World leaders will not forget their first glimpse of her at the G8 summit in
June. Appearing under an explosion of camera flashes in flimsy black lace,
Cécilia, the wife of Nicolas Sarkozy, looked more like an Oscar nominee than
a French première dame. Having dazzled them all, she then departed, citing
an important engagement in Paris, and Sarkozy was left as the only head of
state without a spouse at a dinner.
The extent to which the unpredictable Cécilia makes her own rules became even
clearer last week: not content with trying to liberate the economy, shake up
education and the civil service and get France working again, the Sarkozys
are also revolutionising the role of first lady by turning her into the
designer-clad queen of backstairs diplomacy.
Her mission to Libya to help win freedom for the five Bulgarian nurses and a
Palestinian doctor accused of injecting children with HIV prompted
complaints that the French were sweeping in at the last minute to steal the
glory from the EU after its months of painstaking diplomacy. Horror over the
nuclear reactor France has allegedly promised to build Libya as part of the
deal was brushed off, as Paris accused its critics of envy over its
devastatingly effective new diplomatic tool.
The deployment of Cécilia helped to clinch a deal, certainly: Muammar Gadaffi,
the eccentric – some say romantic – Libyan leader fell quickly under the
charm of the tall, chic Frenchwoman as they chatted in his bedouin tent. “It
was hard for him to say no to her,” a diplomat said.
Sarkozy knows all about that. He openly dotes on Cécilia, a key adviser for
the past several years, and desperately seeks her approval. This has led
some to describe the statuesque former model as the pint-sized president’s
“control tower”.
A telegenic brood of children – two grown daughters from her previous
marriage, two grown sons from his, and 10-year-old Louis, the child they had
together – has enlivened life in the Elysée after years in which the only
child to set foot there was the former president’s grandson.
Cécilia’s style has drawn comparisons to Jackie Kennedy. A habit of bolting,
however, makes her, to some, a potential liability who has already driven
“Sarko” to despair by leaving him twice for another man.
A senator in the president’s conservative party recalled how dejected Sarkozy
looked the first time Cécilia went to live in New York with Richard Attias,
a Moroccan-born advertising executive, in 2005. This was not what Sarkozy
had intended when he began preaching la rupture , or a break with the
political past. “He sat there eating chocolates, one after the other, not
focusing on anything. He was a mess.”
Their very public reconciliation did not end tensions between them and the
body language sometimes seems contrived. So will it end in a real rupture?
Or can the hugely ambitious Cécilia carve for herself an interesting and
rewarding enough role to compensate for what she regards as the hell of
living in a fishbowl?
French first ladies have generally contented themselves with mute appearances
alongside their men. Cécilia does not find that prospect appealing: she once
said “the whole idea of being first lady bores me” and, until recently, a
question mark hovered over whether she would be anything more than a
president’s part-time spouse, so erratic was her behav-iour in the run-up to
Sarkozy’s elec-toral triumph in May.
Just weeks before the voting she disappeared, prompting speculation that she
had eloped for a third time with the blue-eyed Attias. Another rumour had it
that she was romantically involved with Marc Lévy, a dashing French author
living in London, where one of Cécilia’s daughters works in a bank.
If a British politician mislaid his wife during the most important campaign of
his career it would be headline news but the French press ignored it:
Sarkozy, a close friend of the country’s media barons, has made clear he is
tired of having his love life picked over and got an editor sacked last year
for printing a picture of Cécilia flat-hunting with her lover in New York.
As voting drew near, Cécilia reappeared from what turned out to have been a
break in Florida. In what seemed like an extraordinary show of indifference,
though, she failed to vote in the final round of the election.
Politicians’ wives usually stick like limpets to their victorious husbands but
that night Sarkozy was alone in his glory as he addressed the nation. Nor
did Cécilia bother to turn up for a victory dinner that she’d organised.
When she finally appeared just before midnight at a concert on the Place de
la Concorde she was clearly sulking.
This turbulent, on-again, off-again love story has mesmerised the nation as
much as the antics of the wunder-kind president who, aside from his
ambitious programme of domestic reforms, has weighed in on nearly every
foreign policy question within earshot. A whirling dervish of initiatives,
the conquest of Cécilia was no different.
Often described, like most presidents before him, as a chaud lapin– it means
“hot bunny” and is used to denote men who like sex – Sarkozy was smitten
with Cécilia, a public relations expert and parliamentary assistant, at
first sight in 1984 when, as the 29-year-old mayor of the affluent Paris
suburb of Neuilly, it fell to him to marry her to Jacques Martin, a
tele-vision presenter 21 years her senior who has been described as France’s
Bruce Forsyth.
“What was I doing, marrying her to another man?” Sarkozy asked later. “I fell
in love with her almost immediately. I thought, ‘I must have that woman.
She’s mine’.” Things were complicated by the fact that Sarkozy was already
married. Cécilia, who had previously been engaged to a photographer but
bolted six weeks before the wedding, was about to give birth to her first
daughter.
The Sarkozys and Martins became friends and the future president’s infatuation
with Cécilia was apparently matched by hers for him. It ended in tears,
though, when, on a group skiing holiday, Sarkozy’s wife followed her
husband’s footsteps in the snow one morning right up to Cécilia’s bedroom
window. Cécilia left Martin, who agreed to a divorce after walking into the
Neuilly town hall, according to one account, and punching the mayor on the
nose.
Sarkozy’s first wife, a Corsican pharmacist’s daughter, was less
accommodating, however, and fought tooth and nail against a divorce. During
those years, Cécilia has confided: “Life was hell. Everybody in Neuilly was
pointing the finger at us. I was looked down on.”
That is no exaggeration. People took to calling her “the mayor’s whore”.
Sarkozy’s divorce came through in 1996 and he married Cécilia. By that time he
was in the political wilderness, having made the mistake of backing Edouard
Balladur instead of Jacques Chirac, his mentor, who won the presidential
election of 1995.
Through sheer drive and determination, Sarkozy was gradually able to claw his
way back into the light. Cécilia became an indispensable part of his
entourage, a paid adviser in charge of everything from the ties he wore to
the appointments he kept. Sarkozy began his presidential campaign in 2003,
when he was interior minister, and so solid did his partnership seem with
Cécilia, a model political wife, that whispers of a marital bust-up two
years later scarcely seemed credible. Sarkozy accused Chirac of spreading
rumours but it was true: Cécilia was living in New York with Attias.
For a while she had been dropping hints that she was not happy and there were
suggestions that her husband had been unfaithful.
On one occasion she said she “did not see herself” as France’s first lady. She
wanted the right “to wear jeans and sandals” or “combat trousers and cowboy
boots”, adding: “I am not who you think I am.” Asked by one televi-sion
interviewer where she expected to be in three years, she said: “Jogging in
Central Park in New York.”
Sarkozy put the same energy into winning her back as he put into everything else.
Every time he appeared in public he seemed to have his mobile phone stuck to
his ear. He was talking to Cécilia, said aides.
She came back in January last year, rushing down the steps of the plane into
his arms. The storm was not over, however. In her absence, Sarkozy had taken
a lover and after a few months Cécilia was gone again, only to reappear in
time for the election.
So what now for this international woman of mystery? Sarkozy is eager to free
Ingrid Betancourt, the Colom-bian presidential candidate kidnapped five
years ago by left-wing guerrillas. And the government has also has set its
sights on liberating Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel peace prizewinning
pro-democracy leader who has been under house arrest in Burma for 12 of the
past 18 years.
Cécilia may have to invest in a tropical wardrobe.
