Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

Banned in France: The 20 oddest laws

France loves laws. There are 9,500 in force and parliament passes 70 new ones every year while the state issues some 120,000 decrees. Just about every aspect of French life is governed by a regulation, which means that many are ignored. The 1995 ban on taking photographs without permission is an example.

Prohibition also comes in varying degrees, between just plain interdit and the stronger formellement interdit and rigoureusement interdit. On the Paris Métro, the signs say that all pets are "interdit" then add that small ones are "tolerated".

Here is my list of odd things that you are not allowed to do in France. Some bans, such as winter evictions and price discounts, are supposed to protect the vulnerable (indigent tenants and small shops). Others protect privileges, like pharmacists and the state betting monopoly. Some are just strange. Please add any that I have omitted.

French law provides fines or imprisonment if you

-- Evict a tenant in cold weather, defined as between November 1 and March 15 

-- Arrest or search anyone at their homes between 10pm and 6am

-- Cut any chlidren out of your will. All property/real estate must be divided equally among all offspring.

-- Broadcast music on the radio that is less than 60 percent French. Half of that must come from "new talent or new productions and be broadcast during hours of significant audience".

-- Call Nicolas Sarkozy a "bloody Hungarian" (A demonstrator was jailed for one month for shouting at Sarko, when he was Interior Minister: Go back to China, espèce de Hongrois". The offence was "insulting a person who holds authority for public order".)

-- Sell any book at less than 95 percent of its official retail price

-- Broadcast television commercials for books, movie films or political parties

Sarkozy bags a Vuitton for Carla

Here is a clip of yet another gaffe by President Sarkozy.  Topic number one in France this week is the difficulty of making ends meet. Sarko and François Fillon, the Prime Minister, have proclaimed war on what the country sees as a conspiracy by manufacturers and retailers to raise prices out of all proportion to costs.  The sense of collapsing purchasing power is credited more than anything else for Sarko's deep unpopularity. The sense of urgency was created by a survey this week that showed that some supermarket food items had jumped by between 25 and nearly 50 percent over recent months, among them a leading mass market camembert which rose by 30 percent.

Fresh from the fiasco of his "pauvre con" exchange at the farm show, Sarko descended on deep rural France yesterday to show his concern for the struggle to pay the daily bills.  At Saint-Pourçain in the Allier département he told the crowd that there was obviously a "fiddle" going on when pork producers were being paid peanuts while the price of ham had exploded. The government will investigate and "strike where it hurts", he said.

But then he blew the concerned image at the local workshop of Louis Vuitton, maker of the luxury leathergoods that are especially prized by Asian, Russian and American women. He was handed a handsome LV bag. "You can guess who I am going to give it to," he said. "This will please her. This morning she told me 'you bring me back something'." Heads of state always receive presents, but given Sarko's need to shed the bling-bling aura,  a leg of ham might have been a better gift.

The President is off today to Chad and South Africa, taking Bruni for her first foreign trip as première dame. He will be glad to escape after a rough week. But the gaffe-prone team at the Elysée Palace will no doubt keep us entertained in his absence.

To follow up on our debate this week on bad language, here's another taste of Sarko's rough tongue. According to today's Canard Enchaîné, which is usually well informed, the president blew his top with his staff after a string of goofs last Wednesday. He was, he told them, surrounded by a bunch of cons et de branleurs. The latter word in British English translates directly as wankers. Con, as we noted earlier has lost its sexual sense and just means fool, idiot or clown.      
               

Cotillard's Oscar lifts France

It is extremely rare for the French morning news to start in English. That happened today when they all opened with Marion Cotillard's euphoric acceptance speech for her best actress Oscar in Hollywood.  "It's true there is some angels in this city," she said.

Cotillard's success gave France a reason to feel proud on a grey Monday full of gloomy news.  Only one French actress had ever won such an Oscar, if you don't count Claudette Colbert in 1938. She grew up in America and was a US citizen.  Simone Signoret won in 1960 for her role in Room at the Top. What pleases France so much is that La Môme (The Kid, but released in English as La Vie en Rose) is a French-language film. Only once before has the best actress gone to a non-English speaking role. That was Sophia Loren in La Ciociara in 1962.  Juliette Binoche won an Oscar for best supporting actress for her part in The English Patient in 1997 -- but that was English-speaking too.

