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On Thursday, the 52-year-old French leader was struck hard on two different domestic fronts: a wave of strikes that swept through France and an official announcement that his 11-year marriage had come to an end.
Shortly after the presidential spokesman, David Martinon, said at a hastily called news conference that he had absolutely no comment about his boss's marriage, the Élysée Palace dropped the bombshell that Sarkozy and his wife, Cécilia, "announce their separation by mutual consent."
The Élysée later clarified that the duo "had divorced."
Other French leaders have led unconventional love lives. President Félix Faure died in the bed of his mistress in 1899; President François Mitterrand fathered an illegitimate daughter.
But Sarkozy, the first divorcé to be elected president of France, is also the first to divorce while in office.
Immediately after the news was broadcast on radio and television, striking protesters in the port city of Le Havre shouted, "Cécilia, we are like you! We are fed up with Nicolas!"
The Élysée statement, which ended weeks of speculation about the marital woes of France's first couple, said that neither of them would comment on the news.
The announcement coincided with a transport strike in the public sector - the first in Sarkozy's five-month presidency - to protest the conservative government's plan to eliminate special retirement privileges. But the news gripping France was not the strike - the French are used to strikes - but the announcement that the Sarkozys were ending their marriage.
Cécilia Sarkozy has been out of the public eye recently, but last week she posed - at her request - on the balcony of a chic Paris hotel for the cover of Paris-Match, whose latest edition appeared on newsstands Thursday.
She was said by the popular weekly magazine to have been unhappy with unflattering pictures of her that had appeared recently in the media. She chose the same photographer who had taken her husband's official presidential portrait to take the pictures.
The three-page spread showed her staring vacantly into the camera next to the caption, "Cécilia Sarkozy, a Serene Woman," but revealed nothing about the state of the Sarkozy marriage.
Her whereabouts Thursday were not publicized, though she was said to be preparing the engagement party for Jeanne-Marie, her 20-year-old daughter. The couple has a 10-year-old son, Louis, and each has two adult children from previous marriages that ended in divorce.
Asked in a telephone interview about Sarkozy's plans, Carina Alfonso-Martin, her spokeswoman, said: "I don't know them. This is her private life. It's up to her to say."
The president kept to his schedule and traveled to Lisbon on Thursday afternoon for a two-day meeting of the leaders of the European Union. He will be accompanied on a state visit to Morocco next week by Rachida Dati, his 41-year-old minister of justice, who is single.
It was unclear whether Sarkozy timed the announcement of the divorce to coincide with the strike, perhaps in an attempt to mute its news impact.
"The Élysée has chosen this Thursday, a day of strong social mobilization, to make the information official," Annick Lepetit, the Socialist Party's national secretary, said in a statement. "It's the right of the French people to judge if it's only a simple coincidence."
The separation of Ségolène Royal, Sarkozy's Socialist rival for the presidency, and François Hollande, her longtime partner, father of her four children and head of the Socialist Party, was announced on the night of France's legislative elections in June.
Portraying herself as a woman scorned, Royal was quoted in a book leaked to the media that night as saying, "I asked François Hollande to leave our home, to pursue his love interest, which is now laid bare in books and newspapers, on his own."
Since then, the tabloid magazine Closer has published a photo of a French journalist with her arm around the pleasantly rotund Hollande on a Moroccan beach. Hollande has sued the magazine for invasion of privacy.
With the Sarkozy divorce finally out in the open, the finger-pointing began. Patrick Balkany, a close friend of the couple and the mayor of the Paris suburb of Levallois-Perret, called the separation "inescapable" because "Cécilia was in this state of mind."
"She no longer wanted to participate in the life of the president, in public life," Balkany said on RTL radio, adding that the president was "very serene" and "had tuned the page."
He continued: "She left; she came back. When she came back, they perhaps thought that it could go back like before. It did not."
Some of their friends confessed they were heart-broken. "I love Nicolas, I love Cécilia," said André Santini, a secretary of state in Sarkozy's government. "This gives me so much pain."
The rumors of the breakup have circulated for weeks, but the country's most important newspapers largely stayed away from the story. On Thursday, the left-leaning Libération, which had vowed not to publish rumors, suddenly shifted course. It published a special report with a front-page photo of the couple and the headline, in English, "Desperate housewife."
"A newspaper must publish information and not rumors," an editorial in Libération said in explaining the newspaper's shift, adding, "Things have just changed."
The Thursday afternoon edition of Le Monde, regarded as France's most serious newspaper, reported that a petition for divorce agreement was prepared by a lawyer for Cécilia Sarkozy months ago.
"They were heard by a judge and the judge granted their divorce," Michèle Cahen, the couple's lawyer, said on Europe-1 radio after the official announcement was made. "It went very well. There was not the slightest difficulty."
The question is whether the breakup of his marriage will negatively affect the way Sarkozy governs France. Known for his quick temper, suffering episodically from migraines, he has openly professed his dependence on his wife.
"Even today, I have difficulty talking about it," he wrote in his 2006 campaign book, "Testimony," of their months apart when she left him apparently for another man in 2005. "I had never known such an ordeal. Never would I have imagined that I would be so profoundly distressed."
Maia de la Baume and Pauline Ranger contributed reporting
