The launch of a new album by Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, orchestrated by the full panoply of the French government publicity machine, has been for some of its citizens the last straw.

Hitherto Carla has softened French hostility towards their President but this latest indication of her perceived casual attitude to public opinion has damaged her husband’s standing still further in the polls. With Nicolas already voted the most unpopular president in his first term in more than half a century, the Sarkozys were recently described as the most politically insensitive couple since the ill-fated Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.

The French queen’s reputed indifference to the bread riots in Paris in the late 18th century was compared to one of Carla’s lyrics in which she sings, ‘Let them curse me, let them damn me. I don’t give a stuff’. The ostentatious trappings of the French head of state and his first lady do not go down well in a nation suffering from morosité, a general sense of gloom. Restaurants remain half-empty, patisseries have had to cut prices to shift luscious fruit tarts that would have whizzed off the shelves a year ago, and French shoppers, like those in Britain, cannot fail to notice a 20 per cent increase in their weekly food bill.

After last month’s traditional holiday, Bastille Day, celebrating the storming of the feared prison in Paris back in 1789, French commentators reflected unfavourably on a year in which most citizens concluded they had been badly let down and deceived by their President. A winter of industrial unrest surely lies ahead. On 14 July a Parisian radio station laconically reported: “We don’t want to worry you, Monsieur Sarkozy, but we are receiving reports of skirmishes in the place de la Bastille.”    

From our August 2008 e-newsletter