It has taken ten long months for Nicolas Sarkozy to start to understand what a president should be, but at last the penny seems to have dropped. Even as he was brushing off his disastrous poll ratings with deliberate if unconvincing insouciance, he was clearly panicking behind the scenes, for already things in France are not what they were even a fortnight ago. While everyone has been glued to the local elections, President Sarkozy has, to use the French word, re-looké his style. Long gone are those unflattering jogging opportunities making him look so ridiculous, more recently the heavy gold wrist-watches have dropped off, the helicopter-man Ray-Bans have been binned. What his minders call “an adjustment” has taken place, quietly, behind closed doors. Hours in front of the mirror to eliminate the stabbing finger and those irritating facial tics, trying to coach some gravitas into those absurd eyebrows. Gone are the flying visits to factories, farmers or fishermen (too common for a head of state, anyway he is too easily wound-up) in favour of solemn, weighty events more in keeping with a president: commemorating the courageous but doomed resistance on the Glières plateau in 1944, for example, or launching a submarine. In short we are being led to expect that the ten month-long Act I of his presidency is finally over (a nightmare, with moments of high farce). Tomorrow we may expect Act II, featuring a reformed leading-man.

For Monday is also the Day One of the new reforms which, according to Mediapart, an on-line newspaper run by four of France’s best journalists which begins life today, are going to rain down upon us. Having warmed up his team on pensions, over-time payments and the principal of flexi-security, the real work of changing France is set to start on Monday, they say. This is not a mere plan de rigeur suspected by the Socialists but structural reform at its deepest level, called impressively La Révision Générale des Politiques Publiques. According to Mediapart it will be “un ensemble de mesures transformant en profondeur l’architecture même de l’administration ou certaines règles de la protection sociale.” Employers’ charges are being reviewed, a complete over-haul of the tax system has been envisaged and is being drawn up to make both charges and tax simpler, clearer, more “competitive and attractive”. Some social security benefits may be abolished, as well as perhaps “1,000 special rights” currently enjoyed by some fonctionnaires. Even the partial privatisation of the nuclear-power generator Areva is being worked on (which, if true will cause much controversy). The over-riding aim is to reduce public spending and honour France’s commitment to some sort of balanced budget by 2012. The question is whether that rather academic ambition interests the French, or whether they will demand something more immediate and solid to improve their fast-sinking purchasing power – said to be their number one concern.

If the journalists on Mediapart are right, however (and their informers seem to be the very people working on these reflection groups), then the President is being as good as his word and is not letting his party’s defeat at the local polls influence or dilute his reform strategy. Which is all to the good. For the next week or so the French press will be asking itself the ultimately futile question as to whether today’s vote was a sanction or not – but Sarkozy looks to be using that as cover to push forward his long-awaited reform programme. He won’t have an easy time of it: even last autumn when the government fixed its budget for 2008 oil was at a paltry $73 a barrel (now $110), growth in France was estimated at 2 – 2.5% in 2008 (now revised to 1.5%), the euro was at 1.37 for a dollar (now it’s at 1.55). The next few weeks will be vital to Sarkozy’s longer-term credibility and survival.

I have written before about the problem in France of getting reliable demographic statistics, in particular about how many Muslims there are and how many French citizens have roots in North or West Africa. There now appears to be another hole: there are no figures for how many French citizens emigrate each year. Benign observation says “lots” – simply because almost everyone I speak to knows at least a couple of young people who are working in London. But astonishingly no official figure exists: no one knows exactly how many French people have left or are still leaving France to work abroad. Trying to explain this lack, today’s Rue 89 has a résumé of a 50-page report by demographer Hervé Le Bras, the whole of which is published on-line by the think-tank “En Temps Réel”. M. Le Bras, who is also a mathematician and historian, worked with Jacques Attali on the probably doomed “Liberation de la croissance francaise”.
The French, according to M. Le Bras, think of their country as a “pays d’immigration” (I suspect many British think the same of their country), a phrase which is gently flattering because one likes to imagine one’s country is a magnet for others less fortunate. The official net immigration figure has been some 52,000 a year over the past decade. In reality though, says M. Le Bras, net immigration is closer to a mere 6,000 – simply because no one counts the white French emigrants (and, he adds, few want to countenance the possibility that France might also be a “pays d’émigration”). The demographic curves established by M. Le Bras on emigration resemble those of “well-known” emigration countries such as Ireland and Portugal before they became part of the EU. That bad.

