The President’s Women Speak

Look for the woman, the French say, and who better than Nicolas Sarkozy at finding them? ● With the first, Marie, it ended badly, and now she is laying the blame on the second, Cécilia, in a new book ● With the current one, Carla, all is sweetness and light for now, and she reveals how she fell into his clutches, in another new book ● He also had a television presenter, a president’s daughter and a James Bond girl

As befits a good Catholic, Marie-Dominique Sarkozy, the French president’s first wife, is no longer angry—at least not with her husband. She has forgiven him. “Politics,” she says, “was his real mistress.” She is in no hurry to forgive the woman who stole him from her, Cécilia. That woman, the ex-wife claims in a new book, “Sarkozy and the Women,” ruined his life and his personality.

Sarkozy’s new wife, Carla Bruni—the third in all—also has something to say about Cécilia, and she says it in a book too. In “Carla and Nicolas, the True Story,” written by journalists Valérie Benaïm and Yves Azéroual, Bruni tells how she fell in love with her husband at first sight, “and not only because of his looks.” Unlike Marie, she does not mention Cécilia by name. She prefers to call her “my husband’s previous wife.” Cécilia, incidentally, had already contributed her share to the pot in the book “Cécilia, Portrait,” by journalist Anna Bitton, published after her divorce from the president.

Bookshop shelves in Paris are packed with books summing up President Sarkozy’s first year in office. He is expected to arrive in Israel in about two weeks, together with Bruni. His former and present wives are not the only ones to have made him a literary hero. About a third of the books that have appeared on the shelves were written, in whole or in part, by experts in mental-health problems. And almost every writer-psychologist points to one prominent feature of the president’s life, evident since early childhood: his relationship with women. Sarkozy, they conclude, is enslaved to them.

From his mother to the model

The first woman in the life of the 53-year-old president did not think he was crazy, but she did not regard him—the short, cute and ambitious middle son—as the most successful of her three boys either. Andrée Sarkozy, known as “Dado,” raised her sons alone from the time Nicolas was five, after her husband left home. They lived in Neuilly, a wealthy suburb of Paris, where Nicolas would later become mayor. His mother was a strong, strict woman who expected her sons to work but also to play sports, and was fairly astonished by the raucous lifestyle adopted by Nicolas, the student and budding politician.

At a young age, Sarkozy married a young woman from the “neighborhood,” Marie-Dominique Culioli, the daughter of a wealthy family of Corsican origin and the mother of his two older sons. He met her when they were both active in right-wing student organizations. When he was elected mayor of Neuilly at the age of 28, she was by his side. Marie focused on raising the boys and kept her distance from her husband’s public life. That life also pushed him away from her: Sarkozy allowed himself a few affairs on the side.

Marie-Dominique, who has kept the surname Sarkozy to this day, is shocked by the image of the president as he appears to his fellow citizens. “He was a modest, spiritual young man,” she is quoted as saying in a book by journalists Caroline Derrien and Candice Nedelec. She blames the woman who came after her, Cécilia, for all the troubles that befell her, including Nicolas’s transformation into a man hungry for pampering and luxury. It was Cécilia, Marie claims, who swept him into a world of glamour, emptiness and luxury.

On the morning that changed everything, in August 1984, Sarkozy cut short his traditional holiday in Corsica to conduct, at his town hall in Neuilly, the wedding ceremony of respected resident and friend Jacques Martin, an aging television personality, to Cécilia, a model and socialite. Sarkozy fell in love with the bride at first sight, and from then on did everything he could to get her.

Marie-Dominique discovered the secret one night in the spring of 1988, during a skiing holiday in the French Alps. She woke up alone in bed and knocked on Cécilia’s bedroom door, from behind which suspicious noises could be heard. On her way back to her room, she found Nicolas’s tracks in the snow. Despite this, she refused to divorce him, and Sarkozy shuttled between the two women. Only ten years later would he divorce Marie.

Cécilia was not liked in Neuilly. Nor was she liked by the colleagues in the government ministries he would head. Marie, as noted, says she forgave him and even voted for him in the 2007 presidential election, unlike Cécilia, by then his legal wife, who did not bother to go to the polling station. Jacques Martin never forgave him, not until the day he died—sick, paralyzed and alone. He never fulfilled his promise to punch the elected president in the face.

Meanwhile, Nicolas Sarkozy was putting his charms to work for his career. In 1988 he drew close to the Gaullist leader Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, and especially to his younger daughter Claude, who worked in the public-relations department. The two were often seen together. She was fascinated by Sarkozy. Chirac senior was pleased, but suspicious. Sarkozy did, however, manage to charm the mother, Bernadette. He knows how to win the mothers of all his wives, and they, in particular, remain loyal to him forever. Bernadette would remain a friend even after Sarkozy unexpectedly abandoned Chirac ahead of the 1995 presidential election. He left Claude before the betrayal. When she married a short time later, he served as a witness at her wedding. She married, it is said, in tears, her gaze fixed on Sarkozy.

Nicolas and Cécilia married in 1998. His new wife vetoed various flirtations, such as men-only holidays at the Corsican home of his friend, actor Christian Clavier. The first period of their marriage was happy. He was enslaved to “her,” as he called her in his book “Testimony.” Cécilia also acted as his personal adviser and managed his private and professional life. For example, she was responsible for media relations, perhaps in order to keep him away from women journalists.

