I read in yesterdays Irish Times that Nicolas Sarkozy is raising eyebrows in France with his frequent use of tu when talking to people.
For those of you not familiar with the minefield which is the French use of Tu and Vous I will always remember the first advice I was given when I first went to France to work.
This is, always use vous unless asked to do otherwise.
As someone with a limited knowledge of French the easiest option for me seemed to be to just forget about tu and vous everyone indiscriminately.

The moment when I realised that wasn’t going to work was when I addressed the dog as vous (it was one of my jobs to feed him) the French people hearing this thought it hysterical. This gave me the clue that it was not sufficient to ignore tu altogether. In fact I have since discovered that one can offend as greviously by using vous in a tu situation as the reverse.

But it is a minefield.

Last year at a French class, and this was as the end of a year when the five remaining pupils had become extremely friendly with the teacher, the discussion moved on to the problems of tutoient.
Blunt as ever I asked the teacher straight out whether or not we all should be tu-ing her.
She coloured, shuffled her books together and changed the subject.
The reaction was as if I had made an indecent proposal.