France did pretty well this year. The make-up artists of La Môme won a second Oscar for the film and the prize for best short film went to Philippe Pollet-Villard for Le Mozart des pick-pockets." Cotillard also scored a quadruple triumph, winning a Golden Globe, BAFTA award and the French César for her role as well as the Oscar.

Everyone recognises that La Môme/Vie en Rose had everything to please America -- a rags-to-riches biography picture featuring Edith Piaf,  a singer who was a star in the United States in the 1950s.  Elle magazine points out today that Cotillard is, like Piaf,  the quintessence of what the world likes about Parisiennes -- elegant and sexy but spirited and fun, not a haughty beauty.  She is also a superb actress who worked in the style of the Anglo-Saxon theatre not just to play Piaf but to turn herself into the singer.  Her Piaf is jouée à l'Americaine, one French critic noted this morning.   

Cotillard, who is 32 and the daughter of actors,  said that she did not know much about Piaf when she took the role in Olivier Dahan's film.  She immersed herself in the singer, "leaving only a little room to be me", she said.  Though she had not yet become one of France's biggest domestic stars, Cotillard now seems destined for a Hollywood career.   

    

Sarkozy loses cool and wants UN defence for French cooking

Here's another glimpse of why Nicolas Sarkozy is unlike his predecessors. In the clip Sarko gives a taste of his rough side at the annual Paris Agricultural Show. When Sarko approaches while shaking hands with the crowd, the man on the left says (in ungrammatical French): "Don't touch me". Sarko replies: "Then get lost". The man: "You dirty me when you touch me". Sarko: "Then get lost, pauvre con." This translates roughly as "stupid a-hole", stupid sod, or the equivalent.

Sarko's more regal predecessors no doubt used such language, but never in public. His readiness to mix it in an unpresidential way with hecklers is part of the reason that his popularity has slumped. The latest poll in today's Journal du Dimanche, shows him down nine points in a month at 38 percent approval. In contrast, François Fillon, his prime pinister, is at 57 percent.

The pollsters say this reflects the way that Sarkozy has reversed the traditional roles. The prime minister is reserved and dignified, staying in the background like a president, while Sarkozy is out in front taking on all-comers. The presidential visit to the annual Salon de l'Agriculture is an important ritual because of the mystical bond which France entertains with the countryside and its produce. Jacques Chirac, pretended to be a countryman and put on a great show at the salon, wandering around stalls slapping cattle, knocking back wine and tasting sausage.

Not Sarko, a life-long urbanite. He made a quick drop-by and, before exchanging the insults in the video, he delivered a speech that was mainly about protecting France and its food producers from foreign competition.

The most quaint point was his announcement that France will apply to Unesco to have French cuisine listed as part of the world's heritage.

Sarkozy's phantom words are set to music

That Sarkozy text message just won't go away.

A couple of weeks ago, the French president unleashed his lawyers and prosecutors against le Nouvel Observateur for allegedly inventing his "come home" plea to Cécilia, his ex-wife. The magazine had reported that, one week before marrying Carla Bruni this month, he texted to Cécilia: "If you come back, I will cancel everything". In the aftermath, the president's staff and ministers have been denouncing all journalists as vultures for picking up the story. We heard today that the investigating judges have summoned Cécilia to ask her if the message existed or not. But now France's most famous message has taken on new life as a song by Jeanne Cherhal, a rising singer-composer.

The ditty (listen here), is wistful rather than satirical. In 24 hours it has become a hit. Lifted from Cherhal's MySpace site, it has the main media buzzing and has been playing on radio and television news. They must be hopping mad at the Elysée Palace.

