WHEN he was president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing refused to let anybody sit opposite him at dinner, reviving a tradition dating from the court of Louis XIV. François Mitterrand thought nothing of dispatching his chef to Brittany for the day to buy fresh oysters for dinner.
Ever since General Charles de Gaulle, French rulers have been famed for their enjoyment of absolute power and its trappings: Jacques Chirac’s pilot knows better than to land before le patron has had a good sleep, even if it means flying in circles.
Like so many other French traditions, however, the extraordinary privileges of power are under assault as people tire of the ruling elite and younger politicians more attuned to the public pulse prepare to storm the Elysée.
“Chirac will be the last of our monarch presidents, the last great dinosaur,” said Bernard Bled, a former adviser who laments the passing of an epoch. “Whoever follows him is bound to pander to the ugly public mood, reducing the majesty of power.”
Nicolas Sarkozy, the 51-year-old interior minister and most likely candidate of the centre-right in presidential elections next year, has vowed, if elected, to grant grace and favour apartments to only a handful of officials such as the president and prime minister. Until now, they have been dispersed like confetti to courtiers in a tradition dating back to the court at Versailles.
Similarly, Ségolène Royal, 53, the most likely Socialist rival to Sarkozy and the first French woman to have a real chance of becoming president, has displayed her populist credentials by announcing that she will challenge the perks of MPs. To howls of outrage from the political caste, she called last week for “citizens’ juries” to assess the performance of elected officials.
Some heard in her proposal the creaking of the tumbrel, the cart used in the revolution to convey victims to the guillotine; and what has been described as a pre-revolutionary ambience was made all the more tangible by the burning of buses by angry youths at the gates of Paris one year after the country’s worst street violence in four decades.
Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister, also seemed for once to have sensed the popular mood: he tried to match the Royal initiative by proposing on Thursday that television cameras be allowed into the hallowed conseils des ministres, bringing these weekly sessions between president and cabinet into people’s sitting rooms.
“The Bastille must fall,” said this silver-haired dauphin and former career diplomat who has yet to be elected to public office. “We must shake up our habits.”
It is about time. The French head of state, although not a monarch, certainly behaves like one. He often seems more remote from his people than the Queen, a God-like figure who seldom comes down from his cloud and has wielded power with all the lavish pomp and excess of Louis XIV, the “sun king”.
“There is no accountability,” said Nicolas Charbonneau, author of The King Is Dead? Long Live the King, a study of French presidential power. “Unlike Britain, there is no counter-weight to challenge the excesses of our elite. Even the press is part of the same ruling family.”
The president is under no obligation to detail how he spends his £56m budget — £20m more than the Queen’s — and René Dosière, a Socialist MP, is one of the few to have challenged that privilege by asking awkward questions in parliament.
“People are right to be suspicious,” said Dosière, who discovered after arduous research last year that only a fraction of the time Chirac spends aboard his presidential jet can be accounted for by official trips, raising suspicions that he takes the aircraft on holiday or lends it to friends.
Not wanting to ruin a night’s sleep, the 73-year-old president often instructs pilots not to land before 7am, regardless of the delays this can entail. An hour of flying can cost up to £4,000.
At the start of his presidency, Chirac insisted that he did not want to be a “republican monarch” and shortened the presidential term from seven years to five. He decreed an end to the use by ministers of government planes — this has been ignored — and to the extravagant “presidential hunts” enjoyed by Georges Pompidou and Giscard, who would serve sumptuous dinners at one presidential chateau or another on the eve of big shooting parties.
Chirac has shown little interest in reforming other aspects of palace life, however, and the budget has grown considerably under his rule. He keeps a republican guard of “musketeers” for protection, is surrounded by courtiers who have become experts on his twin passions of sumo wrestling and primitive art; and can have his pick of any number of courtesans, according to Bernadette, his wife, who has complained about the extent to which other women find him attractive.
He may have kept a fondness for beer and charcuterie but does not neglect his cellar. The one he created as mayor of Paris in the 1980s was sold at auction last week for £700,000 by Bertrand Delanoë, the Socialist inheritor of the town hall who, in a reflection of the new public mood, felt queasy about the political consequences of uncorking bottles worth more than a month’s salary.
“It is a shame,” said Bled, who was in charge of the town hall’s protocol when Chirac was mayor and who bought the wine. “In Paris, visiting dignitaries expect to be royally entertained. Chirac understood that.”
Visiting royals have been flabbergasted by the pomp laid on for them by French presidents. When she came to France in 1991, Beatrix, the “bicycling queen” of Holland, was flown by helicopter into Paris and escorted to an exhibition in a motorcade of 30 vehicles.
She was overheard saying afterwards: “If I did that at home they would cut off my head.”
Mitterrand seemed bent on imitating the sun king and even held a summit at the palace of Versailles in which he made the servants dress in period costume. He would occasionally fly to the palace in a helicopter and ask the servants to turn on the fountains for his own pleasure.
There was no cutting corners in culinary matters. Returning to Paris once after talks with King Hassan II he demanded a cup of the same mint tea that he had enjoyed in Morocco. His servants could not reproduce the exact flavour and the unsatisfied Mitterrand kept sending the tea back to the kitchen. Eventually, he ordered a plane to bring the Moroccan tea maker to Paris to teach his staff how to proceed.
De Gaulle was just as demanding. When he requested crayfish tails out of season, his chef ordered some in the diplomatic pouch from Turkey rather than disappoint the president.
It is hard to imagine leaders such as Royal or Sarkozy behaving so capriciously. Sarkozy, a fitness fanatic, has presented himself as a symbol of “rupture” with the past — understood to include a break with royal traditions. He even prefers cola — quelle horreur — to wine.
As for his rival, she might bear an appropriate name for the presidency but can a woman who still looks good in a bikini really follow in Mitterrand’s crazed imperial footprints? In which case, like smoke-filled cafes, the days of the presidential monarchy may be numbered and France may become a little less French.