INSEE’s mistake, says Le Bras, has been to see emigrants only as previous immigrants who decided to return home. While accepting that during the years of high unemployment many young French people went to London, and then perhaps across the Atlantic, it was always said they didn’t really count as emigrants since it was assumed they would come back as soon as they could. Whether they will or not is of course in the land of conjecture. What is now clear from M. Le Bras’ researches is that fully 5% of the generation born in the late 60’s and early 70’s left France between the two census points of 1990 and 1999 and most have not come back.

Politically this is hard to swallow: public opinion says that France is “envahie par l’étranger”. Many politicians owe their votes and therefore their jobs to encouraging this notion – as I write the President is making a speech on the subject. Hervé Le Bras is one of a small band of researchers trying to explode myths about their own society. But like Michèle Tribalat’s two reports (1999 and 2004) on how many Muslims there are in France, I doubt much more will be heard of it. “Demography,” says Le Bras, “is a perfect illustration of the dangers of French conservatism, marked by a great difficulty in analysing deep changes in French society.”

Now that the first (and for many only) round of the local elections is over and we realise they are not the public flagellation of the ruling party many had predicted, we can expect the President to get back to the true business of government and do the job for which he was elected. Objectively it is absurd that having been elected by a good majority less than a year ago, he felt he had to delay most of his reforms until after the local elections for fear of upsetting people. All his reforms were announced with much pomp during the presidential campaign so why he should feel suddenly so bashful about them is a mystery. Anyway, now at last we should begin to see whether all the media silliness of the past few months can be thankfully forgotten, or whether France really is stuck.

Because silly stories have dominated for so long it is easy to forget that Sarkozy has had some quite surprising successes in two important areas – both where his predecessors either failed or ducked out: partial reform of pensions and in particular getting an agreement from the unions to discuss intelligently reform to the Code du Travail. The major question now is whether the President has the stomach to go back to finish these and to tackle new reforms. He has not got long: in three months France takes over the presidency of the EU. He is desperate that his presidency (one of the last there will be, assuming the Lisbon Treaty is passed) should make an especially big splash so that once again the eyes of all the world are riveted on France. Thus during between July and the end of the year it’s unlikely he’s going to risk strikes and huge demonstrations on the streets – he’s got to do it now. I only hope he gets it right.

In passing I note the very strange absence of comment in any French media about last week’s massive climb-down by the President over the Mediterranean Union. Originally (as announced many times during last year’s election campaign) this was to have been a wonderful French initiative, placing France at the head and the centre (if that’s anatomically possible) of two spectacular international entities: Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Angela Merkel (and she was not alone) was utterly against, and she had her way last week with an agreement from M. Sarkozy that the Mediterranean Union would revert to being an entirely European venture, in other words little different from the Barcelona Declaration adopted fully 13 years ago which launched the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership or Barcelona Process. Sarkozy’s idea of dominating the Mediterranean (he has wasted considerable energy on his idea, inflicting state visits on most North African countries) has been binned by Angela Merkel’s greater ability. Indeed last week the Germans were treated to a most fawning French President, telling them their way was the way dreamed of by all France. Yet few French papers or TV channels have endorsed this or mentioned Sarkozy’s volte-face.

There’s a fascinating video on the site of the ultra-prestigious Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. It shows what may be a portent of a coming trend: physically preventing independent – particularly internet – TV journalists from filming at public meetings where members of government are speaking. In this video we watch, from the inside, the frustrated (and deeply frustrating) efforts of a TeleLibre cameraman trying to record a public meeting at which the Minister of Justice, Rachida Dati, is going to speak. Everytime he starts filming, a huge shoulder comes in front of the lens to block him out. The camera moves, the shoulder moves with it. After a while we see the director trying (it seems politely) to clear a little space. But the owners of the shoulders (there are several) will not budge. Several young and not-so-young faces, all nicely groomed and impeccably correct, grin smugly at the camera or the increasingly frantic director. They seem to be acting in concert. We assume they are militant supporters of Mme Dati and the UMP. After a while we feel the camera being pushed sideways and suddenly it is out in the entrance hall where others, putting their hands over the lens presumably to avoid identification, apparently hustle the cameraman and his director out into the street.