Cherhal's refrain goes:  "Si tu reviens, j'annule tout, nos écarts de langage, nos colères, nos passions de passage." (If you come back, I will cancel everything, our bad language, our spats, our passing passions)

Cherhal, one of the leaders of the young genre called nouvelle chanson française, said that Sarko's supposed SMS appeal turned into a song in her sleep.  "You never know what causes inspiration. It comes from everywhere, and especially from the last place you think -- a noise on the pavement, anything," she told Libération. "I woke up in the morning with that sentence on the brain. The music came along with it."

Libération joked that the RG, the police intelligence service, must be on to Cherhal by now. Their criminal investigation colleagues have already seized mobile phone records to prove the message never existed. Indeed, the singer appears a little embarassed about the text-song's runaway success. Her manager, Héloïse Martins, said: "She just wanted to have fun on her MySpace site. It was a joke between friends, not to promote herself," she said. "The song does not allude to the presidential couple. It is a general song about breaking up. We do not want to be at the centre of a row." 

There is a lot to be said for the clever words and pretty tunes of the nouvelle chanson genre, even if they can be nombriliste or self-absorbed, at times. One of the leading nouvelle chanson exponents with those tendencies is of course Carla Bruni, la première dame de France and victim if the text message was by any chance genuine. Many of the lyrics in her hit album "Quelqu'un m'a dit" are about herself and her past and present lovers. We are all waiting to find out if there will be a song to Nicolas in the new album, which she is just about to release.  Perhaps even a track on texting. 

 

Self-mockery in France's unlovely north

Much of the world thinks of France as a sunny Latin place with vineyards, windows with shutters and a fine art de vivre. Many French also prefer that image and look down on the bits that do not fit the picture, especially those along the northern fringe next to England and Belgium.

This week, the far northerners -- a tribe that calls itself Ch'tis -- are celebrating a chance to shake off their uncouth image as potato-guzzling beer-drinkers who dwell in a rain-soaked rust-belt.

The excuse is the opening in Lille yesterday of Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, a film that makes fun of the region's unflattering stereotype in order to show the people as warmer and generally nicer than those in the sunny south.

Starring and directed by Dany Boon, the film has won critical praise and seems destined to become a hit. So it should boost the much-maligned Ch'ti country, the old port and mining area which runs from Calais eastwards to about Maubeuge (I have a fondness for this area of red-brick terrace houses and tall bell towers from four years living in nearby Brussels in the late 1990s).

Dany Boon is a popular stand-up comedian and actor who is a native Ch'ti or Ch'timi. The name comes from Picardy patois. Like comedies about England's "Geordie" northeast, much of the film's fun stems from a working class dialect so impenetrable that it needs subtitles. In Ch'ti, "ch" replaces "s" and it includes expressions from old Picard and Flemish as well from the Italian, Polish and other migrants of a century ago. The Ch'ti language splash in yesterday's Voix du Nord was: Dany Boon, Bienvenue à s'baraque!" ('welcome home'). Instead of a "chortie nachional" (sortie national-- national release) the film has started with a "chortie ch'timi". Have a look at the promotion site, with the CNN parody "ChtiNN, une chaîne qui ne perd pas le nord".

Stop bashing poor Nicolas Sarkozy

They arrested Nicolas Sarkozy this morning in a pre-dawn raid at the Elysée Palace. The French President accompanied the police without resistance. He is likely to be charged later in the day with the crime of "drift towards monarchy"

I'm joking. Sarko is not in the Bastille yet, but judging from the onslaught from politicians, media and public opinion, the gendarmes may soon be at the gate. After idolising Super-Sarko last summer, much of France has turned against its "hyperpresident". A BVA rating for l'Express puts him at 58 percent negative and 36 percent positive, a drop in nine points over a month. Only two presidents have plumbed such depths in the past 40 years -- Jacques Chirac and François Mitterrand.

Sarko the former miracle worker is being blamed for everything and given credit for nothing, not even for making a decent woman out of Carla Bruni, his latest bride. So it's time to speak up for Sarkozy and stop what his staff are calling the lynching of the president.

You have to acknowledge that something in Sarkozy touches a nerve in the French psyche.

