in 2005, she fell in love with Richard Attias, an events producer, and took off with him for a while. "I don't see myself as First Lady. It bores me," she said. Still, Sarkozy persuaded her to come back, to help him maintain the appearance of the marriage through his campaign, and by all accounts he wanted to keep her. So even as he wooed voters he was also wooing her. "He doesn't give a shit about Fouquet's, he doesn't give a shit about Bolloré's yacht—that was all to please Cécilia," one of Sarkozy's close advisers at the time told me. A number of people in Sarkozy's orbit offered the same explanation, and, whether or not they believed it entirely, it was clear that the story gave them consolation. "It's his humanity, his weakness," his former staffer said. "And it makes him likable in a certain way—he's a man like any other."
But a President is not like other men. When it comes to managing his marriage, for instance, he can offer his wife excitements outside the conventional romantic repertoire. So, in mid-July of 2007, two months after Sarkozy was elected, the French press reported that Cécilia had gone to Libya as her husband's representative. She was there to meet with Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, in a bid to secure the release of the Benghazi Six—five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who had been falsely convicted of injecting Libyan children with H.I.V.-infected blood. For years, E.U. diplomats had been negotiating with Tripoli, and they were on the brink of a deal when Cécilia arrived, unannounced. The E.U. dispatched an envoy to Paris to lecture Sarkozy about the perils of freelance diplomacy, but he was not deterred. When the Benghazi Six were released, two weeks later, he claimed full credit for France, and sent Cécilia with a government jet to fly them to Bulgaria for the homecoming photo op.
Sarkozy's grandstanding caused considerable grumbling in other European capitals, but French diplomats and businessmen wasted no time in descending on Tripoli to cut billions of dollars' worth of deals—for the construction of a nuclear desalination plant, the sale of missiles to Libya, the sale of oil and gas to France—and to lay plans for Qaddafi to make a state visit to Paris. The Socialist opposition complained that the deals amounted to the payment of ransom for the Bulgarians, and of bribes to Qaddafi for the normalization of relations. A parliamentary inquiry was got up, whose most conspicuous effect was to give leftist delegates a platform to issue public reminders of Sarkozy's rocky marriage. As Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the French Green Party, put it, "Europe was exploited so that the Sarkozy couple could have a family therapy session."
Still, the rescue of the hostages was generally hailed as a triumph for the assertive new President. Sarkozy's popularity hit an all-time high. Then Cécilia left him. She returned to Richard Attias, and the Élysée Palace announced the divorce in mid-October. Sarkozy soon began dating Carla Bruni, the Italian-born French supermodel turned pop star, whose romantic résumé included reported affairs with Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, and the former French Socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius. Word of the Sarkozy-Bruni hookup began getting around in late November, little more than a week after they were introduced at a dinner party, and the President's involvement with such paparazzi bait was received with dismay by a France weary of seeing the Élysée as the set of a soap opera. Yes, Bruni was impeccably elegant and enviable to behold, but she had famously said that monogamy bored her, and that "burning desire" never lasted more than two to three weeks.
Amid this romantic intrigue, Colonel Qaddafi came to town. In the runup to his visit, there had been much debate about whether Sarkozy was capitulating to a terrorist. The Secretary of State for Human Rights, Rama Yade, a Senegalese-born Frenchwoman, framed the problem broadly: "Colonel Qaddafi must understand that our country is not a doormat on which a leader, terrorist or not, can come and wipe the blood of his crimes off his feet." Qaddafi set up his big Bedouin tent near the Élysée, and made a mockery of diplomatic protocol, showing up late for official audiences and touring the shrines of French culture according to his whim. (A trip to Versailles to admire the throne of the Sun King particularly offended the French.) He taunted Sarkozy about human rights, insisting that France had nothing to teach him on the subject. And, while Sarkozy received the families of the victims killed when a French plane was blown out of the African sky by Libyan terrorists (a crime for which Qaddafi's brother-in-law was convicted in a French court), Qaddafi rolled off in a twenty-car convoy to the Louvre to spend a few minutes contemplating the Venus de Milo.
"Qaddafi was really playing Sarkozy," a French official told me. "It was a humiliation. It was the first time Sarkozy looked weak. And it was the first time he lost points in the polls. So he had to do something to make that go away." What Sarkozy did was to make his first public appearance with Bruni: an outing to Euro Disney. "And that was worse than Qaddafi!" the official said. "This is a notorious femme fatale in people's eyes—she had been with Mick Jagger, she had been with everyone—and Euro Disney is the worst image in France for someone who is already seen as uncultured."
It was at that point, the official said, that the memory of the party at Fouquet's, and the cruise on Bolloré's yacht, and all the drama with Cécilia, and the drama with Qaddafi came together in the French mind to form a definitive negative judgment of Sarkozy. "People said, 'Who is this we elected?' " the official said. After Euro Disney, there was a whirlwind of public courtship—Sarkozy and Bruni at Luxor, the President with big Ray-Bans and his shirt unbuttoned at the throat, staying at an extravagant resort, on the cover of every slick magazine—and, within two months, they had married. But the French public was unmoved. The damage done in the first six months of his Presidency could not be undone. A few weeks after his wedding, Sarkozy appeared at an agricultural exhibition, and when a man refused to shake his hand he snapped, "Casse toi, pauvre con." This distinctly unpresidential phrase, which can be translated to fit anywhere in the idiomatic lexicon between "Get lost, loser" and "Fuck off, asshole," was endlessly discussed as further evidence of Sarkozy's essential brutishness. "He was basically depressed at that time, to tell it like it is," one of Sarkozy's longtime advisers told me. "So he made a lot of communication mistakes. It was almost four years ago, but, nevertheless, he has not at all recovered from that. It's fascinating how the image of these mistakes sticks to him."
