The Life of Others 2008?
A friend of mine emailed me recently to criticise, gently, this blog for devoting so much space on Nicolas Sarkozy, who, my friend assured me, is simply not worth it. It’s a question I have asked before on this blog (although recent posts have been about emigration, working with the French tax system, le devoir de mémoire, Rachida Dati – as well as the French President). The answer is simple: if you are writing a blog about French politics (the sub-heading of this blog) you have to write about Nicolas Sarkozy. There is nobody else. For the past ten months he has monopolized not only the centre stage, but every square inch of the theatre, including the wings and front-of-house. He is a one-man show. Or rather he has been, because he promises things are going to change (see previous blog). But until now, when one expected a minister to announce a new bill or policy, Sarkozy hogged the spotlight and the microphone (in that he reminds me of the Socialist former mayor of Montpellier, Georges Frêche, who at public meetings would give a discours fleuve for an hour, then, as the opposition rose to its feet to reply, would simply disconnect the sound system). The French President even announces who will be the head of the (private) French TV channel TF1. Apart from all that he is an extraordinary man with a quite exceptional character: I have written before that Shakespeare would have been proud to have created him – and he would not have been flattering, although, being Shakespeare, he would have helped us understand the human threads that link us.
Sarkozy’s latest sortie has been to announce the appointment of Nicolas Princen, a 24-year old, as the watch-dog of all and every web-blog which mentions – Nicolas Sarkozy. The appointment has caused a storm on the net, evoking recent mémoires of Francois Mitterrand’s telephone tapping of journalists or, going back further (to Sarkozy’s période de preference, the Occupation), worse. It is quite true that Sarkozy has received a hammering on the net, not by malicious rumour but by the posting of factual videos which show a side of his character he clearly would rather remained hidden. But what will young Princen do about that? How can anyone “watch the web”? How can anyone even attempt it seriously without a massive back-up of material and personnel? And if the President commits large sums of public money to an enterprise like that, he will suffer (justifiable) accusations of irredeemable paranoia. As the inestimable Versac says, Princen simply should not have accepted the job. What will he do to someone who records and then posts a video of the President saying something like “get stuffed you prick!”, or telling his press attaché, after an awkward interview with a foreign journalist, that he’s useless? Will the blogger be invited to the headmaster’s study for a pep-talk about “responsibility” and the need to “pull together”?
No, the key is at the beginning of this post: the Elysée has announced that this new job has been created. Unlike Mitterrand or others, this surveillance will not be secret. Now we all know that we are being recorded, read, perhaps archived. We all now know that our posts may be held against us. Fear, it is presumably hoped, will do its work. I repeat, and this not only for the benefit of M. Princen, Nicolas Sarkozy is an exceptional man.