An exotic hotel night in Paris

The most sought-after hotel room in Paris is a shoe-box perched on a roof in the opulent 16th arrondissement.  There is no room service except for breakfast. The furniture is made of plastic and there is no television. Yet every day, 40,000 people are trying to book a night there.

The word novelty comes in here. The Hotel Everland is a room with adjoining bathroom which costs at least 333 euros a night but it's not really a hotel.

It is a 10-tonne art installation that has been perched since last November on top of the Palais de Tokyo, the Art Deco home of the contemporary art museum on the Right Bank. For its creators, the Swiss artist-designers Sabrina Lang and Daniel Baumann, Everland makes the guests part of the art.

Is Colonel Gaddafi a Frenchman?

If Colonel Gaddafi was so eager to linger in Paris when he came last December, it was perhaps because the Libyan leader is half French. His father was an air force pilot from Corsica. That's him in the picture on the left. 

This extraordinary claim has surfaced over the past few days after a report by Bakchich, a French investigative news site. They looked into a legend which has long circulated in Vezzani, a village of 600 people in eastern Corsica. According to this, a Vezzani gendarme's son called Albert Preziosi was stationed in the Libyan desert with the Free French air force in 1941-42. He is said to have had an affair with a local woman at about the time that young Muammar would have been conceived.

Preziosi was killed when his aeroplane was shot down over Russia in 1943. As a member of the famous Normandy-Niemen squadron, he has been celebrated as a hero in his home village ever since. An air force base near the town of Solenzara, is named after him. Not a shred of evidence exists to stand up the Gaddafi legend but the physical resemblance is so strong that it has persisted.

Apologies all round for Mrs Carla Bruni Sarkozy

The latest episode in the Elysée Palace soap opera has produced an exchange of apologies and highlighted dangers for traditional media from their websites and blogs. 

Le Nouvel Observateur, a venerable left-leaning news weekly, said 'sorry' today for starting what is now known as the affair of the text message. That followed hard on the heels of Carla Bruni, President Sarkozy's new wife, apologising to the same magazine for comparing it to people who denounced Jews in the Nazi wartime occupation.   

For those who missed last week's episode, Le Nouvel Obs caused a stir by reporting on its website that, a week before marrying Bruni, Sarko sent a text message to Cécilia Ciganer, the wife who left him last October. This allegedly said: "Reviens et j'annule tout." -- Come back and I'll cancel everything.

Sarkozy, the first modern French ruler to turn his private life into public theatre, decided that le Nouvel Obs had crossed the line and hauled out the heavy guns. Rather than suing under the privacy laws, he has opened a criminal prosecution for fraud. Previous presidents never sued the media and certainly never wielded such a legal sledgehammer.

Le Nouvel Obs at first stood by its story and Airy Routier, its senior investigative reporter, said that his sources on the supposed explosive text were impeccable. He has failed, however, to produce evidence. He will have to do so in court to avoid the possible three-year prison term. Today the magazine grovelled, saying that it had erred on two counts: the facts had not been verified and, anyway, the story was a gross breach of the president's privacy. It obviously hopes that Sarko will withdraw the prosecution, but I would not bet that he will.

The internet comes in here because the magazine said that it would never have printed such a report in its weekly paper edition. It had been slapped quickly onto the internet site "in which speed and quick reaction is the vital rule". 

Enter Bruni. She decided to make her first address to her husband's subjects via the pages of L'Express, a rival news weekly. Her debut, published yesterday, was a long question and answer session in which she speaks about her love-at-first-sight meeting with Nicolas in November and her commitment to stay married to him forever.

Asked about the text message, she said:

"The justified suit filed by my husband is not of course against an organ of the press, but against 'the new disinformation media'. Le Nouvel Observateur has joined the ranks of the gossip press...If this sort of site had existed during the war, what would have happened with the denunciation of the Jews?"

After an outrcy from Le Nouvel Obs, Bruni has apologised, saying that she was extremely sorry if she had offended anyone. "I wrongly compared the methods used by web sites to those of the collaborationist press". 

