"IT IS TARTUFFE IN THE AGE OF TWITTER"

April 8, 2010

Rumor of Infidelities Sets Off Modern French Farce

By STEVEN ERLANGER

PARIS — The French, like it or not, have found themselves immersed in another presidential psychodrama, spiced with Internet rumors of infidelity, intelligence and police investigations, complaints about press manipulation and foreign plots and the removal of security protection from a former minister of justice who just happens to have been a favorite of a former wife.

It’s Tartuffe in the age of Twitter.

This French farce began with a rumor on Twitter that may or may not have been cooked up by some journalists indulging in some mischief before regional elections in which President Nicolas Sarkozy and his center-right party did badly.

The postings were picked up in March by a blog on the Web site of the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, but not printed in the paper itself. Then numerous foreign newspapers — especially the British and Italian press, which gleefully recycle almost anything published here — printed coy stories based on the blog.

The rumors, which seemed like an especially exaggerated joke at the time, had Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the president’s wife, engaged in an affair with an old friend of hers, another singer, while Mr. Sarkozy was supposedly involved with a married, karate-champion junior minister. Given the histories of the presidential couple, and Ms. Bruni-Sarkozy’s oft-quoted doubts in her younger days about her capacity for monogamy, the story had legs just long enough to run for a bit, despite denials.

But Mr. Sarkozy, as is his wont, became incandescent. Not only was the blog removed from the Web site of Le Journal du Dimanche, which is owned by a Sarkozy friend, Arnaud Lagardère, but two journalists involved with the Web site were fired. LA HISORIA /DEL PATÁN/ SE REPITE. RECUERDEN CÉCILIA CON SU AMANTE EN LA PORTADA DE PARIS MATCH.

Mr. Sarkozy also apparently smelled a plot, perhaps by the Socialists to undermine him before the elections, perhaps by other forces, including, aides hinted, his political rival, the former prime minister Dominique de Villepin, or the British financial markets worried about the French push for harsher regulation of the City of London.

He ordered an investigation by the French domestic intelligence agency, and then Le Journal du Dimanche filed a criminal complaint, setting off a police inquiry into the “introduction of fraudulent information into a computer system.” The very same issue was at the heart of the Clearstream trial, in which Mr. Sarkozy and others sought the prosecution of Mr. de Villepin for conspiracy to plant false information about fake bank accounts intended to receive arms-sales kickbacks. Mr. de Villepin was accused of planning a smear campaign in 2003-4 intended to undermine Mr. Sarkozy’s presidential ambitions.

The investigation into the rumors of infidelity appeared to point to Rachida Dati, 45, the elegant and intelligent daughter of a Moroccan father and an Algerian mother, as the source. While she was close to Mr. Sarkozy and his second wife, Cécilia, and served as his spokeswoman for his successful 2007 presidential campaign, Mr. Sarkozy fired her, exiling her to a European parliamentary seat in Brussels, where Ms. Dati is said to be extremely bored.

The first inkling Ms. Dati, a former justice minister, had that she might be a source of presidential displeasure was when her police protection, with its government car and driver, suddenly disappeared. She called to keep the car while she finished an appointment that evening, but it was removed thereafter. When the interior minister, a Sarkozy friend named Brice Hortefeux, called her to apologize, she reportedly hung up on him.

The chief of the domestic intelligence service, Bernard Squarcini, denied that Ms. Dati’s phone had been wiretapped and said that his investigations stopped when the police stepped in.

But then Mr. Sarkozy’s friend and communications adviser, Pierre Charon, went public, telling the Web site of the Nouvel Observateur that the Élysée was going to war. “We are going to make this disgrace a casus belli,” he said. “We’re going to do all it takes to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

“As they say, fear has got to change camps,” he said, and spoke of “terror.”

For some reason, journalists at Le Journal du Dimanche and elsewhere interpreted his words as a threat.

But the Dati issue was hardly finished. Claude Guéant, the dark cardinal of the Sarkozy administration and its chief of staff, then told the weekly Le Canard Enchaîné that “the president of the Republic no longer wishes to see Rachida Dati.” The next day, however, on Wednesday, Mr. Guéant, while confirming his earlier statement, then uttered a phrase that might serve as a motto for this entertainment: “Yesterday’s truth is not, perhaps, that of today.”

Jean-François Copé, who leads the governing party’s parliamentary group, said that the deputies were “reacting very badly” to the affair. “They truly don’t need this at the moment,” he told Le Monde. “They are exasperated by this new messy outpouring and are even more sickened by the statements of Pierre Charon.”

Ms. Bruni-Sarkozy was then trotted out on Wednesday night to try to calm the waters in an interview with Europe 1 radio. The rumors of infidelity? “For me and my husband, these rumors are insignificant,” she said. “There is no plot. There is no vengeance. There is nothing. We have turned the page.”

Her husband? “The preoccupations of my husband are the French and France.”

Ms. Dati? “Rachida Dati remains truly our friend.”

La fin?