Letter from France: The Human Bomb

To understand Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been President of France for three intense months, it helps to know the story of the human bomb. “It was in 1993, when Sarkozy was the mayor of Neuilly,” Philippe Labro, the novelist and talk-show host, recalled over lunch a week or so after Sarkozy received his first Bastille Day salute as President. (Neuilly is a small leafy suburb of Paris.) “A psychotic took over a nursery school. He strapped explosives to his body, and he held the children hostage. He called himself H.B., the human bomb. He had an incoherent set of demands—a true lunatic—and the police surrounded the place. Sarkozy went into the school, completely alone, and began to talk to the human bomb. He engaged him in conversation: what did he want, what were his problems, could he solve them? But first he had to let the children go. Well, half an hour later, out comes Nicolas with children in his arms and all around him. Later, of course, the police went in and shot the human bomb dead.” He shrugged. The French police are not known for their gentle touch with psychos.

“This was the first time that many people in France had even heard of Nicolas Sarkozy,” Labro went on. “That was the moment he was introduced to the French people. Two things were apparent. Courage? Yes. But also an almost crazy appetite for living on the edge that is completely outside the normal experience of French politicians. He likes risks, enjoys risks, revels in risks.”

In the days since the election, the sense of Sarkozy as a risk-taker has grown stronger, and so has the sense that he is something of a human bomb himself, an unknown explosive quantity whose ends and effects are hard to gauge. His timer is ticking. This makes his aura in France very different from his aura in America, where no French personality since Brigitte Bardot has been such a projection screen for wishful dreams and onanistic fantasies. The fantasy on the American right is that he is staunchly pro-American, pro-market, and sympathetic to the Republican agenda. Like Bardot, though—an extreme French nationalist who turned out to love animals more than Americans—he is bound to disappoint as they discover who he really is and what he really wants: a French nationalist with a rage for modernization, and largely European horizons. His French supporters, meanwhile, who understand this, admire his confidence and his daring. But the human-bomb factor casts a sense of portent over what is, in other respects, an enormous sense of possibility.

Though Parisians who voted for Sarkozy would like to believe that the feeling in the city is “Blairite,” it is really nothing like the spirit of May, 1997, in London—a moment that, in retrospect, seems almost Kennedyesque in its exuberance and willed innocence. The feeling in Paris is more like the spirit surrounding the ascension, in 1992, of Bill Clinton, a politician whom Sarkozy (said to be an avid “West Wing” viewer) admires and emulates: old doubts about the “character” of the new guy are for the moment overwhelmed by his energy, his brains, and his obvious gifts—but lying in wait is a strident, powerful opposition that, with an intensity that seems to an outsider disproportionate to any offense, hates him, really hates him, and is waiting for a chance to get even.

Sarkozy, knowing this, spent his first two months engineering a series of audacious tactical coups that were of exactly the human-bomb type: walking up to dangerous men and defusing them. He disarmed the two most potent politicians in the Socialist Party—the international activist Bernard Kouchner, whom he made his foreign minister, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the finance minister for the former Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, whom he got appointed head of the International Monetary Fund. At the same time, by talking tough on immigration and crime he stole votes, mostly in the South, from the extreme-right National Front—whose leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, had made it to the final round of the previous Presidential election. He brought many of Le Pen’s supporters into his own party, even at the price of being mildly respectful to the evil old man.

Yet politicians who are in a position of strength and have radical programs, Thatchers and Reagans, do not fill their cabinets with members of the opposition, since they understand that members of the opposition are likely eventually to oppose them. And so there are doubts about whether Sarkozy has any strategic vision to go along with the tactical brilliance, any plan for France beyond the old one of getting power and keeping it.

There are certain realities of Sarkozy’s position that are easily overlooked—again, not unlike Clinton’s in 1992. His election, over the Socialist Ségolène Royal, was far from a rout; and in the legislative elections that were held the following month, as a kind of consolation for the losers, he actually lost ground. A stronger Socialist candidate—Strauss-Kahn, say—could likely have won the election for the left. The election was really won only on the night of the Presidential debate a few days before the final round of voting, when Royal harangued Sarkozy for two and a half hours about his weaknesses and flaws as a man and as a politician. This allowed Sarkozy to look wistfully harried and play the one part that he had never had the chance to play before—a sympathetic, erring middle-class French husband being blasted by a furious wife.

