The French are not Mature enough for a Modern-day First Lady

And certainly not one as intelligent and independant as Carla Bruni, President Sarkozy’s wife and heiress to the fortune created by the Italian tyre manufacturing company CEAT. Before she married Sarkozy in February 2008 she was a model and musician, and her good looks seduced Clapton and Jagger, to name but a few.

Since then she has become an up-and-coming worldwide ambassadrice in the fight against AIDS, tuberculosis, leprosy, and illiteracy, and has attended the UN General Assembly on these issues.

In other words, she is a smart and consciencious Anglo-Saxon style First Lady who just happens to be beautiful and elegant too.

And that’s her problem. She is everything the French do not want, and French attitudes towards her are quite simply appalling.

Here’s the story. She accompanied Nicolas Sarkozy to Mexico recently in order to discuss, apart from political and other issues, the case of  Florence Cassez, a French citizen who just got a 60-year prison sentence in Mexico for various offences linked to alleged kidnapping and criminal activities. Cassez’s trial remains highly controversial, with strong suspicions of a possible police set-up and a botched and biased investigation procedure. Bruni was there because Cassez’s family had asked her to intervene personally to help them get their daughter extradited back to France.

The result was that Calderon agreed with Sarkozy to set up a bilateral legal study group to see if she could be extradited back to France under the terms of Extradition Treaties signed by both countries.

And this is how the French reacted to the whole thing. The following quotes are my translations of reactions I found in two of the leading French dailys, Liberation and le Figaro. (In French).

“Apart from Madam Credit Card Sarkozy..”  “Oh isn’t it nice to see her looking so happy, whereas us French are crying in pain”  “A saviour of French criminals who doesn’t care about those in France who have nothing to eat”  “All that costs a lot of taxpayers’ money”  “Ex top model but still, unfortunately, a “singer””  “A 25000€ coffee- machine so that little Carla can have coffee how she wants it”  “Little Carla’s going to come back all suntanned with a freed prisoner to show her Patriotic fervour. Isn’t life beautiful for you Carla, the self-styled figurehead of France, ”......

.....And on and on it goes! What could possibly drive a country to be so vitriolic in its shabby criticism of a woman who is trying to help a French citizen in a Mexican jail? Why are people so violently insulting towards her? (As well as Sarkozy and the prisoner herself).

Her last album (yeah, last album. A president’s wife who makes albums is pretty cool where I come from...) was officially boycotted by sections of the French Socialist Movement, her actions to help others have led her to being accused of being a wannabe Jackie K, her elegance has been vilified as being Hollywood vulgarity and she is regularly subjected to terms that border on the “whore” theme”.

Maybe you’re thinking that she must not be a nice person and that she rubs people up the wrong way? Ok, let’s buy that for the moment, but consider this. The last First Lady had it just as bad. Cecilia Sarkozy, his last wife, was very active in charity work and was instrumental in saving eight Bulgarian nurses from trumped-up charges of deliberately infecting Libyan children with AIDS. They were waiting to be executed. Her personal action saved them more than that of anyone else or any other country. The reaction here?

She was taken to pieces as being a maverick, for undercutting (doomed to failure in many people's view) European efforts to free them, she was accused of riding roughshod over constututional rules and abusing conventional presidential prerogatives, and, cherry on the cake, the Socialist Party (seriously, they actually did this) officially demanded a Parliamentary Enquiry to see if she had broken the Protocolic rules of the Constitition in order to free the nurses. It had no chance of being voted of course, but an excellent cartoon in the Washington Post showed eight crying hostages boarding an Air France plane bound for Tripoli with a French Civil Servant reading the words “...Sent back to Ghaddafi for reasons of procedural error”.

And she had saved eight innocent lives!.........unbelievable.

She was considered to be less beautiful than Bruni, so she was constantly abused for her manner of dressing and for being France’s ugliest ever President’s wife.....

So, that’s what you can expect, girls, if ever you marry a French Prez. Insults, machism, female jealousy, obstruction, even hate. The plain fact is that French politics and society are far from being mature and modern enough to accept that a woman can play a role in helping others by using her position to influence events and people. Women are not taken seriously in this country, which is 21st out of 25 European countries in terms of the percentage of female Parliamentarians in National Government, and 14th out of 15 for the European Parliament itself.

Women here are expected to do good things, but not too many, not too big, and certainly  not too publicly. That’s why Chirac’s wife was spared the excesses that have been vomited onto her successors. Why? Oh, she was lucky enough to be older, and was thus ‘only’ ridiculed laughingly for her dowdy clothes, awful handbags and whining voice. Her work to help the world? Best known is her effort to collect one to five cent coins from primary schoolchildren in order to help the poor. Perfect. No rocking the boat there, just a nice little bit of genteel local charity work. In the best of discreet French traditions………

Oh, sorry, I almost forgot to tell you about the slogan that fifteen-year-old French schoolchildren were chanting in the street when they went on strike last year to protest Sarkozy’s Education Reform Law (yes, French schoolchildren have the de-facto right to go on strike, and they do so regularly). It was;

"Carla, Carla, on est comme toi, nous aussi on se fait baiser par le chef d'état".
 
The translation? Sure;

"Carla Carla, we are just like you. We also get fucked by the President".

(…And to think that I am writing these words just a couple of days after International Women’s day…..)