One weekend in July of 2010, police in Grenoble, in the French Alps, shot dead a man of North African descent whom they suspected of robbing a local casino. The killing sparked two days of rioting, during which youths from suburban immigrant ghettos burned some fifty cars. That same weekend, in Saint-Aignan, a village in the center of France, police shot dead a migrant worker, a member of the Roma community of Gypsies, who had failed to stop his car at a roadblock where identity cards were being checked. There, too, a riot ensued, and a police station was torched. In reaction, Sarkozy ordered hundreds of Roma encampments to be cleared out, and announced plans to deport members of the Roma community, most of whom had immigrated legally from Romania and Bulgaria, through the Continent's open borders. Sarkozy travelled to Grenoble, where he reiterated his plan to deport some Roma and declared a new war on crime. "The principal cause of violence is leniency," he said, and he wasn't talking only about slack law enforcement: "Negligent parents could find themselves pursued on criminal charges." He said that any foreign-born French citizen who attacked a public official should be stripped of citizenship. "One must show oneself deserving," he said. "When one fires upon an agent representing the forces of order, one no longer deserves to be French."
Of course, Sarkozy's vilification of immigrant communities was punctuated by banal cautions: "In no way is this stigmatizing the Roma"; "I'm only talking about foreigners in irregular situations." But to many ears—even within his own party—the President's declaration that France would get into the wholesale deportation business again, and that France should draw a hard line through the citizenry between the native and the foreign-born, carried ugly echoes of Vichy. "That was a stain on our flag," Dominique de Villepin told me. In fact, France had been deporting Roma (on the ground of vagrancy) for years, and French voters were enthusiastically supportive. But Sarkozy's singling out of Gypsies was of dubious legality, and the ensuing spectacle of whole families being bundled onto trains and shipped east provoked worldwide condemnation.
The Grenoble speech and the campaign against the Roma were described in the French press as a bid to keep the National Front from exploiting the midsummer riots to recapture supporters. Sarkozy's poll numbers had been dropping, and the papers said that he felt the need to show strength. His aides don't deny it, but they argue that the challenge posed by the Front is best understood as a symptom of the much greater challenge of running a democracy while remaining subordinate to the E.U.'s constraints on policymaking. "People need to understand why the President puts so much stress on the question of security," one adviser told me. "It's precisely because it's something which is entirely in your hands." When it came to crime in the streets, he said, "there is no Europe here."
As for immigration, Xavier Musca, Sarkozy's chief of staff, told me, "One of the problems we have is a welfare state that is extremely appealing for a lot of people on our frontiers." Immigrants without French citizenship are entitled to many of the same extensive benefits as citizens. A lot of low-paid workers find it galling that people (particularly immigrants) who don't work often earn more from the state. Sarkozy's promise to cut away at such perceived injustices had appealed to the French in the abstract, but not when it became clear that cuts for one meant cuts for all. Despite Sarkozy's promises of rupture, his former staffer told me, "He always said, 'We can't go too fast, the French aren't ready for all this reform,' " which the ex-staffer understood to mean, "I don't want to fuck things up, and I want to be reëlected." Faced with the prospect of mass popular resistance (the inevitable crippling strikes and tumultuous demonstrations), Sarkozy had fallen back on crowd-pleasing law-enforcement campaigns, going after illegal immigration and welfare fraud. When I asked Musca what the big difference was between Sarkozy's security policy and the National Front's, he said, "They are not realistic."
Marine Le Pen's hostility to foreigners has led her to compare the small groups of Muslims who pray in some Paris streets to Hitler's army of occupation, but she was not impressed with Sarkozy's campaign against the Roma. When I asked what she thought of the Grenoble speech, she raised her hands to her mouth, one above the other, wiggling her fingers to imitate the Pied Piper, and made chirpy noises: Pi-po, pi-po. Teedle-ee, teedle-ee. "The problem is that Nicolas Sarkozy makes plenty of speeches, but he has big words and a weak hand," she said. "He brought the Roma to a border that no longer exists, which they crossed again four minutes later before the eyes of dumbfounded journalists. It's all theatre."
Le Pen presents herself as a common-sense Everywoman—a divorced, hardworking single mother of three—who sees a broken system and states the obvious, that the politicians who serve it cannot fix it. Nearly everyone I spoke to in Paris said that she should be Sarkozy's biggest worry in the first round of voting next year. But how to respond? The more he tacks in her direction, the more plausible she appears, and she is keenly aware of this. She likes to say that there are only insignificant differences between Sarkozy and the Socialists, because both are estranged from the French people by their devotion to a Europe that works only for international élites. By contrast, she told me, "We have a very Gaullist vision of France—its place in the world, its independence, to which it's true that we're very attached, that particular voice that is its own, its national sovereignty." And she said, "The truth is that the left-right fracture doesn't exist in France today." She drew the political divide instead between "the globalists and the nationals," a distinction that leaves Sarkozy no tenable position. When I asked Musca what he thought of Le Pen's claim, he would not be drawn into the trap, saying only, "That's not at all our analysis."
Sarkozy pushed out his lips; he drew them back in a tight smile; he raised his eyebrows, furrowing his forehead, then he squinted and his forehead smoothed; he pursed his lips; he hiked up his chin; he looked left; he looked right; he flexed his jaw as if he were trying to pop his ears; he twitched his cheek muscles, strained his neck sinews, twitched his nostrils; he managed a smile again, and abandoned it. This was all in the space of a minute or two, on a September morning, at Liberty Island in New York Harbor, where he stood on a platform, with his back to the back of the Statue of Liberty. A troop of fourth graders stood below him, dressed like Soviet Young Pioneers, in white blouses with red kerchiefs knotted at their throats, singing the "Marseillaise"—"Arise, children of the fatherland. . . . Against us tyranny's bloody standard is raised"—in high, sweet voices.
All morning, a hot, dark fog had shrouded the harbor. Now the fog was burning off, and the day brightened but Sarkozy did not. In a black suit, with his black hair combed in tight waves back from a high widow's peak, he looked like an actor trying to loosen up backstage, only he was center stage and he looked incapable of looseness. He held his hands clasped at his waist, but the fingers kept fidgeting free and having to be recaptured. The schoolchildren sang, "They are coming into our midst, to cut the throats of your sons and consorts. . . . To arms, citizens. . . . Let impure blood water our furrows."
