By IRNA,
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 Andre Malraux at his elbow. Francois Mitterrand renovated the Louvre. Just before he left office, Jacques Chirac inaugurated 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. Naturally, millions of tourists now flock to it, The International Herald Tribune said.
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.
Sarkozy’s taste is said to be for Lionel Ritchie and Celine Dion.
(Mitterrand mulled over Dostoevsky; de Gaulle consumed Chateaubriand – the writer).
The current president’s fondness for showbiz pals, his marriage to the Italian former model and singer Carla Bruni, and the appointment of a culture minister, Christine Albanel, who is intelligent but widely regarded as weak among 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. That much is undeniable. One recent afternoon, Lacouture sat in his study overlooking the Seine , meditating on this sea change. “When de Gaulle returned to a liberated France in 1944,” he recalled, “he made a show of visiting famous writers like Paul Valery and Francois Mauriac. It was his way of declaring a renewed sense of French glory.”
These days, Paris kiosks sport a special issue of Le Canard Enchaine, the satirical newspaper, with yet another photograph of Sarkozy in his familiar aviator Ray-Bans, a yacht and a private jet superimposed onto his mirrored lenses.
“President Bling-Bling,” has already become a tired cliche.
“Sarko l’Americain” is another common insult, although the French may soon have to think up a fresh one if the Americans elect a president who delivers speeches like the one 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 grace: The hyperactive Sarkozy reportedly text-messaged somebody or other while with the Pope.
That infuriated some French Catholics along with many old-time Gaullists and other traditional conservatives who, though they elected him, now find 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,” acknowledged Herve Mariton.
He is a young, worldly, neo-Gaullist member of Sarkozy’s governing center-right UMP in Parliament. In a brief stop at a busy cafe across from the National Assembly, he 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,” 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 he had to dash back to 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 ’68, 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.) Sarkozy has almost inspired in Rambaud 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 Petrus.
“It goes back to the days of the kings.”
Georges Pompidou published an anthology of French poetry and launched the national center for modern art named after him. Valery Giscard d’Estaing left behind the Orsay museum and the Institute of the Arab World.
Chirac, to enhance his aura, 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.