Recently cameras have caught politicians saying things in public they perhaps shouldn’t have said – the most notorious case being President Sarkozy at the Salon d’Agriculture telling a member of the public to get stuffed. Within hours the video was on the internet and the President’s off-the-cuff remark was once again pushing far more important pieces of news off the slate. His minister for Human Rights was caught at a public (local) meeting saying embarrassing things, as other UMP stalwarts have been too. “La petite phrase” filmed and posted on the web has become a major bugbear for the party in power (and was for the Socialist opposition too during the presidential election campaign). Ironical of course, a case of l’arroseur arrosé, since President Sarkozy’s manipulation of the press is one of his greatest strengths.

So here is the web confirming its role as an (perhaps the only?) independent force, leader of the anonymous opposition, showing us aspects of our leaders which they would rather we did not see. The web doesn’t do so well in the hands of those in or seeking power – with a few exceptions the web-sites of the candidates for the local elections have been ignored, perhaps too parochial – but it blossoms as a purveyor of scurrilous material potentially dangerous to those in power. I know nothing about TeleLibre except that it seems to be a video equivalent of AgoraVox, a web-based citizen’s newspaper. This video is posted by a highly qualified researcher at one of the grandes écoles to make a serious sociological point.

The wider implication of the video is obvious: web journalism (independent and thus uncontrollable) has such a huge (and often gullible) audience that if someone does not want these literally free-lance reporters filming at his or her meeting they enlist the backs, shoulders and elbows of their supporters, who clearly relish the chance to flex their muscles. While far from new, the technique is very dangerous for us all. Or of course this particular video could all too easily be faked – that’s the problem with all web journalism.

A compatriot and colleague sent me the following angry email. Possibly written with all the bitterness of someone who has sold up everything in Britain to make their home in France and too late realised their mistake, it could be read as a classic piece of French-bashing. But I don’t think that’s the author’s intention and certainly is not mine in publishing it. I think it has wider implications. Read it first:

“Last year this reporter earned a stunning €1,919 for her words and pictures submitted to the excellent French News. Then, as a thoroughly fair sort of Brit, she felt she should register this lucrative enterprise with the State – not wishing to work on the Black and keen to contribute to this fine country.
“This, dear reader, was the beginning of a great mistake!
“Tax – of course - you declare it – no problem but then there is URSSAF – not a branch of the US military but the people who issue the Siret number you need to work independently in France and RSI another – pay us now outfit.
“As corny papers say “imagine my surprise” when the kindly folk of URSSAF demanded, in January, a whopping €1,333 leaving the correspondent a mere €586. Soak the rich eh – and the poor and struggling while you are about it too.
“Then in February another parasite invaded - RSI – which also want to gorge on whatever mean reserves of food this damaged body has, with a demand for €1,077.
“So far my freelance work has cost me €491 more than I have earned. So next year I plan to give up my hobby of supporting the Republic – it is better, and cheaper not to work at all.
“And of course the princely sum of €1,919 has already been added to the family’s income.”

I doubt this will be news to anyone who has moved to France and tried to set up some freelance work. We all have similar heart-wrenching stories which tend to be the stuff of ex-pat dinner-time conversations while enjoying a few glasses of excellent French wine – a “residents’ rant” blog would be soon over-loaded. There are in fact ways round the problem quoted above, but they are technical, long-winded, requiring huge amounts of time, effort and above all a good understanding of administrative French. Indeed many Chambres de Commerce provide induction courses (in English!) to help and explain the French system to the woefully ill-equipped Brits. But what interests me here is not the particular case but the wider implications of the naivety of so many British people (in whom I include myself) who set up here without understanding what ‘protectionism’ or ‘anti-competitive’ really mean in everyday life. Many French people consider us entirely, possibly dangerously mad.