Sarkozy was in town for the United Nations General Assembly, and he had ferried across the harbor that morning to mark the hundred-and-twenty-fifth anniversary of France's gift of the statue to the United States. With a microphone in front of him, he composed himself, and took on the air of someone with something necessary to say. Speaking extemporaneously, he evoked the dead of 9/11, and said, "For the French people, they are also our dead." He folded that thought into a reminder that France and America were fighting together in Afghanistan and Libya—the sort of places, he said, where "the statue speaks again." He finished by saying that the Americans who fought and died in France in the Second World War and remain there in its cemeteries represent a "blood pact" that binds the two countries in "a particular responsibility, which is to show that liberty is for everyone."
Making such speeches clearly pleases Sarkozy, who more than any other French President in decades has sought to cast himself as an international statesman. But few of the dozens of French political reporters in the audience that morning appeared to notice what he said. They were bowed over their BlackBerrys, consumed by reports from Paris of a spree of police action against several of Sarkozy's closest associates, who were caught up in an investigation of corruption related to the sale of submarines to Pakistan in the mid-nineteen-nineties, when Sarkozy served as the Minister of the Budget under Édouard Balladur.
The night before Sarkozy addressed the U.N., Thierry Gaubert, his deputy chief of staff in the Balladur years, had been taken into custody and placed under investigation. Hours later, police raided the home of Nicolas Bazire, a director of the French luxury-goods conglomerate L.V.M.H. Bazire, who had been Balladur's chief of staff and was Sarkozy's best man at his wedding to Carla Bruni, was then taken into custody. On the ferry to Liberty Island, the word went around that Bazire, too, was under investigation. And now the BlackBerrys were throbbing with the news that Brice Hortefeux, one of Sarkozy's most devoted lieutenants—godfather to one of his sons, his former Interior Minister, and slated to run his campaign for reëlection—could face questioning, too. You couldn't cut any deeper into Sarkozy's inner circle. "My God," a man from Le Monde said, as we boated back to the Battery. "It's enormous, this thing. Could it touch Sarko? I don't know. But when you read what I'm reading—wait and see."
The story of the Pakistani submarine deal was well known in France. To secure the lucrative contract, Balladur's Defense Ministry had agreed to pay a commission of more than fifty million euros to various middlemen, including Pakistani military bosses. (Such commissions—effectively bribes—were legal in France at the time.) Then, just as the deal was closing, Balladur's team introduced an extra middleman, Ziad Takieddine, a highly connected Franco-Lebanese businessman, who commanded an additional commission of tens of millions of dollars. Suspicions arose that Takieddine had been paying kickbacks into Balladur's campaign coffers, but a series of investigations over the next decades produced no conclusive evidence of impropriety. Finally, this July, a French anti-corruption judge sent police to raid Gaubert's home, confiscate paperwork, and question him. The police also bugged Gaubert's phones, and the way the case developed after that was dramatically revealed, as the Le Monde man promised, when leaked transcripts of the tapped calls appeared in the French press.
In mid-July, Gaubert's twenty-year-old daughter, Nastasia, had called a friend, and said that the police had found records of a secret bank account that he kept in the Bahamas. "My dad had it opened in my mom's name," she said. Her parents were estranged, and Nastasia said that her father feared that her mother, Hélène of Yugoslavia (a full-fledged princess), would testify against him. Nastasia seemed to take her father's culpability for granted. In addition to the account in the Bahamas, she said, "he also has one in Switzerland, and one in Israel—they haven't found those." She thought that the only way for Gaubert to avoid prison was to flee the country, and she said that he had told her mother, "No one will help me, because everyone's in deep shit. . . . Hortefeux is in deep shit. And if Sarko doesn't make it to a second term he'll also be in deep shit and no one will help him."
Two months later, on September 14th, Ziad Takieddine was formally placed under investigation. That day, Gaubert received a call from Hortefeux. "Apparently, Hélène squealed," Hortefeux said. And he asked, "Have you heard from Bazire? Because clearly he's involved in this story."
A few days later, after Gaubert and Bazire were detained, and Hortefeux was formally implicated for meddling in the case—and all three denied any wrongdoing—Hélène of Yugoslavia sat for an interview with Le Monde. She said that she had met Gaubert in the mid-nineteen-eighties, in Neuilly, when Sarkozy was mayor and Gaubert was his right-hand man. The two men were fast friends, partners in business as well as in politics, and before long Gaubert became Sarkozy's deputy chief of staff. If they weren't together, they were always on the phone, Hélène said: "Thierry became indispensable to him." When the Balladur campaign began, she said, Gaubert would tell her, "I'm going to Switzerland to look for money." She has said that he always returned with suitcases stuffed with cash, which he'd deliver to Bazire. But Gaubert rarely spoke to her about money and finances, and she said that she didn't ask. Alluding to her royal heritage (her father was listed at one thousand six hundred and forty-third in line to inherit the throne of England), she explained, "I come from a milieu where that isn't done."
This has been a particularly ripe year for scandal in France, and as each new outrage eclipses the last, leaving no major party or faction unscathed, it becomes hard not to take scandal for granted. There was the affair of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, arrested and charged with rape after having sex with a hotel maid in New York: he lost his job as the head of the International Monetary Fund, and his prospect of challenging Sarkozy as the Socialist candidate in next year's election, but the prosecution's case fell apart, and he returned home—only to face another charge of sexual assault. That case, too, was dropped, because the statute of limitations had expired, but within weeks a new investigation was reported, involving allegations that a Franco-Belgian prostitution ring had flown hookers to Washington to work at Strauss-Kahn's orgies.