This is touchy territory because of the hazy line between traditional "published" news and items that circulate on media websites without full vetting. A lot of commentators have come down against le Nouvel Obs over this double standard. Gérard Carreyrou, a veteran who writes now for the tabloid France Soir, says the magazine was guilty of supreme hypocrisy by "putting on its site something that it would not have had the courage to print on its paper."

He is no doubt right, except that it is getting harder these days for the media not to air items that are causing a buzz on the internet and which "everyone is talking about". One of these at the moment is the story that Carla Bruni is expecting a baby. You can find it on tens of thousands of blog postings but no traditional media have picked it up except in a joking way.

Today, the rumour has hit the site of L'Express magazine in a round-about way. Christophe Barbier, the editor, who did the interview with Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy, responds on his blog to readers who complained to him that "you should have asked her if she is pregnant". His answer: "No, because that is not about politics."   

So there we have a serious weekly having it both ways. It steers clear of an unseemly question but still airs it on the editor's blog. Of course I am doing much the same here, since The Times has not reported the rumour in the newspaper.

It's worth noting that Bruni's media debut was far from the spontaneous interview that it appeared to be. Barbier is a friend of hers. He says that he spent several days with her reworking her answers "as if they were lyrics to one of her songs". Anyone in the business would be surprised if the Elysée Palace did not also breathe on them. So France was really served up a crafted media release, not a piece of journalism in our sense. The internet can certainly mislead, but the stage-managed interview is not very honest either.

Top 10 golden oldies of France

French pop music is rubbish. One of my colleagues wrote those words the other day in a piece on saving the world's pop heritage. So let me try again to demolish the old cliché, which springs mainly from lack of exposure and ancient prejudice.

They have been putting down French popular music since the early sixties, when Johnny Hallyday and the yéyé movement came over as funny copies of Elvis and then the Beatles. The early rockeurs français were obviously imitators but they had flair and infused their songs with a French lightness that stands comparison with much of the period's Brit pop. There was also the school of great original French singer-composers whose wit and commentary had no "Anglo-Saxon" equivalent.

I know I'm asking for trouble, but here is a personal top 10 from la variété -- popular music --  of the 60's and early 70s. Four of them (Hallyday, Aznavour, Hardy and Polnareff)  are still touring and have released new hits over the past couple of years. I'll get to modern French pop later, but this is in answer to the swipe about France having no heritage in the field.

1  Serge Gainsbourg. To Brits, he was the author of the 1969 scandal hit "Je t'aime, moi non plus" with his girlfriend Jane Birkin. But the wonderful Serge was far more. Originally a jazz pianist, he was a genius tunesmith and lyricist. His bitter-sweet songs and witty adult words made him the post-war Cole Porter. Try La Javanaise (in video above) or Je suis venu te dire que je m'en vais. 

2. Jacques Brel. All right, this giant was Belgian, but Madeleine, Vesoul, Le Plat Pays, and his bitter, passionate ballads, were in the pure, lyric-driven tradition of la chanson française.

 

3. Georges Brassens. A little older than the rest, he was from the 1950s poet-anarchist tradition. But his tender, sardonic songs of the 60s and 70s matched the best of Dylan or the other minstrels of protest. Try the joyous les Copains d'Abord from 1964.

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Son of Sarko makes his first kill

Jean Sarkozy is tallish and blond while his father is short and dark, but a minute with him is enough to see that the President's son is a chip off the old block. The shrugs, charm and verbal tics of the 21-year-old student are pure Sarko.  France has just discovered that shy Jean is just as fast as Dad with the dagger.

Sarko junior, the second son by the President's first marriage, with Marie Culioli, a Corsican chemist, has done his father's dirty work and performed the political execution of David Martinon, the Presidential spokesman.

Six months ago Sarkozy senior anointed Martinon, a 36-year-old technocrat, as the next boss of Neuilly, the opulent town on the western edge of Paris which he ran as Mayor for 19 years. Sarko came in person one evening to Neuilly to launch Martinon on his campaign for next month's municipal election. The president was in effect handing his dauphin a golden throne for his political debut.

