The French president's thin-skinned insecurity has impelled him to instruct more barristers than all of his predecessors combined. His hero, de Gaulle — Sarkozy popped over to London last week to honour him usually took care of his political enemies, and often of his friends, with a devastating one-liner. Sarkozy, no stylist of the French language, does it with writs.
Alone or with his wife du moment, Sarkozy has sued a toy maker who had dared to produce a voodoo doll in his image; Ryanair for using a picture of him and Carla in an ad; a journalist who quoted a supposed text message he sent his ex-wife Cecilia, allegedly promising that he would drop his about-to-be-third wife, Carla, "if you come back"; the former head of the French equivalent of MI5 for publishing unfounded rumours about his private finances; a T-shirt maker for a design where the ‘o's in the president's name were shooting targets; three hackers who had stolen his bank account number; former prime minister Dominique de Villepin for allegedly masterminding a slander campaign to spoil Sarkozy's presidential bid; and a TV journalist and a cameraman accused of leaking to YouTube a pre-broadcast diatribe. If judged guilty, these latter two face, respectively, five and three years in prison.
When he can't sue, Sarkozy leans on his media friends to get the offending parties sacked. This is thought to have happened recently to an editor and blogger at Lagardère Media. Other victims are said to include a think tank fellow and a comedian on state radio.
It's not that his predecessors did not attempt to muzzle the press. François Mitterrand had the telephones of more than 1,000 personalities and journalists tapped in his obsession to hide his second family and natural daughter. Books went unpublished, careers languished.
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing had similar tendencies I was fired when I published an interview I had refused to bowdlerise after I wrote that the president had second thoughts on his candid explanations about receiving diamonds from ‘Emperor' Bokassa.
Lacking guile
Sarkozy, though, is the first to get at what he perceives to be his enemies openly, on his own. It makes it easy for his opponents to paint themselves as victims of the Elysée's new Napoleon. In the case of de Villepin, he knew about the Sarkozy smear campaign, met some of its instigators, and yet was acquitted for "lack of evidence".
Sarkozy's perceived vindictiveness (for a very real slight) managed to paint de Villepin the (wholly unjustified) innocent. From being caught pretty much red-handed in a sleazy manoeuvre, de Villepin is now launching his own spoiler political party, resurrected from the graveyard thanks to Sarkozy's over-reaching ego.
DV stands no chance of being elected president in two years' time, but he could easily divert enough votes from Sarkozy to give the job to a socialist.
The L'Oréal scandal moves in to new territory. Liliane Bettencourt's daughter is trying to have her mother declared senile in a bid to reclaim the lavish gifts the L'Oréal heiress made to the society photographer François-Marie Banier. Liliane's daughter, Françoise, has produced tapes of her mother's phone calls.
They prove, she says, that her mother is losing her marbles. Liliane's lawyers argue that the tapes show that Françoise will not stop at breaking the law. Banier is now on trial for abuse of trust. I remember him from my student days, a beautiful blond sprite with a charming manner. So what if Liliane did buy herself a billion-euro walker? Isn't she worth it?
France's highest-profile Roman Catholic campaigner is a quirky comedian and television personality called Frigide Barjot (a pun on Brigitte Bardot meaning the Frigid Loony) who last year mounted a spirited defence of Pope Benedict XVI and created a support group now numbering over 15,000 members.
She's one half of a media couple: with her journalist husband, Basile de Koch, she led Les Jalons, France's answer to Monty Python, in the 1980s. Frigide, real name Virginie Tellenne, now speaks on France's religious revival in such revered institutions as the Collège des Bernardins (established 1245) — "to my everlasting bewilderment", she says.