Gossip swirls around Paris about Sarkozy’s relationship with his own wife, the darkly beautiful Cécilia, as it did in Washington about the Clintons, but it tends to come down to a fairly coherent story, which is that both have had romantic attachments outside their marriage but have come back together now not from convenience but out of real passion—he adores her the way short, ambitious men adore beautiful women who are taller than they are but tolerate their advances. He sent her off to Tripoli to rescue the Bulgarian nurses—a group of unfortunate women who had been sentenced to death by a Libyan court on the implausible charge of deliberately injecting Libyan children with H.I.V. She brought the nurses back, but there have been allegations—strongly denied—that the mission’s success was connected to an arms deal between the Libyans and the French. Anyway, there seemed something unduly personal about using one’s family, rather than the usual channels of Euro diplomacy, to make an international deal, even an impeccably humanitarian one.

People close to Sarkozy like to say that he is an American manqué, meaning that in the normal run of twentieth-century things, his family—Greek Jews on his mother’s side, minor Hungarian nobles on his father’s—would have kept going west and ended up in New York, where he would now be running a private bank and sitting on museum boards. But an American manqué is not at all the same thing as someone who is pro-American. He is not reflexively opposed to American interests, as Mitterrand was and as Chirac became. The point of his so-called Americanness, though, is to be able to act the way an American would if he were running France. He is surrounded by people who admire and understand America, but what they have taken from it is the habit of high-spirited enterprise and self-assertion. Sarkozy is a statist, unrepentant and unreformed, and determined to use the levers of government for its own good. By “reform” Sarkozy means growth and a crash course in modernization. By reform, he means, in a nutshell, anything to catch up with London. He is eager, even desperate, to modernize France—to make it competitive on every front with the other leading Western nations—but he does not place any particular value on doing it chiefly through entrepreneurial capitalism outside the control of the state. He would like to lame the unions—he has already proposed, and in part achieved, legislation to compel minimum services during transportation and education strikes—but he does not embrace the rest of the Thatcherite program of liberalism. His model for the future is something more like the Airbus program: a pan-European, state-centered, semiprivate enterprise to catch up with and outdo those American airplanes. (In fact, one of his first acts was to help streamline the Airbus bureaucracy, which previously had two parallel French and German lines of descent, just as one of his first acts was to ask Angela Merkel, the German premier, to lunch with Airbus workers in Toulouse.)

Although Sarkozy appointed Kouchner (who had supported the removal of Saddam Hussein) to the foreign office, he remains as hostile to the Iraq war as Chirac was. His first public speech, the day of his election, sent a friendly greeting to America, then implicitly rebuked the Bush Administration for expecting everyone to do as they were told (“Friendship is also accepting the fact that friends can think differently”). Soon he flew off to embrace Angela Merkel.

If there is a political creed behind Sarkozy’s government-of-all-the-talents populism, his urge to transcend party or policy, it can be found in what people call his Bonapartism. Bonapartism does not mean simply the possession of power by a short, ambitious man. It refers as well to a coherent ideology, which flourished in the nineteenth century, when the original Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon, campaigned for, and eventually led, a Second Empire. Louis-Napoleon, who from 1848 until the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War, in 1871, ruled and modernized France—still its longest-serving head of state since the end of the ancien régime—gave form to a Bonapartism without a little general to lead it. His rule was by turns statist and entrepreneurial, devoted to French power and its extension, and not at all allergic to grand plans of rebuilding and the celebration of novelty.