There was the Bettencourt affair, involving allegations that Sarkozy took illegal campaign contributions from the spectacularly wealthy and rapidly declining Liliane Bettencourt, the elderly heiress to the L'Oréal fortune. Sarkozy says he is blameless, but the case won't go away. This summer, Le Monde published definitive evidence that state security agents, who have repeatedly been accused of spying on journalists at Sarkozy's behest, had hacked into the phone of its reporter covering the Bettencourt investigation. There was the Clearstream affair, a scandal of byzantine complexity, involving the sale of frigates to Taiwan, a scattering of corpses (a naval officer fished out of an Asian harbor, a businessman and a spy defenestrated in France), and forged lists purporting to link illegal offshore bank accounts to prominent politicians, notably Sarkozy. And, in September, there was Robert Bourgi, an old Africa hand associated with the Élysée, claiming that he had overseen the regular delivery of millions of dollars in cash from various African heads of state—including banknotes stuffed in djembe drums—to the campaign war chests of one French politician after another.
To say that the French are used to skulduggery in the political establishment doesn't mean that they are incapable of being disgusted by it, and the police roundup of Takieddine and Gaubert and Bazire was seen as an uncommonly nasty mess. Opposition leaders called it the biggest political scandal since the establishment of the Fifth Republic. It was known as the Karachi Affair, because in 2002 a suicide bomber in Karachi blew up a bus carrying French engineers to a naval yard, where the French submarines were being built. Eleven Frenchmen and three locals were killed, and French judges investigating the case now believe that elements of the Pakistani military staged the bombing in retaliation for Chirac's decision to stop paying the Balladur-era commissions. It is implausible that Sarkozy would not have known of any dirty dealing attached to the Pakistani submarine contracts. So the scandal was seen as a threat to his Presidency, although he has rejected the allegations as "grotesque" and "a fairy tale," and no evidence links him directly to the case.
As long as Sarkozy keeps his job, he enjoys Presidential immunity, but when reporters at a NATO summit in Lisbon last year asked him to account for "Karachigate," he didn't act as though he felt immune. A former Defense Minister, Charles Millon, who investigated the case under Chirac, had given testimony in which he expressed an "inner conviction" that there had been kickbacks, and the reporters in Lisbon wanted to know: what about that? "And you!" Sarkozy shouted at one of them. "I've no evidence against you. But it would seem you're a pedophile. Who told me? I have an inner conviction. I've seen the intelligence reports, but I won't tell you which ones. I've seen someone, but I won't tell you who, and it was word of mouth. But I have an inner conviction—you're a pedophile. . . . Can you explain yourself?" The Guardian reported that he went on in this vein for ten minutes, then walked away, saying, "See you tomorrow, pedophile friends."
When disappointed Sarkozy voters say that they feel betrayed, the writer and activist Bernard-Henri Lévy enjoys saying, I told you so. Like Sarkozy, Lévy grew up in Neuilly, and when they met there, in the early nineteen-eighties, he was already established as a jet-setting journalist and an iconic intellectual playboy—with his floppy black hair, and his signature crisp white shirts, custom-tailored without buttons from collar to navel to reveal a risqué wedge of naked torso. Lévy, who is six years older than Sarkozy, recalls that at the time Sarkozy became mayor he seemed like "a young boy, excited, full of promise, very charming." The two had opposing temperaments—Lévy, who had inherited immense wealth, identified himself with the political left, while Sarkozy, the self-made striver, was committed to the right—but they developed a friendship. They sometimes took their wives on getaways together, skiing in Val d'Isère, or retreating to Lévy's palace in Marrakech, and they found themselves in sympathy on some big issues. After the Srebrenica massacre, in the mid-nineties, they both expressed outrage at French inaction in Bosnia, and in 1994 they both believed that France's intervention on behalf of the genocidal Hutu Power regime in Rwanda was, as Lévy put it, "bullshit."
Yet, half a year after Sarkozy's election, Lévy published a book depicting his old friend as a crass opportunist, cynically indifferent to ideas, and brutal in his capacity for denial. Lévy cited Sarkozy's "grotesque and devastating reception of Colonel Qaddafi in Paris" as a case in point, and wrote him off as a "President who, in morphing as he has from a questionable but imposing statesman to a quaint, Warholian character, may now interest only folklorists, or students of political curiosities." Henri Guaino, Sarkozy's speechwriter, dismissed Lévy as a "pretentious little prick."
Of course, everyone in the Parisian chattering classes knew that the two men had a tangled history. A decade or so earlier, Carla Bruni had dated Lévy's close friend Jean-Paul Enthoven, before taking up with his son, Raphaël Enthoven—who was married at the time to none other than Lévy's daughter, Justine. Everyone knew about this, in large part, because Justine, a novelist, had told the whole story in a thinly disguised roman à clef, "Nothing Serious," which became a sensational best-seller. "A father, a son—in France, it's seen very badly," a Parisian socialite told me. But then Bruni stayed with Raphaël for years, and had a child with him. In the socialite's view, that put an end to the scandal, because it became a love story. "Love forgives everything," the socialite said. "You can take the son of your lover if it is a love story. If it is Phaedra and Hippolytus, it is O.K. If it is Racine, O.K. If it is just a drink, a Coca, and you go together—unforgivable." It was the same with Bruni and Sarkozy, the socialite said: "Obviously, a love story, to be a love story, lasts four or five years."
Bruni has denied ever sleeping with the elder Enthoven, and since she and Sarkozy got together, the Lévys, father and daughter, have maintained a strict public silence on the whole affair. Lévy and Sarkozy periodically found themselves in the same room, but they did not speak for the first three years of Sarkozy's Presidency. So it was a surprise, early this year, that Lévy emerged as a driving spirit behind Sarkozy's sudden and intense interest in leading the international military intervention in Libya.
Sarkozy had been slow to grasp the importance of the popular protests against repressive regimes in the Arab world. Tunisia, where the spark was lit, was a former French protectorate, and France was the chief international patron of the corrupt dictatorship of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. During the protests in Tunis, the French Foreign Minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, publicly proposed sending in French riot police to help crush the dissent. Then it emerged that Alliot-Marie's family had personal business dealings with a rich Ben Ali crony, and that she herself had been flown around Tunisia for a brief holiday, as his guest, in the midst of the revolution. After Ben Ali was driven from power, and revolts proliferated across the region, Sarkozy sacked Alliot-Marie and scrambled to reposition France as a champion of the uprisings.
