Results 1 to 9 of 9

Thread: The President of France is single

  1. #1
    The Usual Member Ice's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2005
    Location
    Northville, Michigan
    Posts
    4,259

    Default The President of France is single

    Ohhh Gossip!

    http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/18/asia/sarkozy.php

    ARIS: For President Nicolas Sarkozy, a day does not get much darker than this.

    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



  2. #2
    Nobody expects the Senior Member Lemur's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2004
    Location
    Wisconsin Death Trip
    Posts
    15,754

    Default Re: The President of France is single

    This was also posted in our News of the Weird. Not sure why, exactly, but it was. Which is not to say it doesn't deserve its own thread -- bachelor heads of state are rare enough to warrant at least a little discussion.

  3. #3
    Clan Clan InsaneApache's Avatar
    Join Date
    Sep 2002
    Location
    Grand Duchy of Yorkshire
    Posts
    8,636

    Default Re: The President of France is single

    Divorce is tough.
    There are times I wish they’d just ban everything- baccy and beer, burgers and bangers, and all the rest- once and for all. Instead, they creep forward one apparently tiny step at a time. It’s like being executed with a bacon slicer.

    “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.”

    To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise.

    "The purpose of a university education for Left / Liberals is to attain all the politically correct attitudes towards minorties, and the financial means to live as far away from them as possible."

  4. #4
    Second-hand chariot salesman Senior Member macsen rufus's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2004
    Location
    Ratae Corieltauvorum
    Posts
    2,481

    Default Re: The President of France is single

    OMG - Constitutional crisis!!!

    No, seriously, how can you be President of France without being able to have extra-marital affairs?
    ANCIENT: TW

    A mod for Medieval:TW (with VI)

    Discussion forum thread

    Download A Game of Thrones Mod v1.4

  5. #5
    TexMec Senior Member Louis VI the Fat's Avatar
    Join Date
    Apr 2004
    Location
    Saint Antoine
    Posts
    9,935

    Default Re : The President of France is single

    I posted it in brief format in the News of the Weird thread because I didn't know where else to put it. Maybe it should've had it's own thread. Then again, I sometimes think that Sarkozy deserves his own stickied thread, just to keep up with our ADHD omniprésident. It's breathtaking.

    Gone are the days of discretely whispered rumours about mistresses and secret extra-marital children. Nowadays, we get full-colour reports about very open affairs, long holidays spend with lovers in Mediterranean yachts, Moroccan palaces and appartments in New York. And it's not just Sarko, everybody's at it.
    Anything unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
    Texan by birth, woodpecker by the grace of God
    I would be the voice of your conscience if you had one - Brenus
    Bt why woulf we uy lsn'y Staraft - Fragony
    Not everything
    blue and underlined is a link


  6. #6
    Come to daddy Member Geoffrey S's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2005
    Location
    Shell Beach
    Posts
    4,028

    Default Re: The President of France is single

    Jealous, Louis?
    "The facts of history cannot be purely objective, since they become facts of history only in virtue of the significance attached to them by the historian." E.H. Carr

  7. #7
    has a Senior Member HoreTore's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2005
    Location
    Norway
    Posts
    12,014

    Default Re: The President of France is single

    This shows the problem with our society very well. Why should we care about this?
    Still maintain that crying on the pitch should warrant a 3 match ban

  8. #8
    Backordered Member CrossLOPER's Avatar
    Join Date
    Sep 2006
    Location
    Brass heart.
    Posts
    2,414

    Default Re: The President of France is single

    Quote Originally Posted by HoreTore
    This shows the problem with our society very well. Why should we care about this?
    Too many pressing problems?
    Requesting suggestions for new sig.

    -><- GOGOGO GOGOGO WINLAND WINLAND ALL HAIL TECHNOVIKING!SCHUMACHER!
    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
    WHY AM I NOT BEING PAID FOR THIS???

  9. #9
    Part-Time Polemic Senior Member ICantSpellDawg's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2002
    Location
    U.S.
    Posts
    7,237

    Default Re: The President of France is single

    I do believe that this was supposed to happen during the strike, or the first thing that needed to be overshadowed.

    BUT it is clear that they are done - that seems legit.
    I'm not so sure that he's really sad about it though.
    "That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."
    -Eric "George Orwell" Blair

    "If the policy of the government, upon vital questions affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court...the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned the government into the hands of that eminent tribunal."
    (Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, 1861).
    ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •  
Single Sign On provided by vBSSO