This kind of Bonapartism has features that set it apart from monarchism or Republicanism or the monarchical-republican hybrid of Gaullism: where those are essentially conservative in rhetoric and rural by ritual, appealing to la France profonde and insisting on continuity even as change takes place (“the Quiet Power” was the Socialist Mitterrand’s slogan and self-description), Bonapartism is deliberately disruptive, urban, friendly to large capital, desperate for reform. Nostalgia for an organic, agrarian past has become a left-wing conceit now; Ségolène Royal became widely known for having received an “A.O.C.,” a certificate of appellation, for cabichou, a goat cheese from her region of Poitou-Charentes; it was her human-bomb moment, and she appeared in folk costume to present it. This is why some in Chirac’s circle were sure that Sarkozy could never win: not because he seemed vaguely Jewish and foreign but because he was inarguably Parisian. Yet the Bonapartist tradition is very much that of an outsider—whether Corsican or Greek-Hungarian—in a Parisian setting: opportunistic, authoritarian, maneuvering, personality-cultish, and successful. Louis-Napoleon remade Paris into the city we see today, boulevards and cafés alike. It is a creed that can be philistine—the recent Sarkozite claim that France suffers from too much thinking is pure Bonapartism. But its ideal would be to make Paris a world capital once again, however that had to be done. And this time there is no Bismarck at the gates, only a friendly German Frau, waiting to hug you as you plot to extend your influence.

As Sarkozy has aced the Socialists and delighted the humanitarians, some of his sharpest critics lie among those on the “liberal” pro-market right. One might have thought that Philippe Manière, whose 1998 book “The French Blindness” was an influential manifesto for radical pro-market change, would be pleased with Sarkozy’s election; he is, instead, a doubter, even a heretic.

“There is no sign of a real reform agenda,” Manière, who now directs the Montaigne Institute, a think tank based in Paris, says. “France needs reform on the supply side, reforms in the way we work and make, and instead all we have are demand-side reforms. And he’s proposing things like a mortgage deduction—at a time of a big international property bubble. That’s the last thing we need, more encouragement for the property bubble! Too often, the reforms are minimal, symbolic, or compromised in advance. I very much fear the disappointment that will set in within six months. Unless a global wave of growth buoys him up, very little of what he has done can increase French productivity or internal growth.”

Some suspect that Sarkozy’s secret strength in resolving the French economic “crisis” may be that there is no crisis. Over the past few years, the stock market has hummed along, and the quality of French life remains remarkably high. Every French worker is still guaranteed those five weeks of vacation, and though the thirty-five-hour week is a folly, it is not a scandal. At the same time, Sarkozy has acted aggressively to create what amounts to the first program of affirmative action in high places in France, including choosing a Muslim woman, Rachida Dati, as the minister of justice. Even the philosopher Pascal Bruckner, who predicted the riots in the poor suburbs in 2005 and does not underestimate the intensity of Muslim alienation—the Muslim vote ran overwhelmingly against Sarkozy, and among his fiercest opponents are many Muslims—thinks in retrospect that the riots were more “American” than they might have seemed at first: that they were mostly a cry of excluded people demanding inclusion in the French state, rather than a first intifada of people who wish to remain outside it, or remake it in the image of their own faith. (A poll last year showed that almost as many French Muslims think of themselves as French first and Muslim second as think of themselves as Muslims first and French second.) Sarkozy is said by those who know him to have a distaste for bien pensant clichés of minority appeasement—he feels that tolerance runs two ways—but he believes in inclusion on the American model, and thinks, perhaps too optimistically, that the problem can be dealt with by providing better jobs and more Muslim faces in big roles.

On a recent Sunday morning, in an office directly across from the Élysée Palace, Jean-David Levitte, the former French Ambassador to the United States, who is Sarkozy’s leading diplomatic counseller—in effect his national-security adviser—and who is generally thought to be the real point man of Sarkozy’s foreign policy, was receiving visitors in his shirtsleeves, showing them in and out himself, in an Americanized gesture from a French man of state.

“I had hardly known Sarkozy at all until he asked me to come back and take this role and I accepted,” he said. “And I discovered that he has been brooding for twenty years about what he would do if he became President. His ideas are clear, down to details. Chirac spent years planning to become President, but when he got to be President he was left with an ambiguous program. Sarkozy wants to do it differently. There won’t be another December, 1995”—the period, half a year into Chirac’s Presidency, when France was crippled by general strikes—“because he has planned well, and because the overwhelming majority of the French know that they want reform, and that that is what they voted for.”