My brother-in-law is an inspecteur du travail in the Limousin, and from time to time has to go out with the gendarmes on dawn raids against British residents who have, for example, set-up a gîte without going through all the administrative palaver. Or, a speciality in the Limousin, bought a small lake stuffed with carp which they then charge other British anglers to come and fish. Or an elderly lady who imagined she could buy antiques from those oh-so-tempting street markets and re-sell them to British neighbours and “friends who come round for tea”. How naive can you get? This is not Britain (which, by definition, all these people decided to leave) and in France an Englishman’s home is not his castle. My French family (and I suspect many others) get somewhat steamed about those who set up in France without thinking through the consequences, without really understanding what they are doing, often without really understanding the language. For like the language, the French learn their administrative system from the cradle: it’s second nature.

France is famous for its cuisine and its social protection – and just as there’s no such thing as a free lunch, you can’t have this high level of social protection without serious cost. Having a nanny state means paying the nanny: and even if the French complain about it, they accept it as a fact of life – just as an entirely matter-of-fact education inspector once explained to me that if I wanted to be paid for teaching English three hours a week at my local primary school I would of course have to pay an amount equal to five times “salary” in charges. She wasn’t particularly shocked and not at all embarrassed to tell me this – that’s just how life is and it’s naive to imagine otherwise. Which explains in part why the majority of young French people dream of becoming fonctionnaires, it may not be the best income but it’s a totally secure one, with every wrinkle and stress-factor of the administration taken care of. They reject with much manifesting horrors such as the Contrat premier embauche, seen as Contrat premier pas vers la jungle.

Indeed the author of the rant above began her diatribe with the words: “What the French Republic could learn from Zoology”, arguing that the “French Ministry of Finance could do well to study Darwin”. Again the arguments she puts forward are totally reasonable – from the British (Darwinian) point of view. But they ignore the fact that the French don’t like and are deeply suspicious of Darwin (usually misquoted in translation as advocating the survival of the strongest, since there seems no easy equivalent in French of the word “fittest”, which has nothing to do with strength, and in any case the phrase was not Darwin’s but Herbert Spencer’s. Darwin used it first in the 5th edition of “Origin of the Species” and then only reluctantly, usually in combination with his preferred “natural selection”) – indeed for many French people Darwin is mixed in with Malthus, jointly responsible for all that is wrong with the anglo-saxon world. Much French thinking, especially in the press, believes that nature, and especially human nature, is red in tooth and claw and for that reason should at all costs be avoided, not learnt from. As in 18th century gardening, the thought is still that nature must be tamed, pruned, ordered – in a word civilised, as proof of man’s superiority. The pinnacle of this civilisation, the proof man’s superiority is of course the French state – an entirely artificial construct which rains the benefits of education and health care on all, while simultaneously providing obligatory periods of leisure – things unknown in the jungle.

It’s satisfying to see that the on-line news journal Rue 89 has taken up an idea I launched five days ago, that “devoir de mémoire” should be focussed not on the deported children but rather on the adults who rounded them up. They knew where the children were going and what horrible death awaited them. When I suggested that each adult should be given the name of a member of the milice (and be encouraged to wonder whether he/she knew anyone like that today) I was being perfectly serious, although no one has commented on it so maybe you all thought I was yet again being facetious - but it is actually where the mémoire in question should be. The contributor to Rue 89 is particularly well placed to make the same suggestion since he himself was rounded up, on the 16th July 1942, by the French police.

He says: “Such reminders of History are extremely useful at a time when police officers and gendarmes are working non-stop tracking down the sans papiers and, sometimes, separating them from their children.” Then, having added that of course the periods are different he writes a beautiful phrase which doesn’t work in English: “Pourtant les mauvaises manières n’en perdurent pas moins, et les fonctionnaires d’autorité de la République ne se risquent jamais à transgresser les ordres qui ne sont en rien compatibles avec les traditions humanitaires du pays des droits de l’homme.” In simple terms, people still dare not disobey orders which are in flagrant contradiction to French humane traditions. He is absolutely right and that is the root of the problem.

