In this weeks New Yorker there is an excellent article about Sarkozy by my favourite commenter on French affairs; Adam Gopnik.

It is a surprise to the world, but especially to the French that the president is parading his affair with Carla Bruni so publicly.
It seems that :
“Sarkozy wants people to think about his sex life, in the way that Bill Clinton didn’t want people thinking about his.”

This hasn’t always been the French habit.
There they long for the days when:
“President Mitterrand would go on long walks alone to old bookstores, and then make love to his mistress on the way home to his wife, patting his love children on the head while making sonorous pronouncements about life and destiny”

The more unkind are saying that this is less prompted by Sarkozy’s efforts to rid France of its discreet sexual hypocrisy than Sarkozy involving himself in a bit of ostentatious sexual swagger.

Gopnik says:

“People in Paris who know the President well, though, think that he is a man at the mercy of his impulses and appetites, who is landing willy-nilly where they lead him—and that what is particularly pathetic is his delusion that Bruni is a notch on his belt, when he is so obviously a notch on hers.”

Gopnik finishes the piece with a telling phrase which proves that his (Gopnik’s) years spent in Paris were not without their effect:
(The Bruni/Sarkozy affair shows us a)..”deep and permanent truth, which the French once knew better than anyone: there are worse things in this world than a little organized hypocrisy.”