Levitte is in his early sixties, understated and mildly ironic, and did hard diplomatic labor in Washington during the Iraq crisis, soothing the tempers of all but the most irate Francophobes. “There was purpose in Sarkozy’s appointment of Kouchner,” he went on. “There is no naïveté about him. He understands the most realist of Realpolitik. But he understands as well that we cannot move and charge the French people without appealing to their sense of justice and values. To become reëngaged with the world, they need to perceive French policy as uncynical, they must be convinced that it is humane and large-spirited. So: with the Bulgarian nurses, this cost him something, but he mentioned it in his first address to the nation. This is a case where moral politics and real politics are the same thing. It’s a way of fighting xenophobia, an inherent suspicion of the world.”

He continued, “With America, he wants the normal relations we’ve always had. But he is capable of candor there, too. When Sarkozy met Condoleezza Rice, she said, ‘What can I do for you?’ And he said, bluntly, ‘Improve your image in the world. It’s difficult when the country that is the most powerful, the most successful—that is, of necessity, the leader of our side—is one of the most unpopular countries in the world. It presents overwhelming problems for you and overwhelming problems for your allies. So do everything you can to improve the way you’re perceived—that’s what you can do for me.’ I think it’s entirely possible; the reservoir of good will has been drained somewhat, but it is far from dry. Look how much the image of France has changed in the United States in eight weeks.”

Sarkozy’s decision to spend his summer vacation in New Hampshire and have lunch with George W. Bush in Maine was widely regarded in France not as obsequiousness but as pure human-bombism: walk right up to the man considered dangerous and disarm him by talking calmly over a hot dog. The effect aimed for was not so much audacity as anomie: Sarkozy is trying to remove the drama from Franco-American relations by making them “normal.” I’m in the neighborhood—let’s have lunch. The larger, implicit point is that the threatening thing is not really that threatening.

The catastrophe in Iraq has had an unlooked-for effect: not to stoke anti-Americanism in a new generation but to make America seem almost marginal. For almost two hundred years, Americanization in Europe has been synonymous with modernization—that’s why the Statue of Liberty stands in New York Harbor, as a gift of the Third French Republic, the fraught state that appeared after Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire failed. It was a gift not from a complacent old world to a nascent new one but from a newborn republic to one that, after its civil war, was firm and coherent. The point wasn’t that Europe would not abandon us; it was that we would not abandon old Europe to the despots.

Now, for the first time, it’s possible to imagine modernization as something independent of Americanization: when people in Paris talk about ambitious kids going to study abroad, they talk about London. (Americans have little idea of the damage done by the ordeal that a routine run through immigration at J.F.K. has become for Europeans, or by the suspicion and hostility that greet the most anodyne foreigners who come to study or teach at our scientific and educational institutions.) When people in Paris talk about manufacturing might, they talk about China; when they talk about tall buildings, they talk about Dubai; when they talk about troubling foreign takeovers, they talk about Gazprom. The Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkel generation is not unsympathetic to America, but America is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was for Blair and Chirac, in the nineties, when America was powerful beyond words. To a new leadership class, it sometimes seems that America is no longer the human bomb you have to defuse but the nut you walk away from.

What Brown, Merkel, and Sarkozy all have in common is that they do not want to be defined by their response to America—either unduly faithful, as with Blair, or unduly hostile, as Chirac became. Instead, as Levitte says, they all want to normalize relations with a great power that is no longer the only power. Its military weakness has been exposed in Iraq, its economic weakness by the rise of the euro, and its once great cultural magnetism has been diminished by post-9/11 paranoia and insularity. America has recovered from worse before, and may do so again. But it is also possible that the election of Nicolas Sarkozy may be seen not as the start of a new pro-American moment in Europe but as a marker of the beginning of the post-American era. ♦