Power, ‘corruption’ and the wife of the French president

She was wrong about one thing, however. When I asked about the allegations of corruption that had led to Sarkozy’s indictment for illegal campaign financing in 2016 and were still buzzing about the remains of his political career, she assured me: “Everything will go away.”

Bruni at the Cannes Film Festival in May

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“There were many [allegations] when he stopped being president,” she said. “They tried 13 times but they’re all lies, incredible lies. I’m so surprised it lasted. I’m so surprised it became so political, but they achieved their goal because he’s out of politics for ever. So they invented everything and won the battle, but we’re much more happy now.”

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The allegations did not go away. Her husband went on to be convicted, and although he served his custodial sentence at home wearing an electronic tag, the threat of actual jail time remains. This week Bruni has been charged with involvement in a criminal conspiracy to “whitewash” him over cash allegedly received from Muammar Gaddafi, the late and unlamented Libyan dictator. Although she has consistently denied involvement in “Operation Save Sarko [from jail]”, the offences, if proven, could prove serious enough to send her to prison. In the meantime Bruni, who has been co-operating with the authorities, is under “judicial supervision” and banned from contacting anyone involved in the case.

The only good news for Bruni is that the stipulation does not forbid her from speaking to her 69-year-old husband. That would be tough. One of the songs from the record we were discussing in 2020 was called Les séparés [“the separated ones”], in which she sang of separation as “suffering and secrecy”. I had assumed she was writing about the enforced seclusions of Covid, but I was wrong. She had written it before the pandemic in response to a Sarkozy absence of just five days. “I obviously couldn’t live without him. I would rather die before him,” she told me, although when she showed him the lyrics on his return he told her they were “tragic”, which I suppose could be taken two ways.

What I did not know, because she only revealed it in 2023 in a health campaign video, was that the year before we talked she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had undergone surgery, radiotherapy and hormone therapy. The cancer was caught in time, but she could not have been so sure of that in 2020. The thought of dying before her husband, despite his 13-year seniority, would not have been something the mother of a nine-year-old daughter could ignore. Another of her songs began: “I had a brush with death on Monday/ I felt the bullets fly past my ear.” We can guess what that might have been about.

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So Bruni is, I think, a brave woman and will likely face the humiliating challenges and penal perils ahead with the fortitude acquired by experience. Hers was certainly a rocky childhood. At the age of three, she moved from her native Italy to France after her very wealthy family became convinced they were at risk of being kidnapped by the mafia or Red Brigades, a real and “frightening” threat, she told me. In her adopted country, she was brought up by her French grandmother more than by either her mother, the famous concert pianist Marisa Borini, or her father, Alberto Tedeschi, a businessman and composer.

At least, she thought Tedeschi was her papa. On his deathbed in 1996, he informed her that her biological father was in fact a Brazilian grocery magnate named Maurizio Remmert, who had had a six-year affair with Marisa. Bruni was, she told me, relieved rather than devastated; she finally understood why she was “so complicated and anxious” (as a teenager she was agoraphobic).

Bruni with Naomi Campbell and Gianni Versace

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After the obligatory Swiss finishing school, she studied art and architecture in Paris but left for modelling at 19. It was her derriere on the Guess jeans posters and her face on campaigns for Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent and Versace. Before she left the scene to devote herself to the musical talent her (mother’s) genes had bequeathed, she was reportedly earning $7.5 million a year.

Her boyfriends were legion. One of her songs, Une enfant, claimed she had had 30 lovers, although she told me the number was just there for the rhyme. They included Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger, although Clapton had reportedly begged the Rolling Stone not to steal her. Yet Bruni was, at 40, still unwed when she met the twice-married Sarkozy. Arranged by his friend, the advertising genius Jacques Séguéla (one of the “original Mad Men of France”, Adweek calls him), it was quite the dinner party. Séguéla told the authors of The True Story of Carla and Nicolas: “I saw the connection the moment the two met. It was electric, like a bolt of lightning.” Bruni went on to tell them she was seduced by his charm and his intelligence. “He has five or six brains and they’re all remarkably well-lubricated.”

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There were plenty who said the wealthy star simply craved what she did not have: the power inherent in becoming France’s first lady. She told me, though, it was the man she fell for. “He was a different [sort of] man: a Jewish name, not coming out of the right schools, not coming out of the establishment, you know?” she said. “He had nothing and he did it all alone. So I was fascinated, but I was not very attracted by his position because I could feel that it was full of brutality and violence.”

And then there was the sex. “My husband and me were made of desire. We wouldn’t last without desire for each other. He’s very passionate, more passionate than me. He’s not a man from the north. He’s from the south and with Hungarian blood, which is the blood of Attila.”

In his memoir last year covering their early years together (he has published three and all became bestsellers), his praise for her is more circumspect. She had presented “a worldwide image of French elegance and intelligence”. He wrote that he had declined to have a drink with Angela Merkel at a G8 summit in Normandy to join Bruni, who was pregnant with their daughter, Giulia, in their hotel suite — although the sacrifice is less impressive when you read on and discover he considered the German chancellor “pusillanimous” and “risk averse”.

Bruni performing in Milan earlier this month

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Nevertheless, he was the agent of change in his new wife. In 2007, a year before their marriage, she had told Madame Figaro that she was bored by monogamy, and a few months later told another magazine that marriage was “a trap”. Indeed, she admitted to me that she was “surprised every day” not only that their marriage had lasted so long, but that they remained so close. She certainly struck me then, as I have been struck again by the news this week, as utterly devoted to “her man”.

She made it clear to me, however, that such devotion had to be mutual. “I told him if he cheats on me I’ll cut his throat.” Why would he cheat? “I don’t know, but if he cheats on me, I’ll cut his throat. He knows.”

And if she cheated on him? “I have never cheated on him. Maybe he wouldn’t cut my throat, but I would cut his throat, because I’m against divorce.”

In general, democracies do not like seeing their former leaders — or their spouses — hauled before the courts, but Adam Sage, the Times Paris correspondent, is not sure how much the French will fret over the Sarkozys’ latest travails. For one thing, he finds it hard to imagine either of them doing prison time, partly because it is rare for anyone to do so if their sentence is under two years. A suspended sentence, he thinks, would be highly unlikely to affect Bruni’s career.

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“Her husband has two corruption convictions to his name and is still considered to be the honourable elder statesman of the centre right,” he says. “So she will be able to carry on singing, modelling and generally pontificating on whatever issues she likes. Getting a corruption conviction in France is like getting blind drunk in the UK. It’s not a great achievement, but everyone accepts that it happens.”

In his 2011 book The Sarkozy Phenomenon, the author Nick Hewlett noted that Sarkozy had exceptionally close relationships with media executives, owners, reporters and also TV and film stars: “Indeed, his own life became increasingly similar to that of television, film and rock stars, and his affair and subsequent marriage to [Bruni] only served to reinforce this image.”

Perhaps the Sarkozys’ life is not so much unravelling as simply spooling out the next dramatic episodes of a grisly reality soap. Almost as soon as he emerged into public life, Sarkozy was compared, for his ambition as much as his height, to Napoleon, and Bruni is in this reckoning his Josephine.

But Carla and Nicolas: the TV Series lacks the class to rival The Crown. It would probably prove nearer Plus belle la vie, a French soap opera set among the Eurotrash and criminal classes of Marseilles — an amusing diversion as the country’s political elite sinks into the merde. Let’s just hope, for the sake of Sarkozy’s throat, that the next plot turn isn’t the one in which Nicolas cheats not on France, but on his wife.