“Devoir de mémoire” in any country and any language usually refers to the victims, who are no longer with us: it’s too easy to remember them. It should refer to the oppressors, who are still amongst us and whose continued existence and well-being we are aiding and abetting - by not remembering that.

As perhaps the last word on mémoire, the Holocaust and how both interact with new generations, I strongly recommend Tony Judt’s excellent piece (in fact the transcript of a lecture given weeks before the French President’s decree for 10 year old children, but broadly on the same subject of how we tackle and teach this very difficult subject) in the New York Review of Books (and for anyone unfamiliar with Tony Judt and interested in why Europe is the way it is, please read his monumental and more than excellent “Postwar: a History of Europe since 1945″ which has just been published in French as “Après Guerre”).

France looks as if it is poised to go into one of those peculiarly franco-français spins which leaves other nationals gasping for words. This particular spin is caused by the event I wrote about in the previous piece – the President’s insisting, without consultation, that every 10 year old be saddled with the memory of a French child who died in the Holocaust. Whatever one thinks of that decree per se, it was the final straw for many Republicans, and sparked an appeal trumpeted throughout the land for “Republican vigilance”. This call-to-arms was signed by many senior French politicians (Ségolène Royal, François Bayrou, Dominique de Villepin). Their basic premise is that under President Sarkozy, republican values are in danger. That debate, for me, is where the downward spiral starts.

I have written in Prospect that the republican values (equality and laïcité particularly) are the bed-rock and defining principle of present-day France. But they do not export – or even translate – well. Anglophones, for example, tend to read laïcité as secularism – which it isn’t, it is something far stronger and in many French people touches a nerve far deeper. Hence the passion behind this petition for the defence of the republic, which looks like becoming another major row in France.

But many people outside France believe that these “values” are the product of a by-gone age, and are now hampering France as much as its Code du Travail or its unaffordable social security system. Arthur Goldhammer, an American blogger on French politics, feels that: “vaguely [Sarkozy] senses that the old republican rhetoric is out of whack with the realities of contemporary France, and he is right.” Or it may be that, as ange scalpel suggests in a comment on the previous piece, Sarkozy is consciously trying to unpick key republican values: something he could never have alluded to during the election campaign but which, he may feel, have no place in today’s world. Something many non-French would agree with. Sarkozy is clearly influenced by “foreigners” to a far greater degree than his predecessors: as well as the rag-bag of American influences, Rue 89 yesterday gave a fascinating insight into the close links with Canadian billionaire Paul Desmarais, and not just financial: in 1995 when Sarkozy was rejected and reviled by mainstream French politicians, traversing what he likes to call the desert, “a man invited me into his family in Quebec. We spent hours walking through the woods and he told me: “You’ve got to stick in there, you will get there, we must build a strategy for you.” On Sunday Sarkozy rewarded Desmarais with France’s highest honour, the Legion d’honneur, saying: “If I am president today it is partly thanks to the advice of Paul Desmarais.”

It may be that people like Desmarais and others have suggested to Sarkozy that the notion of “the Republic one and indivisible” is, as Goldhammer says: “a pious wish, not reality”. The real question is whether a country prefers to live mouthing pious wishes or staring reality in the face. The second choice is not necessarily superior: many French people appear to prefer the former, even knowing, deep down, those pious wishes are hot air, for they also know that if they are forced to adopt the latter and stare reality in the face, France will lose a large part of its Frenchness.

If Nicolas Sarkozy is extraordinary for one thing it is for continually grabbing the headlines – literally occupying all the space. Increasingly he does this by making apparently off-the-cuff and controversial remarks on a subject for which no one is prepared. He creates a storm of protest, then a day or so later he explains himself, putting his controversial speech into a much more common sense, although often populist, context. But while all that’s going on, the important things like reforms are forgotten.

On Wednesday night he did this during a speech at a dinner for France’s principal Jewish council, CRIF. He announced that from September this year every 9 or 10 year old child, during their last year in primary school, will be given “the memory of a French child who was a victim of the Shoah” to carry with them. Virtually no consultation, no preparation, no if’s or buts. What the President decrees happens, and now every little Mohamed is going to be given (confié) the memory of a little dead Shlomo to carry around with him for a year.

