Op-Ed: Girls, Wanna be a French First Lady? Well listen up. Forget it.

Carla Bruni is French President Nicola 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 ambassadress 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 conscientious Anglo-Saxon style First Lady who just happens to be extremely elegant too. And that’s her problem. She is everything the French do not want, and French attitudes towards her are quite simply weird. Here’s the background. 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 for various offences linked to alleged kidnapping and criminal activities. Cassez’s trial was highly controversial, with strong suspicions concerning a possible police set-up and a botched and biased trial. Bruni was there because Cassez’s family had asked her to intervene personally to help get their daughter extradited back to France. The result was that the Mexican President Felipe 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 dailies, Liberation and le Figaro. “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, ”...... 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? 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 party, her actions to help others have led her to be 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”. You may be thinking that she’s not a nice person maybe or that maybe 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) European efforts to free them, she was accused of riding roughshod over constitutional rules, 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 Protocol rules of the Constitution in order to free the nurses. It had no chance of being voted of course, but a cartoonist 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 Qaddafi 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.....Nope, she didn’t cut it either. 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 (Cecilia’s predecessor) was spared the excesses of the others. Why? Oh, she was lucky enough to be ‘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……… 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 Governments, and 14th out of fifteen for the European Parliament itself. Oh, sorry, I almost forgot to tell you about the slogan that French schoolchildren were chanting 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 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 screwed by the President".

Wonderful, Dahlink. Adooorable!