The way Lévy tells the story, that is where he came in. He had flown in February to Cairo to take part in the excitement of Tahrir Square but arrived too late, and found himself watching TV clips of Qaddafi's forces shooting down protesters in the streets. So he took a taxi to Libya, arriving in the eastern city of Benghazi just in time for the first meeting of the anti-Qaddafi alliance, the National Transitional Council. Although France has deep historical ties to many North African Arab countries, Libya is not one of them. But Lévy, thrilled by the revolutionary atmosphere, called Sarkozy on his satellite phone to suggest that he receive the N.T.C. chiefs in Paris. Sarkozy's aides claim that France had already sent the rebels humanitarian and even some military support, but they do not deny that Lévy's call spurred the President to action. Lévy, who soon emerged as the leading public advocate of a robust French military and political engagement on behalf of Libyan rebels, has said he was as astonished as he was delighted by the impulsive speed with which Sarkozy made momentous decisions.
French officials represent their engagement in the war in the same high-minded terms as Lévy does his, as evidence of their absolute commitment to humanitarian intervention on behalf of people endangered by their rulers. But people who knew Sarkozy described his interests more in personal and domestic political terms: he was exhilarated by the war; he liked the action; he liked making decisions; and he liked that the war made him more important—immediately, on the international diplomatic stage, and also historically. As one of his personal advisers told me, he wasn't going to enter the history books for raising the retirement age. The war involved many interests for France—access to Libyan oil fields was not incidental—but the people in Sarkozy's orbit suggested that it was not least an opportunity to represidentialize.
Among the French electorate, however, support for the engagement in Libya was dispassionate—"Nobody here gives a shit about Libya," a political reporter for Le Monde told me—and Qaddafi's overthrow did not help Sarkozy's standing in the polls. (Lévy, who recently published a chronicle of his Libyan adventure, likes to say that he looks forward to voting against Sarkozy next year.) In the end, on October 20th, a French fighter plane bombarded Qaddafi's convoy to a bloody halt, shortly before he was captured and slaughtered by Libyan rebels. Sarkozy took no credit for his scalp. The day before, Carla Bruni had given birth to a daughter, making Sarkozy the first sitting French head of state to sire a child since Napoleon III. Now he was the first French head of state since Napoleon I who could say he'd won a war, but he didn't say that. He was in the midst of a much bigger struggle: the most intense round yet of negotiations for a solution to the euro-zone crisis.
"What we have is a country and a continent that are depressed—completely depressed," Matthieu Pigasse told me. Pigasse, a Socialist Party stalwart, is the C.E.O. of the investment bank Lazard France and, on the side, a press baron—the owner of Les Inrockuptibles and of one-third of Le Monde. When he spoke of depression, he meant the socioeconomic conditions that afflict most of Europe: five years without economic growth, compounded by no population growth, no productivity gains, and no rise in consumption, wages, investment, or purchasing power. With economic decline came social tension, "and something very new for me," Pigasse said—"political instability." He didn't mean simple unrest but a vertiginous sense of impermanence about the most fundamental structures of the state.
"Look at Europe today," Pigasse said: "Belgium—no government over the last nineteen months. Belgium is the headquarters of the E.U. It's appalling. The U.K.? In London, you have a coalition. How long will it last? Ireland? Same question. Portugal—for months it had no government." The list went on of countries in disarray: Italy, Spain, Greece. "I think we are at a crossroads, and everybody knows that, but nobody wants to confront the reality," Pigasse said. He believed that the only way forward was "to go for more Europe, as quickly as possible. . . . To merge the budgetary policies, to merge the economic policies." He said, "The only way for us to avoid a complete bankruptcy is to mutualize the debt."
That is largely Sarkozy's position as well, but it has not been Angela Merkel's. From his first day in office, Sarkozy cultivated a close, if frequently vexed, partnership with the German Chancellor as co-stewards of European economic policy: Merkozy, the newspapers call their double act. But just as the crisis has exposed the need for a restructured European economic system, it has laid bare the tension between national interests and the common European cause. This fall, the European financial press has been fretting about the possibility of a Merkozy divorce. After all, France's credit burden is staggering, and its banks are overloaded with the bad debt of imperilled euro economies, while Germany is most concerned with maintaining its rigorously won solvency.
Like every other euro-zone leader, Merkel has to consider her voters, and Germans are in a punitive mood. For months, she has refused to agree to any rescue effort that would cost Germany too heavily—ignoring the much greater costs that would attend the euro's collapse. At one point, she wondered aloud why Germany should remain in the currency union at all. It was then that Sarkozy began speaking of the crisis as a matter of war and peace, and said that Europe had ten days to fail or prevail. Nine days later, on October 27th, an all-night negotiating session in Brussels finally established a deal to save Greece. But the deal was just another half-measure, and within weeks, as even Germany's bond market buckled, the end of the euro zone was being discussed as more likely than ever.
Sarkozy, however, returned from Brussels acting triumphant, and sat for a carefully staged prime-time television interview, his first such address to the nation in eight months. His performance that night scored unusually well in public-opinion polls; apparently, the long silence (he had been too busy making decisions to talk to the press, he said) was just the thing he needed to represidentialize. Accepting Greece into the euro was "an error," he said—an error, of course, that had not been made on his watch—and he explained the economic burdens that the euro crisis entailed for France. But he spent at least as much of his time taking jabs at the Socialists, seeking to contrast his statesmanlike management of the crisis with the folly of their economic policies: a return to retirement at sixty, a defense of the thirty-five-hour week, pandering to unions by promising to hire tens of thousands of new public servants. Two weeks earlier, François Hollande had won the Socialist Presidential primary, and Sarkozy was already looking to put him on the defensive. He stressed that he would not make the decision to run until February or March, but the French press nonetheless reported the broadcast as the unofficial launch of his campaign. Le Monde noted that Sarkozy appeared, once again, to be positioning himself as an outsider—the candidate "not of the system."
