The New York Times
April 15, 2008
Abroad
A Lowbrow in High Office Ruffles France
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
PARIS — Nearly a year into his term President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has hardly mentioned the arts or culture. In late February he said that French cuisine should be added to the Unesco World Heritage list.
De Gaulle had André Malraux at his elbow. François Mitterrand renovated the Louvre. Just before he left office, Jacques Chirac opened an immense museum for non-Western cultures, designed by Jean Nouvel, which in its confusing, heart-of-darkness, overwrought layout epitomizes a certain kind of French arrogance and architectural megalomania. Naturally, millions of tourists now flock to it.
Every French president since the liberation has cooked up some such pharaonic new museum or opera house or library or initiated some legacy-minded cultural program, until now. Mr. Sarkozy’s taste is said to be for Lionel Ritchie and Celine Dion. (Mitterrand mulled over Dostoyevsky; de Gaulle consumed Chateaubriand.) The current president’s fondness for showbiz pals, his marriage to the Italian model-turned-singer Carla Bruni and the appointment of a culture minister, Christine Albanel, who is intelligent but widely regarded as weak among Mr. Sarkozy’s ministers, have combined to produce something of a culture shock.
“A rupture,” is what the political scientist Pascal Perrineau calls it.
“An incredible change,” said Jean Lacouture, de Gaulle’s biographer. One recent afternoon he sat in his study overlooking the Seine, meditating on this turn of events. “When de Gaulle returned to a liberated France in 1944,” he recalled, “he made a show of visiting famous writers like Paul Valéry and François Mauriac. It was his way of declaring a renewed sense of French glory.”
These days Paris kiosks advertise copies of a special issue of Le Canard Enchaîné, the satirical newspaper, with yet another photograph of Mr. Sarkozy in his familiar aviator Ray-Bans, a yacht and a private jet superimposed onto his two mirrored lenses. “President Bling-Bling” has already become a cliché.
“Sarko l’Américain” is another common insult. The French, though, may soon have to think up a fresh one if (and you can almost hear Mitterrand starting to turn in his grave) the United States elects a president who delivers speeches like the one Senator Barack Obama gave on race while this country has its first modern leader not to have graduated from the country’s upper-crust schools, a head of state who on a recent visit to the Vatican arrived late, with an exceptionally crude French stand-up comic named Jean-Marie Bigard in tow. The coup de grâce: the hyperactive Mr. Sarkozy reportedly text-messaged somebody or other while with the pope.
That incident infuriated some French Roman Catholics along with many stodgy Gaullists and other traditional French conservatives who, though they helped elect him, now find Mr. Sarkozy, to put it bluntly, vulgar.
“His acquaintance with television and media people, with stars, the way he behaves, all this is an annoyance for the right,” Hervé Mariton acknowledged. He is a young, worldly, neo-Gaullist member of Mr. Sarkozy’s ruling center-right Union for a Popular Movement in Parliament. He stopped briefly to talk at a busy cafe across from the National Assembly and admitted that he had not been the president’s most ardent admirer.
“Our president may not be exceptionally cultivated, but he’s also not a stupid man,” Mr. Mariton offered. “He wants to prove to a part of the elite that things have changed. Like other aspects of government, our cultural policy had become incestuous. So for the president to create a certain distance from it can be good.”
“Ignorance is not,” he added before saying that he had to dash back to the Parliament.
Patrick Rambaud is not so diplomatic. His satiric novel “The Chronicle of the Reign of Nicolas the First” has become a best seller here. An old-style French leftist rooted in the ethos of 1968, he was visiting his Left Bank publisher’s office the other morning. The making-fun-of-Sarkozy business has brought him a surprising windfall.
“We are all ashamed,” he said, about the president’s lack of interest in culture and his general bucks-and-babes style. “I mean, taking Bigard to the pope. Even as a writer I couldn’t have invented that.” (Truth be told, he sounded more grateful than angry.) Mr. Rambaud recalled the sophistication of earlier presidents. Mr. Sarkozy has almost inspired in him a nostalgia for de Gaulle.
