President Sarkozy of France has turned to an unlikely ally in his attempt to revive his plummeting popularity at home: the Queen.

The President’s aides are hoping that after months of embarrassing headlines about his love life, jogging gear and expensive tastes, the visit to Britain next week by “Le Président Bling Bling” will allow Mr Sarkozy to improve his image at home by absorbing some of the “elegance and discretion” of British royalty.

The hope that a dose of royal decorum will rebrand the tarnished President may be a sign of mounting desperation on the part of Elysée officials but it also reflects a deep-rooted and seldom-acknowledged admiration for the British Royal Family in republican France.

Royal watching is just as avid, but far less critical, across the Channel as it is here. And despite having dispatched its own royal family by means of the guillotine, France has retained an abiding fascination with ours.

When the Queen visited France in 1957 — following in the footsteps of her great-great-grandmother, Victoria, in 1855 — she was greeted by adoring crowds and breathless newspaper reports.

The Herald Tribune reported: “Queen Elizabeth II, radiant amid tumultuous cries of ‘Vive la Reine!’ received the joyous homage of France when hundreds of thousands of Parisians turned out to cheer her in weather no less radiant than the British Sovereign’s charm . . . ”

Addressing a state dinner, the Queen told her French hosts: “You were the cradle of our kings” — a charmingly diplomatic way to describe the Norman Conquest.

On every state visit to France since (there have been four) the Queen has enjoyed a similarly enthusiastic reception. “Queen Elizabeth bowls over the Republic, declared the tabloid Le Parisien of her visit in 2004, extolling her “simplicity, her use of French and her references to music, sport and fashion”.

Le Figaro was only slightly waspish: “What a pleasure to see those dresses in green, mauve and orange which one normally never sees outside Britain.”

In France the Royal Family is widely seen as quaint, intriguing, dignified and irrelevant. “The Queen doesn’t serve any purpose but she does it well,” Le Monde declared loftily.

While the Queen was being criticised in Britain for her reaction to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, she was being praised in France for presenting a British stiff upper lip. The film The Queen was a smash hit in France in 2006. Even L’Humanité, the communist newspaper, found it “captivating”.

While the rest of the Royal Family is sometimes regarded in France as a soap opera, the Queen is widely praised for her decorum, reticence and old-fashioned style: all the qualities, in fact, that Mr Sarkozy is criticised for lacking.

In terms of formality and protocol, the French presidency is quite as rigid as the Royal Family, and thoroughly monarchical in style. But where President Chirac favoured uniforms and braid, Mr Sarkozy has developed his own more modern image, with chunky designer watches, aviator sunglasses and, most strikingly, a glamorous new wife, the Italian model and singer Carla Bruni.

During his two-day visit Mr Sarkozy is expected to hold a meeting with Gordon Brown at Arsenal Football Club’s Emirates stadium (the club has five French players and a French coach, Arsène Wenger), and will address MPs and dignitaries in French at Westminster Hall, following a precedent set by General de Gaulle in 1961.

The Sarkozys will be greeted on Horse Guards Parade by the Queen, and then dine at a state banquet.

While recent state visits to France have usually passed off faultlessly, visits by French presidents to Britain have sometimes run into diplomatic hot water.

René Coty, the last president of the Fourth Republic, who welcomed the young Queen Elizabeth to France in 1957, paid a return visit to Britain a year later. Rising to address a state banquet, President Coty found himself positioned between two paintings of battle scenes, one of Waterloo and the other of Trafalgar.

In 1984, when President Mitterrand visited Britain to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale, one of his bodyguards allegedly planted explosives in the grounds of the French Ambassador’s residence to test British security.

President Chirac’s first state visit to Britain in 1996 reflected the French fascination with British pomp, although some of the finer points of royal sartorial taste baffled French commentators. One headline in Le Parisien asked: “Why does the Queen wear such amazing hats?” and then explained: “The Queen must above all be visible to all . . . that is why Elizabeth invariably wears such vivid colours and extraordinary headgear.”

When the Queen presented Mr Chirac with the Order of the Bath, the French media suspected that it must have been some sort of obscure insult, or a comment on French presidential hygiene.

A similarly tricky diplomatic incident occurred in 2004 when, as part of the 100th anniversary of the Entente celebrations, President Chirac was welcomed to the Waterloo Chamber in Windsor, which commemorates England’s defeat of the French in 1815. “Celebrating the Entente Cordiale in this museum filled with Franco-

English antagonism seems at first sight an unpardonable error of taste,” remarked Le Figaro. “To be entertained in a room where pictures hang of the key individuals involved in the defeat of the Napoleonic army risks arousing the bile of Jacques Chirac.”

In the event, Mr Chirac’s bile, for once, remained unaroused. As a boy of 16, the young Chirac had stood in the crowd to welcome King George VI and the young Princesses as they toured the shipyards of Newcastle upon Tyne, and he always relished his encounters with the Queen.

Next week’s visit by the Sarkozys represents something of a gamble. A little royal pomp will help to show Mr Sarkozy in a more dignified presidential light but it will take only one diplomatic gaffe (such as reading his mobile phone texts in Her Majesty’s presence, as he did recently during an audience with the Pope) to unleash a fresh flood of negative headlines.

Mr Sarkozy’s handlers have reportedly been coaching him on the do’s and don’ts of British royal etiquette and diplomatic protocol.

Intriguingly, his visit coincides with a television documentary detailing the ways of royal diplomacy in an earlier age. Richard the Lionheart of England and Philip II of France, it appears, slept in the same bed in 1187, as a symbol of the friendship between their two countries.

Mr Sarkozy is said to be most anxious to make a good impression on the Queen but this particular tradition is unlikely to be revived.

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