I have never met Nicolas Sarkozy, although not for the want of trying. A few years ago, when he was still unknown in Britain, I wrote a portrait of him for Prospect, phoning his press office every day for maybe three weeks, trying to get an interview. He is a fascinating, if mildly repulsive man, reminiscent of a character sprung from the mind of a Jacobean dramatist, and ever since that time I have listened carefully to those who know him – Charles de Courson for instance telling me last week that so divisive is Sarkozy’s nature that if he gets in, the country will collapse within two years. Leaders naturally bring people together, and Sarkozy so far has shown himself the opposite. So Michel Onfray’s blog in which he describes meeting the candidate was a must-read.

For those who can’t face 3,113 words in French (and you thought I’m long-winded!) I will give a résumé (meaning shortened version, for those with no French at all). Michel Onfray is a 47 year old philosopher, already cited in this blog some time ago, who achieved high-profile with his book La Traité d’Athéologie, which sold a remarkable 300,000 copies. Put simply, he is a hedonist, believing in the present, not in the dream of a rosy future, whether religion-based or utopic. He believes in the value of our senses, that we should know the world and see the world as it is. Anyway, the French magazine Philosophie asked Onfray to interview Sarkozy.

On his blog, he describes the meeting: Onfray is accompanied by two of the staff of the magazine, Sarkozy by two advisors. “A stormy beginning. Aggression on his part. He paces round his cage, looking, weighing me up, judging. A great wounded animal, he has read my blog and looks me up and down.” Onfray recently started a blog for this election, and early on he compared Sarkozy to the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. In the same way that the wolf disguises his grey fur with the grandmother’s nightdress, the lupine free-marketeer Sarko has dressed himself up in clothing of the left, claiming to believe in the Republic and its social, caring values. It is for this comparison that the following scene is enacted: “His legs are crossed, one of them incessantly twitching nervously, the foot never stops moving…..First blow with his paw, claws out, then a second, a third, he can’t stop, lets himself go, aggressing, hitting, striking hard, talking to himself, a flow of words impossible to control or canalize. One, two, ten, twenty autistic sentences. His cabinet director and colleague watch and listen to him impassively. I can imagine them present at a heavy [police] interrogation, wearing the same mask, the mask of a person in authority watching someone die without a flicker of emotion. The monologue continues, interminable torrent, bitchy comments thrown out like gall from a sick, bilious man or the venom surging through the body of a person intent on murder. Boasting, provoking, sure of his ground as he pushes his adversary to fight back, he says in essence: “So you’ve come to see the great demagogue, you who are nothing whatsoever, you throw yourself into the wolf’s jaws!” I say something, it is torn apart, destroyed, broken, rejected….. I try again. Same treatment, a torrent of acid words. I try again, same thing. I begin to find it’s going on a bit long…”

As Onfray says, how, if one has wanted, since the cradle, to be president of the republic, if one aspires to walk with the great of this world, be the head of the army, have a nuclear arsenal at one’s disposal, how can one turn like a mortally wounded animal on someone just because they wrote on their blog something mildly critical. All Onfray said in his blog was that Sarkozy had recently converted to Gaullism, the idea of the nation and the republic. “In fact the whole of the first half hour were a hysterical piece of play-acting of someone lost body and soul in a dance of death around a ritual victim, while round about two men from each camp impotently watch this primitive scene.”

Sarkozy, called away to the telephone, returns calmer, and under the influence of his minders begins to talk about the matter in hand, an interview about that area thought to be the monopoly of all educated Parisians, philosophy. Sarkozy announces that he firmly believes that we are born either good or evil and that whatever happens to us, everything is determined by nature: “I tend to think,” says Sarkozy quoted by Onfray and later in the magazine, “that one is born a pedophile…. There are 1,200 or 1,300 young people who kill themselves each year, and not because their parents didn’t look after them. But because they had a genetic fragility…take smokers: some develop cancers, others don’t. The first have a hereditary physiological weakness..” For Onfray, believing that you are controlled by your genes in this way is terrible, a pure piece of American stupidity.

Sarkozy then says that he has never heard anything as absurd as Socrates’ “Know yourself” “This admission turns me to ice – for him. And for what it says about him….In other words this person who wants to lead the destinies of the French nation believes that knowledge of oneself is a vain undertaking?” Onfray reminds his readers that the last three heads of state have all had need of expert psychological help at different times during their mandate. Clearly Sarkozy feels this sign of fragility is not for him.

The description of the meeting reminds me inevitably of the interview with Jacques Chirac told by the journalists from the New York Times, retold on this blog. In France there is a constant and ritual dance between politicians and journalists, who are not allowed by law to comment on a public person’s private life, and so find other ways to undermine their credibility. The world of blogs, a French samizdat, is of course, ideal for that. The comparison, as they say in France, is not anodyne. I cringe to imagine France under Sarkozy, if mild criticism provokes that sort of anger, what will happen to the already acquiescent French press? Imagine Sarkozy interviewed by John Humphrys – he would provide the excuse for bringing back the guillotine. If Sarkozy is elected we shall have a lively passage, as a ferry captain told me once, setting out across the Channel in a force ten gale.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 9:33 am and is filed under Political, Nicolas Sarkozy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.