In May 2005, Cécilia left Sarkozy for public-relations man Richard Attias, a Jew of Moroccan origin. She returned to live with her husband for a year and a half in the run-up to the election. In an interview with journalist Anna Bitton, given after her divorce, she admitted that she had made a deal with him. She told him, “I’ll take you all the way to the Élysée Palace, and then you’ll let me live my life.” Sarkozy apparently hoped she would not be able to resist the temptations of power. He was wrong. She continued visiting Attias in Geneva. The two finally divorced in October 2007.

Between the two periods with Cécilia and after her, Sarkozy tried to regain his self-confidence and prove—as he told friends after his first meeting with Carla Bruni—that he “could get any woman he wanted.” It did not always work. He made a particularly great effort with women journalists. After the first separation, Sarkozy, still not president, chose Anne Fulda, the political correspondent for Le Figaro, who used to ask him the most embarrassing questions. But then Cécilia came back. Angry. In Bitton’s book she crudely and without hesitation calls him a “fucking hedonist.” After the final separation, Sarkozy offered French James Bond girl and actress Eva Green, whom he had never met before, the chance to accompany him on his official visit to Washington. To his surprise, she refused. Next in line was another celebrity, sailor Maud Fontenoy, who fell under the spell of presidential charm.

The president’s fondness for women journalists is especially conspicuous. Last December, shortly after his divorce from Cécilia and just before his affair with Bruni was revealed, a French gossip magazine, following reports in the British press, claimed that Sarkozy was having an affair with the beautiful and highly regarded journalist Laurence Ferrari. She sued the newspaper and won 12,000 euros. In the book “Sarkozy and the Women,” the authors tell of a blonde journalist who fainted in the president’s room and had to be smuggled out of the palace. This week, French newspapers announced that Ferrari had been appointed news anchor at the leading commercial television channel, replacing Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, the French equivalent of Haim Yavin. The president, it was hinted, had worked behind the scenes on her behalf, a claim he was quick to deny.

Sarkozy met Carla Bruni on a blind date arranged by veteran publicist Jacques Séguéla at his home on November 13 last year. Three other couples came to dinner, including philosopher and former education minister Luc Ferry and his wife. Ferry was also on Carla’s list of lovers—“one night between former prime minister Laurent Fabius and Eric Clapton,” he admits in the book “Sarkozy and the Women.”

Sarkozy and Bruni were absorbed in each other all evening. What happened next is described in “Carla and Nicolas, the True Story.” At the end of dinner, Bruni asks: “Do you have a car?” The presidential car, with Sarkozy inside, took her back to her luxurious home in the 16th arrondissement. Later that night Bruni complained to Séguéla: “Your friend is strange. I left him my phone number, and he isn’t calling.” Sarkozy would call the next day, but first he summoned Luc Ferry to his office to ask him: “You know her well—what is she like?” “Don’t be influenced by what people say about her,” Ferry replied. “She behaves freely, like you or me, but she’s a good girl. She’s a woman with values.”

In February 2008, the president married again, and shortly afterward another juicy chapter was added to the soap opera. The website of the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur reported that eight days before the wedding Sarkozy had sent Cécilia a text message: “If you come back to me, I’ll call the whole thing off.” The website had to apologize for the report after Sarkozy sued it, but no one had forgotten the sentence by then.

Sarkozy says of his new wife, whom he affectionately calls “Carlita”: “She’s beautiful, but she also has a brain in her head.” Bruni does not let him have the last word: “He has at least three brains, and each one is well nourished.”

At the president’s bedside

Has the time come to settle scores with the women around the president? That is a difficult task even for Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. In his political life, too, the president surrounded himself with a circle of women. His first government had 15 women. In the current one, their number has fallen to 13, including Justice Minister Rachida Dati, the daughter of North African immigrants. Dati was a friend of Cécilia, who called her “my sister.” She accompanied Sarkozy in the arduous work at campaign headquarters. Malicious tongues suspected she was more than a colleague.

After Cécilia left, Dati flooded the president with text messages. Carla ordered her to stop and not to call the president too early either, “now that he’s married.” On the president’s birthday, she greeted her with a confession: “I hesitated about whether to invite you.” “The True Story” also includes this scene, which has not been denied: Bruni and Dati pass by Sarkozy’s private room in the Élysée Palace, and the president’s wife cheerfully tosses the minister the question, “You’d like to sleep in this bed, wouldn’t you?” Next week, incidentally, they will both accompany the president on his visit to Israel.

Carla has no problem with another of Sarkozy’s choices: Rama Yade, the beautiful 30-year-old Senegalese, deputy minister for human rights at the Foreign Ministry, who dared to reprimand Sarkozy over his invitation to Colonel Gaddafi to Paris. Sarkozy displays a fatherly attitude toward her. She treats him as a teacher and mentor.

Sarkozy is proud of the casting of the women around him. Sometimes he makes sarcastic remarks like a judge on “Star is Born.” For example, when Dati appeared on television too close to Yade. “That’s a mistake on her part,” he said. “She has no chance against her. It would be as if I had my picture taken with Tom Cruise.”

His fondness for women has nearly caused him a diplomatic incident: Chancellor Angela Merkel froze in astonishment when he dared to lay his hands on her at their first meetings. Relations between Germany and France improved after he stopped. “Sarkozy has to touch men and women alike,” explains French psychologist Serge Hefez, “that’s how he feels in control.”

Political commentators, forced against their will to become gossip reporters, talk of the atmosphere of a royal court. French history often brings to mind Napoleon’s Josephine and Madame de Pompadour. But women have never had a significant influence on French politics. Does Nicolas Sarkozy, a president under the influence of women, herald a new era?