L'entente execrable

A couple of quick thoughts about the British media's view of Carla Bruni Sarkozy, wife of the French President Nicholas Sarkozy, during their state visit to the UK this week. The President's wife has been the subject of some deeply obsequious coverage right across the board, wherein such weighty matters as her choice of shoes and general deportment have been discussed with breathless excitement and in minute detail.

One question we might ask ourselves is whether the husband of a female French president, no matter how immaculately turned out, would have received anything like this kind of attention. One suspects not. That the President's wife is widely and freely assessed for her value as an ornament, gives us a pretty chilling measure of the strength of misogyny that remains in Britain today (or at least amongst these several journalists).

Another question is this: if Sarkozy were not such a great Anglophile, who - as I wrote here - is widely welcomed in Britain and the US as the man to improve the backward French and make them more like us, would his wife still be fawned over in quite the same manner? If Sarkozy were a traditional French nationalist, publicly challenging US-UK foreign policy and the wisdom of post-Thatcherite economics, is it not likely that his wife would either have been ignored, or portrayed as snooty, prim, aloof etc. etc.?

"Britain", we are told "has fallen in love with Carla". Actually, I suspect that if you polled Britain to test this assertion, you'd find that most people don't know Carla Bruni Sarkozy is. In these articles, we can take "Britain" to mean 'journalists covering this story'. And I suspect that the real love is a broader political one, for her husband, who has finally done what every jingoistic member of our political class for the last thousand years has dreamt a Frenchman would do, and admitted they were wrong about everything, and we were right. So at a third level, the love here is self-love.

I can't imagine that the simpering court scribes we might have expected to find hovering around some medieval monarchy would have portrayed the consort of a friendly head-of-state in a substantively different way (her hair! her shoes! her exquisite poise!). And I suspect this collective display of journalistic forelock tugging is as much an expression of political/cultural preference for a neo-liberal ally as it is one of latent, thoughtless sexism.