But the rich and very Sarkoziste people of Neuilly rebelled at this parachutage and Martinon blew his chances with an inept campaign. His handshake was limp on his outings on the market square. He made a fool of himself at rallies, where hecklers chanted "Martinon-non-non". He blew it by calling for the vote of "les vieux" (the old people) -- a gaffe in a borough full of senior citizens. By last week, the unthinkable happened. An anti-Martinon -- but still pro-Sarkozy  -- dissident overtook the president's candidate in an opinion poll.

So yesterday, young Jean, a lifelong Neuilly resident, joined a couple of local councillors in public rebellion against le Sarko-boy from the Elysée Palace. Everyone assumes that the President gave the order for Martinon's humiliation.

[picture: Jean Sarkozy looks down on David Martinon.] 

France stops smoking, starts smelling

They said it could never happen. Unlike Americans, Britons or Italians, French smokers would rebel rather than yield to government orders to stop. But nearly six weeks into the start of the ban, they have meekly obeyed and the predicted revolt has not occurred in the bars and bistrots.

As in other places, there have been some odd consequences. One is the body odour that fills the smoke-free air in discos and crowded clubs as the night drags on. Paris clubs are struggling to find alternative scents to mask the sweaty smell that is said to be turning off customers, especially women. Managers do not want to talk about it for fear of losing trade. "We've had enough trouble with the ban on smoking. On top of that we don't want people saying that the place stinks as well," said a club manager near the Place de l'Etoile.

France being the thoughtful place that it is, the pong issue has prompted discussion not of hygiene but of the psychology of odour. Why are we repelled by bodily scent, Libération wondered the other day. It hauled in Annick Le Guerer, an anthropologist and philosopher, to explain that bad smells trigger a part of the brain that makes people think of death. She suggested taking Nietzche's positive approach to smell rather than Freud's bourgeois negative one. Nietzche apparently proclaimed that "my whole genius is in my nostrils."  Freud said that society could not function unless it ignored smells. Before anyone starts making anti-French remarks, the same smell problem caused a stir in England when they stopped smoking there.

Sarkozy surrenders under Carla effect.

Eight months into the Sarkozy era, France has just said adieu to la rupture, the clean break that was supposed to end its bad old ways.

Unpopular and facing an electoral thrashing next month, Super Sarko surrendered last night to the nation's taxi drivers. It took only a day of protests in Paris and around the country for the President to take fright and and abandon a plan to break the closed shop which protects their trade.

You will remember from last month that the taxi reform was one of the most emblematic of the 317 ideas that Jacques Attali presented, at Sarkozy's request, for opening up the economy and "liberating growth". 

Taxis are a minor industry, employing only about 50,000. Three months ago, Sarkozy faced down a damaging week-long strike by the far bigger army of public transport workers. His capitulation, performed by François Fillon, the Prime Minister, follows the time-honoured French practice of caving when a special interest takes to the street. There is no longer any chance that reform will be visited on the other closed trades on the Attali list. These include pharmacists, hairdressers and the legal profession.   

France feuds over May 1968

Everyone likes to celebrate memories, but in France old dates are often the stuff of bad blood. We are heading into one of those moments with the looming 40th anniversary of May 1968.

It was a cataclysmic year everywhere, with the Vietnam war and political assassination in the USA, the Soviet suppression of the Prague spring and... umm... pop festivals and demos in the swinging Britain of Harold Wilson.

As often, France staged its upheaval as dramatic street theatre. The student revolt on the Left Bank captured the world's attention in the usual French fashion, but it fizzled after a month. It failed to excite the workers for more than a couple of weeks of strikes and, after wobbling, President de Gaulle restored order. But the country would never be the same. 

With the anniversary on the horizon, les enfants de mai soixante-huit are fighting over its legacy. For one side, it was a disaster that dislocated society, destroyed moral values and unleashed a culture of selfishness. For the other, it was a liberation that unshackled France, freeing it from hypocrisy and conformity. 

