Opinion: In France, l’Etat is no longer moi

Dodging corruption charges and facing jail time, French leaders go out of their way to give Louis XIV a bad name.

Mort Rosenblum November 17, 2009 06:41Updated May 30, 2010 12:13

France's former president, Jacques Chirac on the right, and the country's current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, attend a ceremony honoring France's wartime resistance heroes in Paris in Mar. 21, 2007. (Charles Platiau/Reuters)

PARIS, France — Beheadings and bad times aside, French rulers have basked in a protective glow emanating for 300 years from the Sun King, old Louis (“L’Etat, c’est moi”) XIV.

After Charles de Gaulle strode down a liberated Champs Elysees chest and nose first, and then designed the Fifth Republic, besmirching presidents amounted to lese majeste.

No longer. What with hound-dog investigating judges, fed-up politicos and a restive rabble, a series of dramatic skirmishes now reverberate in the highest places.

Jacques Chirac, still wildly popular two years after leaving the Elysee Palace, was charged with creating 21 phony jobs for cronies when he was mayor of Paris.

Charles Pasqua, Chirac’s powerful interior minister, was sentenced to a year of hard time over an African arms deal. In a news conference, he implicated the ex-president.

Pasqua was convicted of arranging a medal for Arcadi Gayadamak, a Russian arms dealer, in exchange for a large donation to an association of which he was vice president.

“Can anyone imagine for one minute that I would prostitute myself over a decoration?” he asked. Later, he said, “The real question is why, if this arms sale was illegal, didn’t Chirac stop it.”

Meantime, President Nicolas Sarkozy hauled former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin into court, saying he spread false corruption rumors as a campaign tactic. Even a suspended sentence would keep Villepin from public office.

As Sarkozy smarted from criticism that he was taking vengeance too far, a storm broke over the plum job about to go to his 23-year-old son, Jean, a second-year law student.

Sarkozy’s partisans on the Hauts de Seine council had tapped Jean to oversee La Defense, Europe’s largest skyscraper park, at the western edge of Paris.

Senior people in the president’s party decried what they called nepotism, an unseemly fast track for a controversial young man many call Prince Jean.

At last moment, Jean withdrew. He said he did not speak to the president about his decision. But, he added, he talked to his father.

When it was over, John Lichfield of the London Independent quoted an unnamed National Assemblyman in Sarkozy’s UMP party:

“It is infuriating and disturbing that the president cannot see the harm he is doing to himself. You have to remember that Sarkozy was elected as a man who would break down the barriers to success in France, the real barriers but also the invisible, psychological barriers.”

True enough, Sarkozy rose as a technocrat, the son of Hungarian parents, who campaigned on a promise to make France more egalitarian, freed from a narrow ruling elite.

“For the first time, France successfully stood up for its own values, against those of Mr. Sarkozy,” Lichfield concluded. “The French Republic 1, The Emperor Nicolas Sarkozy 0.”