La photo est exceptionnelle : Carla Bruni, en mannequin, sur le toit du Palais de l'Élysée. Elle est signée - bien sûr - Annie Leibovitz. Et elle va faire le tour du monde.

Voilà le premier intérêt d'un incroyable portrait de Carla Bruni que publie cette semaine la très respectée journaliste américaine de Vanity Fair, Maureen Orth. Le reste du portrait est superbement écrit, assez bien documenté, mais on n'y apprend rien que l'on ne savait déjà - à part peut-être la comparaison entre Carla Bruni et Jackie Kennedy que Mme Sarkozy laisse entrevoir.

Il est cependant suffisamment passionnant pour que l'on s'y attarde en le lisant en anglais. Cela rompt avec les portraits mondains de la presse française ou avec les profils mi-chève mi-chou des journalistes qui aimaient Carla (typiquement les Inrocks) et ne savent plus trop que penser...

(Cet article de nonfiction a été publié pour la première fois le 4 août 2008).

LE PORTRAIT INTEGRAL SUR NONFICTION.FR
TITRE : "PARIS MATCH" (oui c'est le titre de l'article),
MAGAZINE AMERICAIN VANITY FAIR
PAR MAUREEN ORTH

Maureen Orth is a Vanity Fair special correspondent and National Magazine Award winner.

At the Élysée Palace, in Paris, the new First Lady of France, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, is finishing lunch with Sarah Brown, the wife of Great Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown. As I wait outside her office in a large, ornate sitting room filled with elegant Second Empire furniture, I glance out the tall windows to the sun-drenched garden, where a boxwood maze is framed by blooming wisteria. Suddenly the door opposite me bursts open, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, comes sprinting into the room. “Bonjour!” he calls out as he barrels into his wife’s office and shuts the door.

Even though I have heard that Sarkozy wants to be perceived and photographed as a man of action, it is nevertheless startling to see him race through a room just the way so many political cartoons have portrayed him. He got elected in May 2007 on a right-wing, pro-American platform of la rupture, promising to break many of the traditions and laws of a calcified Fifth Republic. Expectations ran high after he appointed a diverse Cabinet, including Socialists, a number of good-looking women, and the daughter of North African immigrants as minister of justice.

Elected when he was 52, the high-octane Sarkozy is much younger than French presidents tend to be, having begun his political career as a town councillor in Neuilly, a wealthy Paris suburb, when he was only 22. However, his apparent meltdown over his tempestuous divorce from his second wife, Cécilia, after only five months in office, and his very public courtship and quickie remarriage, just three and a half months after that, to a glamorous ex-model and singer who had been involved with everyone from Mick Jagger to the son of famed Nazi-hunters to a former Socialist prime minister, were a bit de trop even for the French. More galling still were Sarkozy’s penchant for hanging with billionaires and his obsession with celebrity—sporting aviator Ray-Bans as he flaunted a navel-baring Bruni on a vacation in Muslim Egypt.

In May, his approval rating hit a low of 32 percent, after having been in the 50s and 60s for the six months following his election. Part of Sarkozy’s problem is that in his campaign he promised more than he could deliver. France guarantees workers five weeks of paid leave annually and allows them to turn down job offers while on unemployment if what’s offered is not up to their standards. Once the economy started sinking, Sarkozy’s grand reforms, which included dumping the 35-hour workweek, reducing pension benefits for state employees, and revamping the university system, met with massive demonstrations, which forced him to pull back somewhat on his ambitious agenda. There were also self-inflicted problems. After Sarkozy’s wife, Cécilia, went to Libya to spearhead the release of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who were accused of infecting children with H.I.V., for example, the new president allowed Colonel Muammar Qaddafi literally to pitch his tent on the lawn across the street from the Élysée Palace for five days. Perhaps sensing that that might get him in trouble with Jewish voters, Sarkozy next announced that each French elementary-school student should adopt the soul of a French Jewish child killed in the Holocaust. None of this rash activity went down well, particularly with his older, more conservative constituents. As Jean-Luc Mano, a political adviser of Sarkozy’s, told me, “These people can’t change their wives every week.”