Politics is mostly the unglamorous labor of hashing out compromises, but French politicians are inclined to speak in the language of crisis, of ultimatums and fateful binary choices. The soundtrack is always the "Marseillaise": to arms, citizens, or fall on the cutthroat's blade. And yet, now that the gravest existential crisis of the past half century is upon them, a fearful caution has overtaken the political debate. This is a moment when a failure of leadership could condemn the Continent to a generation of terrible hardship, and all Sarkozy seems able to do is to be a gadfly to Merkel and give speeches. Last week, he delivered a stem-winder, vowing to work with Germany to establish a new European order to safeguard the euro. He sang the praises of globalization, saying that sovereignty must be shared, and also of nationalism, saying that Europe's open-borders policy had to be revisited to protect France's hard-won life style. "Europe is no longer a choice," he said. "It is a necessity. But the crisis revealed its weaknesses and contradictions. Europe must be rethought. Europe must be reëstablished. . . . If Europe doesn't change quickly enough, history will be written without it." There is, however, no quick way to retool Europe; all twenty-seven nations of the E.U. must agree to reforms. Only Le Pen proposes abrupt action, and the growing possibility that Europe will not be there for France has exposed the recklessness of her argument that France should quit the euro. Her position in the polls has fallen, from nearly twenty-five per cent last spring to a still formidable seventeen per cent today, while Sarkozy's standing has risen to the high twenties.
Alain Minc, a power broker and unofficial adviser to Sarkozy, had anticipated that Sarkozy would start to look better when a Socialist candidate entered the race. "For four years, it's been like we're in a theatre with one single actor playing," he told me. "So people are fed up with Sarkozy. But now there are two theatres. We will see, six months from now, if they will not be fed up with the family quarrels of the Socialist Party." Anti-Sarkozy sentiment gives the opposition a strong tailwind, and every poll favors Hollande by a solid margin. But the Socialist Party, which has largely been abandoned by working-class voters, lacks unified leadership, and its program offers little more than a defense of the old, reform-resistant welfare state. Under the circumstances, Minc told me, even if Sarkozy can't win by running on his record, the Socialists could still manage to lose.
François Hollande graduated from three of the Grandes Écoles—in business, politics, and administration—and became a member of parliament, a provincial mayor, and, for a decade, the Party leader. He is known as a likable man, with a keen sense of humor, but he has never so much as campaigned for a national office, and he had planned not to run until Strauss-Kahn dropped out. Hollande is famous for having said that he dislikes the wealthy—those, in his definition, who make more than four thousand euros a month—and he has been nicknamed Mr. Normal, because he promises a "normal Presidency" after Sarkozy's wild ride.
In response, the U.M.P. rolled out a new slogan: "Hollande's France is today's Greece." In November, a reporter for the magazine Le Point asked the Socialist Party spokesman Benoît Hamon, "Is this enduring crisis Nicolas Sarkozy's best chance?" Hamon went off: "Sarkozy says that, faced with this crisis, only one way of politics is possible, only one President is possible, the one who protects, but it's all sleight of hand. Sarkozy embodies cheating as a method of government. He's the president of cheating on everything. . . . François Hollande, on the other hand, is a man honest in his convictions, in his engagement, in his ways." It was hard to imagine Sarkozy being troubled by that. While French voters find Hollande much easier to stomach, the polls show that Sarkozy's experience counts: he rates much higher as a statesman able to deal with world crisis. Alain Minc told me that when Sarkozy heard that Hollande was trying to sell himself as the candidate of "normal," he immediately recognized his opponent's mistake and turned it against him, saying, scornfully, "This guy thinks it's a normal job."
Dominique de Villepin has also spent considerable energy, throughout his long political career, calling Sarkozy names: he used to refer to him as the dwarf, and, more lyrically, he has said, "Sarkozyism is the marriage on a dissecting table of the sewing machine and the umbrella. Sarkozyism is surrealism. It's fascinating, this ability to say everything and its opposite." But although Villepin told me that he was contemplating a run against Sarkozy next year—"I'm preparing," he said—he was not counting Sarkozy out. The new baby, along with Strauss-Kahn's disgrace, "makes Sarkozy look a little more normal," he said. "It can stabilize everything, if he's able to change himself, to adapt himself. That means pulling inside himself, getting this interiority he has been missing. More density, more personal density. And being more mysterious."
Sarkozy mysterious? That won't save France, let alone Europe. And, besides, he has always claimed that his strength lay in being without mystery. Not long after he moved into the Élysée Palace, four and a half years ago, he talked with the journalist Franz-Olivier Giesbert about his political opponents: "You want to know the difference between me and all those people?" He mentioned several of his contemporaries who had long been watched as prospective Presidents. "It's quite simple," Sarkozy said. "Beginning in the cradle, they were pampered and coddled and repeatedly told, 'You're the best, the most handsome, the most intelligent.' And they studied at fancy schools. Look how much they love themselves. I'm a different type. I'm the bastard. But there it is, the bastard is President of the Republic." ♦


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alternate wednesday: Sliders Re-Watch: "Summer of Love"
Sliders: "Summer of Love"
Written by Tracy Tormé
Directed by Mario Azzopardi
Season 1, Episode 2
Air date: 04:19:95
Same Earth, Different Dimension: It's still the Sixties, man.
Back on Earth Prime, FBI agents ask Conrad Bennish about his friend Quinn Mallory, who has been missing since Tuesday along with Professor Arturo, Wade Wells, and Rembrandt Brown. The agents bring him to Quinn's basement, where they are photographing his wormhole equipment and equations on the blackboard, and show him a video in which Quinn mentions discussing the Einstein-Rosen-Podalski Bridge with Bennish–and says he's found a way to cross it. This blows Bennish's mind. He tells them it's possible that Quinn and the others have gone to another universe.


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Friday, August 14, 2009
10 years.......
Posted by amberlindemann at 2:54 AM 4 comments
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Time Flies........