The first camp is represented by that cheeky-looking young man in the 1968 picture above. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a German student, was the leader who symbolised the mutiny whose fun side was captured by its slogans. "Il est interdit d'interdire" (It's forbidden to forbid) said one. Another was "Sous les pavés, la plage" (Under the cobble-stones is the beach). "Danny the Red" is now Green leader in the European Parliament but he hasn't changed much.

On the other side, we have.... Nicolas Sarkozy, the President who whipped up the crowds in his campaign last year blaming May '68 for all the ills of France and promising to "liquidate its legacy".

Nicolas and Carla get married

"Franchement, ça ne fait pas sérieux", my companion said after the phone interrupted our Saturday lunch with the day's big news.  Nicolas Sarkozy, 53, President of France, has this morning married Carla Bruni, 39, the singer-model whom he met in November, a month after his wife left him.

My friend's words sum up the common French reaction to Sarko and his romance on the rebound. The mood of the country is bleak at the moment. The morale of households has sunk to its lowest level for 20 years, according to a poll last week. Sarkozy is perceived -- unfairly -- as a disappointment because he has failed to make everyone better off nine months after his election. His ratings have crashed to around 45 percent support. So there is little rejoicing over the news that the just-divorced president has rushed to marry a beautiful celeb with a sulphurous reputation.

You get the flavour from the profile of France's new first lady which has just been put out by Agence France-Presse, the state news agency. Within three sentences it cited her prodigious roll call of past conquests, ranging from Sir Mick Jagger to French politicians, and then it quoted her saying: "I'm a she-cat, an Italian. I get totally bored in a monogamous relationship." AFP also noted that "she has a son, Aurélien, now six, with Raphael Enthoven, a professor of philosophy, who was himself the son of the publisher Jean-Paul Enthoven, with whom she was living before that." 

Sarkozy's entourage hope that the marriage, conducted on the first floor of the Elysée Palace by the mayor of the eighth arrondissement, will put an end to the president's disastrous playboy phase, which began when he presented Ms Bruni to France from Disneyland Paris in early December. Public opinion took a bleak view of his exhibition of his companion on trips to Egypt and Jordan, their exchange of expensive gifts and his love-struck announcement of their idyll at a palace press conference last month.

Sarkozy is said to be unconvinced that his "bling bling" personal life has contributed to his unpopularity. He puts the slide down to disappointment with the economy and his failure to perform miracles. That is no doubt the biggest factor, but you only have to listen to the chatter in cafes and work places, to know that Sarko's rushed romance has not endeared him to his citizens. It has earned him ridicule that will take time to erase.                

   

Sarkozy's Legion of women.

What is shared by Claudia Cardinale, the Italian actress [left], Pierre Giacometti, President Sarkozy's favourite pollster, and Ivan Ciganer-Albeniz, the businessman brother of the former Cécilia Sarkozy ?

They have all just been elevated to or promoted in the Légion d'Honneur, the distinction for outstanding service to the French Republic. This is Sarkozy's second handout of twice-yearly honours since his election and, in keeping with the new-style French monarchy, the New Year's list is different. Half the recipients are women. 

Last November, Sarko threw back the list of 1,340 names because it was 70 percent male and dominated by the usual high functionaries of state, local government officials and businessmen. Following the example of Tony Blair and his modernised British honours, Sarko wanted more women, non-whites and "ordinary people" like school teachers and charity workers. The Legion fonctionnaires went back to work, erased a few hundred old white men and, one month late, came up with new "feminized and diverse" Légion d'Honneur.   

The top female awards went to Christiane Desroches-Nobelcourt, an Egyptologist, Sister Emmanuelle, a much-loved charity founder, and Cardinale, who was raised to Commander from the rank of Officer, to which her friend Jacques Chirac had appointed her a few year ago. Among other women celebrities, the entry-level Chevalier rank went to Muriel Robin, a popular actress and Marie-Claude Pietragalla, the dancer-choreographer