Once their patience was strained, the French people were unforgiving in their condemnation of Sarkozy’s flashy style. He soon became known as “le Président Bling-Bling” in a country where good taste is sacred. “The national conversation changed to the price of watches,” Mano said. More than one person told me approvingly that Bruni has helped bring Sarkozy to his senses, citing the fact that she made him get rid of his big gold Rolex and replace it with a sleek Patek Philippe, and that he no longer creates a ruckus by jogging in the Bois de Boulogne, the public park on the western edge of Paris—not since it became clear that the French were horrified to see pictures of their president sweating. These days, Bruni runs with him on the gravel paths in the Élysée garden. If the French people were never told that the late president François Mitterrand had two families, if they never learned of his love-child daughter and his mistress until shortly before they saw them walking behind his coffin with his wife and legitimate daughter, they could adapt to it. After all, Mitterrand read Latin, and he was discreet. France is an old country, and her presidents are expected to behave in the monarchical tradition. Sarkozy’s critics soon came to view him as having lost his balance and thus having squandered an extraordinary mandate.

The president emerges again about five minutes later, followed by his willowy bride, who in flats is several inches taller than he is, along with Mrs. Brown and two male aides. The women have been discussing maternal mortality, and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, 40, the spirited Italian heiress whose nude pictures from her modeling days are all over the Internet, is easily in command. While her husband’s ratings are in the cellar, she is getting raves for her beauty, class, and elegance. When the couple visited the Queen of England in March, for example, the British gushed over her perfect curtsy and her demure, Jackie Kennedy outfits. “She’s imaginative, clever, educated. She knows how to behave,” says designer Karl Lagerfeld, who often used Bruni as a model. “She speaks many languages. It must be an embarrassment for the wives of other heads of state to see this beautiful creature who can wear anything and speak like that.” On his visit to France in June, George W. Bush was certainly won over, telling Sarkozy in the middle of a press conference, “It was a great pleasure to have been able to meet your wife. She’s a really smart, capable woman, and I can see why you married her. And I can see why she married you, too.”

Bruni beckons me from across the room to meet her husband. “Bonjour, Maureen,” he says with a big smile. “Is she helping you?,” I ask. Bruni puts her arm around the president, pulling him in to kiss his cheek and nuzzle his face with her nose. Beaming, Sarkozy tells me, “I am happy like nev-air.”

Once everyone leaves, Bruni and I go into the stunning office that Cécilia Sarkozy rarely visited. There is no question that Carla Bruni is thrilled to be First Lady. As she removes the jacket of her navy pin-striped pantsuit to reveal a thin little cotton camisole underneath, she lights an ultra-slim cigarette, saying, “Are you sure you don’t mind? I didn’t mean to start up again.” Then she gracefully kneels down on the floor in front of a black lacquered table, geisha-style, poised and ready to answer questions. As she puffs and waves the smoke away, without any aides hovering about, I sit across from her on the floor, aware that this gorgeous woman is in the catbird seat.

(SUITE...)

2 commentaires

victoryerly

05/06/10 18:04

TD comptabilité publique et orientation budgétaire, outils de décision

La garden party à l’elysée, proposition de changement d’orientation :

Proposition de l’étalon nombre de RSA annuel soit 4000 euros ( seule l’élite des Rsaistes touchent 450 euros par mois) afin d' analyser les budgets de l’Etat :

exemple la garden party de l’elysée en 2009 a coûté 732826 euros ( 7500 invités, une journée) soit 183, 20 RSA annuel (183 personnes recevant le minimum estimé vital pour survivre pendant un an).

Critique de cette proposition d’étalon :
les rsaistes ne payent pas d’impôt, il n’est pas possible de prendre pour étalon un étalon qui dépende de l’existence même de l’impôt, ainsi il est proposé d’inviter à la garden party toutes les personnes qui payent le plus d’impôt et qui ne se payent pas les services d’avocats fiscalistes afin d’en faire les véritables héros de cette journée célébrant la naissance de la République. Mais en existent-ils seulement ?

la fee clochette

19/08/08 23:43

restons serieux à nonF! halte à la BRUNIlatrie !