This summer has FLOWN by. I feel like everything has been going twice as fast as it should.
I am going to miss the kids so much when they go back to school.
I know alot of parents look forward to school starting, but I am not one of them.....
Posted by amberlindemann at 10:50 PM 0 comments
Monday, August 10, 2009
My newest obsession
In my quest to work a little less this summer and spend more time with the kids, I have planned a few outings this summer. One of my favs was heading up to Champaign and painting pottery at The Pottery Place!
You go in and pick your piece(s) and then pick a table and paint (tons of colors to pick from) and then you just get started.........
Heidi chose a teapot and teacupsRJ chose a canister for Snapshots snacksWorking hardWe were there for 6 hours and painted so much stuff.......3 cereal bowls, 2 dog dishes, a dog canister, a teapot, 4 teacups, and a turkey platter (that's what I painted!)Here is RJ's canister. He painted it red and brown and wrote Woof Woof and added some paw print stamps to it. The paint dries chalky and dull and then they fire it in the kiln and it comes out beautiful and shiny!My turkey platter......with the kid's handprints. And they signed their own names......My kids have always called their hand and foot prints, pawprints. ever since they were toddlers....Hence the PawprintsOne of snapshots dishesHeidi's teapotOne of our cereal bowls (with fruitloops on the inside)And a few of the pieces after they were completed!
I LOVE my platter.....seriously, LOVE it!Heidi with her tea setand RJ with his canister.
We've already been back a 2nd time and I suspect it won't be the last!
Posted by amberlindemann at 7:48 PM 4 comments
Zoo Fun
About a month ago, I got an itching to go to the St Louis Zoo. Rick was in Pittsburgh for work and so the kids and I packed a lunch and headed to St Louis with my friend Rebekah and her 3 kids.
After we had a picnic lunch, we headed in to see some animals.But not before everyone had to pose for a picture!The kids (especially Dawson) loved the snakes.There was some guy letting the kids touch crocodile skulls....gotta admit that was pretty cool. RJ and Dawson were super impressed.We bought Safari Passes that allowed us rides on the RailRoad, the sea lion show, a 3-D dinosaur movie etc.....We headed to the Sea Lion show firstI have to say that I loved this show. Not only was it super cool with all the tricks, but also it was a nice chance to feed the kids a snackNotice RJ trying to crash my picture by sticking his finger behind my headGrowing anxious waiting for the train.......Miss Rebekah and Miss Payton on the train......RJ, Cooper and DawsonMe and the HeidsterWaiting to go to the 3-D movie. This was pretty much a favorite of everybodyMy favorite in the whole zoo is the penguin house. (Last year I grabbed a Puffin.....it was just so tempting.) This year I refrained.Cute little Puffin. I wish I would have grabbed itEverybody picked a stuffed animal in the gift shopEveryone except RJ. While we are standing there watching Heidi pick 2 $6 animals.....he just looked at me and said, "Can I just have the 12 bucks?"
Okay, deal. He's his father's son!
Posted by amberlindemann at 6:48 PM 2 comments


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Homosexual sitcom proves online hit but too sensitive for Vietnamese broadcasters
A Vietnamese sitcom about young homosexual male friends is proving to be a massive online hit, promoting gay rights in a country where civil liberties are limited.
Despite the the popularity of My Best Gay Friends online, Dang Khoa says the show has not received any interest or support from Vietnam's mainstream broadcasters.
My Best Gay Friends has received around one to two million views per episode on YouTube with 10 of the planned 15 episodes now available online.
"The first time I created this TV show, it was just for fun," creator and lead actor Huynh Nguyen Dang Khoa told Australia Network's #TalkAboutIt program.
"It was entertainment for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community of Vietnam.
"I couldn't imagine how powerful it would become, how it would influence other people, non-gays and their parents."
The low-budget comedy follows the adventures of 20-year-old student Khoa, who is forced to live with two homosexual friends after his parents tell him he needs to move out of the family home.
Dang Khoa says he was inspired to create the show because the LGBT community was misrepresented in Vietnam's mainstream media.
"I saw images on television that misrepresented the gay community. They were just making fun of us. It was very distorted," Dang Khoa said.
Although homosexuality is traditionally seen as taboo in Vietnamese culture, the LGBT community has enjoyed positive publicity in recent years.
The Justice and Health ministers have both come out in support of gay marriage, the nation has held its second annual LGBT pride parade, while transgender singer Huong Giang was a finalist in Vietnam Idol, and films such as Lost in Paradise have gained international acclaim.
The second season of My Best Gay Friends will be a musical, with filming for the 15 to 20 episode season beginning next month.
"My next musical will be made with a tight budget," he said.
"I know a friend who is a good music composer, and a group of friends will help me shooting this new show.
"Furthermore, a dance group will create choreography for the show."
Topics: lgbt, community-and-society, internet-culture, human-interest, vietnam, asia
First posted


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List it for Free on The Nation and find a buyer or tenant!List your Penthouse
The average price per square meter for a Penthouse For Sale in Chiang Mai is ฿67,865, which is 39% below the average price per square meter in Thailand that is ฿111,359.
Thailand's "Rose of the North" is a cultural and natural wonderland with ethnic diversity, a multitude of attractions and welcoming hospitality. Chiang Mai is a place where both backpackers and luxury tourists can enjoy the ultimate Thailand holiday and live. Nestled amongst forested foothills, Chiang Mai is much older than it first appears. During the city's medieval heyday, almost everything was made of teak hauled by elephant from the surrounding rainforest, with the notable exception of its towering wát. Its Old City area still retains vestiges of walls and moats from its history as a cultural and religious center. It's also home to hundreds of elaborate Buddhist temples, including 14th-century Wat Phra Singh and 15th-century Wat Chedi Luang, adorned with carved serpents. Many expats have chosen to settle here for the rich culture and beautiful surroundings, finding jobs in Chiang Mai is becoming easier and easier.
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Aged care facilities in the Mangrove Mountain area
8 aged care facilities in the Mangrove Mountain area
For people who need help with day-to-day tasks and personal care through to 24-hour nursing care.
