By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 19, 2007
PARIS, Oct. 18 -- Cécilia Sarkozy, who didn't bother voting for her husband, Nicolas, when he ran for president of France in May, finally voted this week with her feet.
A terse 15-word statement from the Elysee Palace on Thursday said that the couple -- long rumored to be on the verge of a breakup -- had divorced "by mutual consent."
The announcement rocked the country, first because no French president has ever gotten divorced while in office, and second because it was not immediately clear how the most powerful man in France could have secured a divorce so quickly and without anyone finding out about it. Unless of course it had something to do with him being the most powerful man in France.
French newspaper Web sites reported on Thursday that a judge in the Paris suburb of Nanterre had approved the Sarkozys' divorce on Monday, ending their love affair of more than 20 years, 11 of them as husband and wife.
Confirmation of the split followed months of rumors that a separation was imminent and weeks of official evasion by presidential spokesmen, who refused to confirm any details of matrimonial disharmony. Many French newspapers have been accused of hushing up the matter until the Elysee Palace announced it.
France's Liberation newspaper ran a full front-page picture of Cécilia on Thursday with the English headline: "Desperate housewife."
"It's our biggest soap, our biggest psychoanalytic gossip piece," said French political analyst Nicole Bacharan. "This breakup -- it's unthinkable."
"There is a fascination with this couple and this man, who is so strong and has so much authority and power and won't accept anything from anyone except from this one woman," Bacharan said. "And she turns down the biggest honor and says no, I'd rather be free, and that's emblematic of the changing status of women" and changes in French family values.
An attorney representing the couple, Michéle Cahen, told Europe 1 radio that they had seen a judge to hammer out financial terms and finalize their divorce. "There was no problem. They resolved everything amicably," he said.
The couple apparently took advantage of a French law that allows quick divorces by mutual consent, and which consequently does not require public legal proceedings, political analysts said.
The presidential statement said neither would comment further on the matter.
The official breakup followed months of apparent discord. One of the earliest signs of serious trouble was this summer when Sarkozy, during a family vacation in New Hampshire, went stag to a picnic lunch hosted by President Bush at his father's home in Kennebunkport. Cécilia simply didn't show up, reportedly because she was sick. But she was spotted out shopping with her daughters the next day.
Since then, Cécilia, a 49-year-old former model, has dropped almost completely from sight. By some counts, she has attended only three presidential functions since Sarkozy took the oath of office in May.
In July, at the request of her husband, she traveled to Libya and negotiated directly with leader Moammar Gaddafi to free five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor jailed there. That brought howls of protest in France, and a parliamentary hearing into the matter opened Wednesday.
Sarkozy, 52, invited more media coverage of his personal life during the campaign than any previous presidential candidate, and their marriage could not avoid scrutiny. Cécilia, who had been an adviser and had an office adjoining Sarkozy's when he was interior minister, played virtually no role in his campaign, and did not even vote in the second round of the presidential election.
She was ambivalent about the prospect of life in the Elysee Palace, once telling an interviewer: "I don't see myself as first lady. The whole idea bores me. I'm not politically correct."
Sarkozy met Cécilia Ciganer Albeniz in 1984 when, as mayor of the Paris suburb of Neuilly, he officiated at her first marriage to a famous television anchor, Jacques Martin. Sarkozy reportedly fell instantly in love with her.
After the marriage, Sarkozy and his first wife became close friends with Jacques and Cécilia, according to accounts by Sarkozy biographers, and he was named godfather to one of their daughters. Sarkozy and C¿cilia secretly started dating and eventually divorced their first spouses. They were married in 1996 and have a son, Louis. Each also has two children from their previous marriages.
They separated briefly in 2005, and during the split the magazine Paris Match ran a cover photograph of Cécilia strolling in New York hand-in-hand with a man it identified as her lover. By his own accounts, Sarkozy was devastated, and newspaper reports at the time said he was so distraught that he failed to show up for a major cabinet meeting.
"He was clearly very much in love with her and felt a great passion for her, but I'm not sure it was reciprocal," said a leading French political analyst, who did not want to be quoted by name talking about Sarkozy's personal life.
"In 2005, when there was this public row and there was media coverage of her cavorting around with this significant other, at the time he was really hurt, and it was not simply his ego, which is fairly substantial. He is prone to getting splitting headaches, to the point where he actually had to skip a ministers' meeting," the analyst said.
"Whether he's had a resumption of headaches, I don't know, but it wouldn't be out of character. So what becomes a serious question is how will this affect his ability to operate? It could help," he said. "What it does to his image is a different matter. In a perverse way, it may reinforce the image that he is just like the rest of us, and whether that is a positive or a negative is an unanswered question, because the office of the president here has monarchial overtones."
In a book published before the election, Sarkozy conceded that he had exposed his wife to "too much pressure, too many attacks and not enough attention from me. . . . Our relationship didn't hold up."
But in the end, "we cannot, nor do we know how to, distance ourselves from each other," he wrote, declaring it "impossible!"
Researcher Corinne Gavard contributed to this report.
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