And as he obviously hoped, nobody is talking about anything else. Push to one side for the moment the rights and wrongs of yet again forgetting all the gypsy children, all the Communist children, what’s important is M. Sarkozy’s manipulation of “Le devoir de la mémoire”. I’ve written in Prospect about this, to me strange phenomenon which seems to have taken hold of many people in France. The duty of memory. Not “lest we forget” but “you must remember”. Memory becomes confused in the popular mind with history; memories are mostly based on emotions, so history is reduced to a series of emotional events – slavery, colonialism, especially the War in Algeria, and Vichy France. The President further works on the emotions by always picking children. Last year he decreed that children should listen to the adolescent Guy Moquet’s last letter to his parents before he was shot. Now he has taken this duty of memory a stage further by decreeing that all French ten year olds will be saddled with the morbid memory of a child his/her own age who was murdered in horrendous circumstances and with whom he/she is now supposed to identify.

An extraordinary imposition on a child’s psyche to saddle them with guilt for something they had nothing to do with, that happened 55 years before they were born. Far more salutary to decree that all French adults will be confié the name of a French adult responsible for rounding up those 12,000 children and make it a duty to think on how any human being, let alone one who has had the benefit of a French education, comes to do that. But of course adults vote, children don’t.

Many people, particularly in the professions affected – teachers, historians and child psychologists – have protested. Simone Veil, herself deported to Auschwitz as a child, has strongly protested. But that’s the clever ruse that Sarkozy is developing more and more: you make a statement that incites immediate reaction and revolt, which in turn makes some people believe you are doing something radical. You then justify the controversial outpouring with a second statement that clarifies and seems a step in the right direction, so that the protesters are made to look like dreadful old reactionaries. Thus having made his decree on Wednesday night, on Friday morning the President says that this is all part of moral education: everyone, he insists, must recognise and respect everyone else, especially their differences.

Now that statement is truly revolutionary in France. Recognising that people are different, with different faiths and different histories, is admitting the diversity of French society. Only a few years ago that was taboo. Azouz Begag, when he was Minister for Equality of Opportunity, made it his mission to bring that word into the French vocabulary and he had a huge problem getting it accepted. In a nation where everyone is equal (it says so above every town hall) you cannot admit diversity – and now Azouz’s implacable enemy has adopted the word for himself. But that too is part of his technique.

It is certainly grotesque. Leaders of the opposition are calling it surreal, ubu-esque. I think of it more as the stuff of Jacobean drama, perhaps the sub-plot to one of those gloriously energetic plays whose characters have names like Malateste, Ambitioso, Supervacuo or Sarkozy. Like a Jacobean play, Neuilly is a story of a ruler, his courtiers, his family, rivalry, revenge – and loads of Kensington gore.

Nicolas Sarkozy began his extraordinary, ambition-driven career in Neuilly, a well-heeled suburb of Paris – aged 28 he was elected mayor. Neuilly town hall was his base for nearly 20 years and now, with municipal elections looming, he nominated someone very close to him to be his successor there, the dashingly handsome David Martinon. Martinon rocketed into public view as Sarkozy’s campaign director during the presidential election campaign last year, and as a reward for victory was made the President’s spokesman. He interprets for the world what the President is thinking. Martinon is also close to Sarkozy’s second wife Cecilia, and it is rumoured that he owes his position to her influence. So far little different from a Jacobean sub-plot, for crucially of course everyone in the pit knows that Cecilia’s influence first faded then was cut off abruptly by divorce. The wheel of fortune turns inexorably at court, and can turn alarmingly fast.