“Look, we need a president who is cultivated,” he said, as if for a Frenchman this were as indisputable as the superiority of Pétrus. “It goes back to the days of the kings.”
Georges Pompidou published an anthology of French poetry and conceived the national center for modern art named after him. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing left behind the Orsay museum. Mr. Chirac, to enhance his aura (in the United States this would be political suicide of course), spread word while president that he had translated Pushkin as a teenager. And aside from the Louvre, Mitterrand’s grands travaux included the new Bastille Opera and the new National Library. They may be calamitous, much-loathed buildings (“the answer to a question no one asked,” Hugues Gall, the former director of the Bastille, often joked about his opera house). But under Mr. Mitterrand and his powerful culture minister, Jack Lang, culture rose to something like a state religion in France.
Now, the endless flow (much of which he himself eagerly sought) of paparazzi photographs, Internet chatter and “news” about Mr. Sarkozy and Ms. Bruni — she, dressed like Jacqueline Kennedy in a pillbox hat while visiting Britain, or not dressed at all; they on a date at Euro Disney or vacationing in Luxor, Egypt, while the French economy swooned — has kept the president’s approval numbers low. And lately it has led his increasingly panicked advisers to try to retool him as a tad more circumspect.
The day he said French food should be protected by Unesco, he raised eyebrows by rudely insulting a Frenchman who declined to shake his hand. Now he gravely attends military funerals and christens nuclear submarines.
Not that French people are buying it. The latest poll, in L’Express, the French newsmagazine, has 45 percent saying his style hasn’t changed at all; 22 percent, that it’s worse. The issue is clearly cultural. His prime minister, who carries out the president’s economic plans, is very popular.
“I’m banking on Carla,” Mr. Lacouture, the de Gaulle biographer, said. “France has had many brilliant queens, you know.”
It turns out, this is what many French people have begun to tell themselves. Olivier Py, the director of the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris, one of France’s five national theaters, also speculated the other morning that Ms. Bruni and her sister, a filmmaker and actress, might make a kind of project of the president, culturally speaking: Pygmalions to his Galatea.
Even if not, Mr. Py said: “Sarkozy’s personal idea of culture doesn’t really matter. The point is, he needs to take up the idea that French culture matters. Nobody is doing that any longer on the left or right. It’s shocking. In France this is the role of the president. He can’t continue to be silent.”
Small cuts to the national theater’s state budget (about 5 percent, Mr. Py estimated), while understandable in a shrinking economy, have nonetheless hurt, he said. “This is a country that knows it can’t afford to go on as things are, but we enjoy a good life here.” Mr. Py shrugged. “Nobody wants to give that up.”
Unlike some artists Mr. Py is not so worried that the president will make far more devastating cuts to culture. (“We won’t let him,” he simply said.) But he does fret that, absent Mr. Sarkozy’s greater commitment, the country may lose its grip on the notion of the arts as a national duty, not just a luxury.
Didier Bezace agrees. An actor, since 1997 he has directed the Théâtre de la Commune in Aubervilliers, producing plays in one of Paris’s poor immigrant suburbs. “In these difficult places especially we need cultural institutions to show that we won’t give up,” he said. “Sarkozy has been the greatest enemy to the suburbs not because he said the people there were ‘scum’ ” — he said that during the rioting that broke out before he became president — “but because everything about him reinforces the idea among the French urban poor that the goal is a fat wallet, brand-name clothes, big hotels and cars.”
Mr. Perrineau, the political scientist, put it differently: “With his jeans, his rudeness, his crude language, no tie, he establishes a new iconography for France. Casualness translates into a more secular sort of leadership, which is why people who don’t like him here talk about the Americanization of France. For both the left and right this means anti-intellectual.”
Campaigning for culture might help remedy that. As Chateaubriand put it, “Taste is the good sense of genius.”
