Can this 'little general' really change the face of France?

Published on Wednesday 26 March 2008 20:17

Nicolas Sarkozy talks about modernisation. His predecessors did, too, but only one of them really achieved it, writes ALLAN MASSIE

'ALL my life I have made for myself a certain idea of France" – the opening line of General de Gaulle's war memoirs is justly famous. His idea of France was very different from that of others, but, in making it, he wasn't unusual.

We all have our idea of France. Every Frenchman has, and often it's not the same as his neighbour's. De Gaulle's remark about the difficulty of governing a country with 246 varieties of cheese is very much to the point. The French are strongly, even ferociously, individualistic. That's why the Jacobin revolutionaries imposed such a rigidly centralised state on them.

Nicolas Sarkozy is only the sixth president of the Fifth Republic, which is now half a century old. (Of all the regimes since the revolution of 1789, only the Third Republic of 1871-1940 has lasted longer.) Quite what Sarkozy's idea of France may be isn't yet clear. He talks of modernisation. Of course he does. So did each of his predecessors.

Some of them, notably de Gaulle himself, achieved a degree of it. Nevertheless, despite a superficial modernity, much remains happily unchanged, resistant to innovation. This is the case not only in la France profonde. The education system, despite modifications, still bears the stamp imprinted on it by Napoleon I 200 years ago. And lunch is still eaten in restaurants or the home, not at your desk. It's uphill work changing a conservative country, steeped in traditional ways of doing things.

The longest-reigning president of the Fifth Republic – and one uses the word "reigning" deliberately – was Franois Mitterrand, nominally a Socialist, the only man of the Left to have been elected president by popular vote. His presidency began with a rush of Socialist legislation. It was soon abandoned. He drew back. No surprise there, at least to men who had been his Cabinet colleagues during the Fourth Republic, when Mitterrand was a man of the Right.

As a student before the war, he had, indeed, been on the extreme Right. Arguably, he turned to Socialism because, at odds with de Gaulle, the Left offered the only path to power.

Yet if de Gaulle incarnated the idea of a heroic France – "he thinks he's Joan of Arc" was one sour wartime comment – Mitterrand represented in his own person the troubled history of mid-20th-century France in all its ambiguities. Associated in the 1930s with the extreme right-wing group called the Cagoule, he was subsequently a prisoner of war, then a junior official in the collaborationist Vichy administration – and to the end he retained a nostalgia for Vichy – then in the Resistance, then a member of almost all the shifting governments of the Fourth Republic.

He condemned the Gaullist constitution as "a permanent coup d'tat", before, as president, proving as monarchical as the general himself. Uninterested in policy, a Machiavellian schemer and manipulator, he nevertheless had one consistent and worthy aim: to repair the rupture in French history, caused by the cruel experience of the 1939-45 war.

Between de Gaulle and Mitterrand came Pompidou and Giscard d'Estaing; after Mitterrand, Chirac. Pompidou, a chain-smoking intellectual from the Auvergne, had been de Gaulle's wartime chief-of- staff, and was a banker with Rothschilds when de Gaulle made him prime minister; he became a Parisian – habitu of the cafs and brasseries of St Germain de Pres, whose roots were still fast in his native soil. Giscard was the lordly enarque, with the assurance of the top civil servant who knew better than the French what was best for France. So the electorate booted him out. As for Chirac, the best that can be said is that he kept France out of the Iraq war. But you would search in vain for any other achievement.

Now, Sarkozy. In one respect, he, too, is a typical Frenchman, being the child of immigrants, from Hungary, in his case. This makes him the incarnation of a certain reality of France, even if of a very different "idea". For, despite that other reality of the conservative, traditional France of the countryside and small towns, France has always been open to immigrants, just as its frontiers have rarely been fixed for long.

Over the centuries, bits have been added on to the country – it's only a century and a half, for instance, since Nice became French – while sometimes other bits have been lopped off: Alsace and Lorraine from 1871-1918. You are French if you speak French, but at the time of the revolution, only a minority of Frenchmen did so. Yet it is the language and the history of the state and its institutions that make France what it is. The French have never been an ethnic nation; there is no French equivalent of the German "Volk". They like to speak of "our ancestors, the Gauls", but they do so in a Latin, not Celtic, tongue. Many of these most characteristic institutions, and the idea of "la Gloire", date from Napoleon, whose first language was Corsican, second Italian, and only third French. Sarko is said to see himself as a Napoleonic figure and is eager to remodel the state as the emperor did. Well, he's the same height as the Corsican, more or less, and his taste for bling is not unlike Napoleon's, but Napoleon was a post-revolutionary figure, restoring order and stability to the state, while Sarko has to upset the old order if he is to make good his boasts.

Meanwhile, the French look at him with a sceptical eye, and suspect his modernisation will prove superficial. Victor Hugo dismissed Napoleon III, the great emperor's nephew, as "Napoleon le petit". Will Sarko turn out to be "Napoleon le plus petit" , or can he be, as he has talked of being, France's Monsieur Thatcher? The former seems more likely.