Now enter Jean Sarkozy, the ruler’s 21 year old son by a first marriage. Although brought up largely in Corsica, he could be seen as Neuilly natural. His father put him to work alongside David Martinon in the Neuilly campaign. Right from the start it went wrong. “Martinon non non” was the cry that greeted the hapless courtier when he arrived to start canvassing – a protest from his own party. Soon the honest Neuilly-burghers were telling the press “A candidate who wanders round our town with a GPS in his hand doesn’t impress.” Then the ruler’s self-assured, enarque spokesman, used to people hanging on his every word, was said to be having a hard time with a splinter faction of his own troops led by – the ruler’s son. The son of the first wife was putting spokes in the wheel of the second wife’s favourite. Then on Saturday a poll placing Martinon second to an “assorted right” candidate ignited rumours that he must go – or perhaps had already gone. On Sunday Jean Sarkozy somewhat gleefully announced that a triumvirate was taking over. On Monday Martinon announced in two brief and bitter sentences his definitive departure. When Jean Sarkozy was asked his reaction he said “Look at my smile.” Now the daggers are outat the palace : the ruler is away in the distant département of French Guiana and at home the court is saying Martinon cannot remain as the President’s spokesman. No reason is given, he must simply go – unlike say Daniel Bouton, who remains immovable at the head of a huge bank despite its catastrophic performance in every respect. Martinon has done nothing wrong. It is mere revenge, as in the best Jacobean tragedy. The favourite of the woman who ousted Jean Sarkozy’s mother from the marriage bed duly despatched, his corpse thrown to the circling press vultures.

I use that bird deliberately because by coincidence (or is it? Is this really the centre falling apart?) in the same week another female power within the court, the darkly beautiful Minister for Human Rights Rama Yade, called the press “vultures”. In an untypical outburst she accused the French press of relentlessly, irresponsibly digging up dirt about the President (she should try the British or American press). They are clearly hoping, she believes, for a kill. Vulture however was ill-advised choice of metaphor – hounds might have been kinder: after all they bay for the blood of an animal still up and running with a chance of survival; vultures, as I understand it, gather only when death is inevitable and imminent. Does Mme Yade sense the President is already no more than carrion?

Perhaps not consciously, but Sarkozy running away from the press on Monday – he who normally walks so confidently towards them – indeed looked like a doomed creature. The press simply wanted a statement about Neuilly, nothing to do with the President’s private life. It is quite absurd for Sarkozy to claim it is not his problem: certainly it is only a sub-plot, but Martinon was his nomination and is/was his man, who had worked hard to build good relationships with many of the same people asking for a statement. Sarkozy’s own son has himself assumed a major role in this chaotic tale and nobody believes that the father was not party to the son’s actions. And Neuilly was Sarkozy père’s fief for 20 years. Contrary to what M. Sarkozy says, it has everything to do with him

One can of course pooh-pooh the whole thing as a piece of ephemeral theatre. But like any good sub-plot it echoes in a minor-key all the elements of the main story: the ruler’s attempt to control everything, even who is to be mayor of a Paris suburb. The anger that control engenders in people, and when things unravel Sarkozy is fast-vanishing dust in the middle-distance (a family trait: his son Jean allegedly has the same tendency on his motor-bike). The influence of his court, of his three wives to whom, paradoxically for a control-freak, he seems to capitulate easily. And finally the bloody despatch of a key member of the ruler’s team – for David Martinon will, I fear, be swiftly followed by others and, as in any good Jacobean drama, we will soon see a stage littered with corpses. But certainly Neuilly is only a sub-plot – the real tragedy is elsewhere and on a much larger scale: all those changes that France must embrace if it is to get out of the downward spiral.

On that subject I like what Theodore Zeldin, a British member of Jacques Attali’s committee on making France more competitive, told the FT at the weekend:
“He [Zeldin] is enthusiastic about the possibilities for change but expresses frustration with the commission’s intensely technical discussions of subjects and the cobwebs of laws and regulations preventing new initiatives. “The tendency of experts is to fiddle around with their expertise rather than trying to find new solutions,” he says.
“His solutions are far more radical: founding new towns with affordable housing near the coast that can draw food, energy and water from the sea; posting school teachers to foreign countries for a year to experience different cultures; inviting the world’s 100 richest people to the Elysee Palace and asking them to create a global university.
“In reforming France, or any other country, Zeldin argues it is vital to avoid, rather than provoke, confrontation. It is better to allow old problems to wither while encouraging new possibilities to emerge alongside.”

But tragically such fresh ideas are shoved aside in what is fast becoming a tale of unbridled personal ambition and bloody revenge.