DailyCare is your guide to the options for government-subsidised aged care facilities and nursing homes, as well as private care in or near Mangrove Mountain.
Contact facilities directly, and shortlist your preferred facilities for Mangrove Mountain to share with family and people close you you.
BaptistCare Orana Centre
Point Clare, NSW
Top level nursing care is provided by our qualified and dedicated staff in a residential setting at BaptistCare Orana Centre. Individualised care for our residents is diligently administered by our specialist team.
- 171 beds
- $230,000
Chamberlain Gardens Aged Care Facility
Wyoming, NSW
If you have family members or close friends in need of support for health decline then our specialised staff at Chamberlain Gardens Aged Care Facility are here to help. Our residents can feel at home at Chamberlain Rd in the quaint Wyoming area as we create an environment that reflects...
- 148 beds
- $275,000
Adelene Village
Wyoming, NSW
At Adelene Village we make the community health of Wyoming our priority. We boost our community's health by providing 81 beds. health decline, post operative and respite are examples of needs that can be met.
- 81 beds
- $225,000
Aurrum Wyoming
Wyoming, NSW
The highly qualified staff at Legacy Aged Care Wyoming is dedicated to providing top quality nursing care in a residential environment.Specialised team members endeavour to provide personalised aid to our residents.
- 61 beds
- $150,000
Allity Henry Kendall Aged Care
Wyoming, NSW
Ideally located on Sydney's Central Coast, Henry Kendall Aged Care has been newly renovated. Positioned in a quiet and picturesque street surrounded by 100 acres of natural bushland the Home also benefits from the convenience of local shops, bus stops, taxis and the Gosford Railway Station close by.
- 110 beds
- $225,000
Aubrey Downer Memorial Orange Home
Point Clare, NSW
Aubrey Downer Memorial Orange Home is a friendly, family-oriented home located on a quiet suburban street in the West Gosford suburb of Point Clare.
- 21 beds
HammondCare Residential Care Erina
Erina, NSW
At HammondCare Residential Care Erina our formally trained staff provide the best care for health decline, post operative, dementia and respite. Nestled in Terrigal Dr in the lovely suburb of Erina our home thrives on community spirit, providing a care-focussed environment for our residents.
- 68 beds
- $415,000
Aurrum Erina
Erina, NSW
Aurrum Erina works tirelessly to ensure our residents are happy, comfortable, and supported in a welcoming environment.The team we have assembled provide loving care and expert support for our residents.
- 246 beds
- $400,000
Did you know that in-home care can be another option for those living in Mangrove Mountain?
Get a little or a lot of help with personal care, domestic help, meals and more. Private and government-assisted services are available to support living independently at home.


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SongSender by Dylan Reich
by via_web on
August 17, 2010
Filed under App DB, Music, Utilities, iPhone, iPhone Apps, iPod Touch
SongSender, developed by 15 year old high school student Dylan Reich, is the first app to reach the iOS platform that lets you send playlists of songs from your iOS song library through email or SMS, or post them on Twitter and Facebook! SongSender has been designed with the user in mind. Selected songs are saved in memory so that if you recieve a phone call while using the app, or you decide to exit the app before sending or posting your playlist, your songs are ready for you the next time you enter the app! Your song selections are pre-organized by giving the song artist and name, that you don't have to organize a jumbled mess of song names by yourself.
Developer Website: http://songsender.dylanreich.com


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The San Francisco-based City Lights Booksellers and Publishers announced last week that its founder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who had been selected as the recipient of the inaugural Pannonius Prize, would decline the award.
The prize, which was announced in September, is funded by the Hungarian government and the Hungarian chapter of PEN International, and offers an award of 50,000 euros.
In a press release, City Lights stated: "While honored to be chosen and recognized, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been a resolute supporter of freedom of expression his entire life. Given that the Hungarian government is widely accused of officially and unofficially stifling free speech and civil liberties, Ferlinghetti has decided to decline the award."
On the same day that City Lights released their statement, the MFA program in writing at the University of San Francisco announced the inaugural Lawrence Ferlinghetti Poetry Fellowship. Established in honor of the poet, activist, and City Lights founder, the biennial fellowship—which provides full tuition funding to the MFA program—will be given to a poet "whose work embodies a concern for social justice and freedom of expression, interpreted in the broadest possible way."
Ferlinghetti, whose most recent book is Americus, Book 1 (New Directions, 2005), is a longtime proponent of the "wide-open poetry" movement; he published Allen Ginsberg's Howl & Other Poems in 1956, and was subsequently arrested, tried, and eventually acquitted on obscenity charges in what became a historic first amendment case. Poet D. A. Powell, a professor of poetry at the University of San Francisco, said in a university press release, "The Howl trial changed the culture of American poetry overnight and paved the way for a more open, expansive poetics—for poetry that confronted American hypocrisies and political institutions, willing to put its proverbial heart on the line."
To learn more about the life and work of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, visit the City Lights website. For more information and complete application guidelines for the Lawrence Ferlinghetti Poetry Fellowship, visit the University of San Francisco MFA program website.


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Date(s) - 09/07/2019
12:00 am
Sky Zone Indy South
- Must be 5 years of age or under
- All toddlers must wear SkySocks while on the courts.
- A Sky Zone liability waiver must be signed by each parent or legal guardian
- Parents who wish to enter the courts must wear SkySocks
- For the safety of ALL Jumpers, parents will not be jumping with their children. Parents are to facilitate the jumping of their child.
- Hours: FRIDAYS 11 AM – 12 PM & SATURDAYS 9 AM – 10 AM
- Price: $10 for 1 hour for each toddler and each accompanying parent that wishes to jump.
We do our best to provide the most relevant and timely information to our readers, but please confirm dates, times, and availability before attending an event. Events are posted on IWK from information found on, but not limited to, attraction sites, government city sites; as well as submissions from individual attractions, press releases and PR firms. All events are subject to change without notice and Indy with Kids cannot be held responsible.