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Interactive Timeline: Sarkozy's first year in office

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It was a year ago, shortly after midnight, crushed between too many men with sweaters tied around their necks near the centre of a jubilant crowd in the Place de la Concorde, when I encountered a 24-year-old university student named Céleste Le Tallec, who was staring at the stage with tears streaming down her face.

She was engrossed by her new president, bouncing on his toes as he delivered his victory speech — "I will not betray you. I will not lie to you. I will not disappoint you."

His puggish frame, shorter than Napoleon Bonaparte's, was dwarfed by that of his wife, Cécilia, who had suddenly materialized on stage beside him, a secular miracle after she had vanished from his side in the final weeks of his campaign. She waved to supporters; he stood on his toes, half a metre away, and declined to touch her or make eye contact.

Ms. Le Tallec, along with millions of other citizens, had jettisoned her traditional support for the Socialist Party because she had been moved by Nicolas Sarkozy's rhetoric of change — "a fundamental rupture," "a France for those who get up in the morning," "the purchasing-power president."

That promise of a new, revved-up France, governed by a man who seemed to be constantly jogging on the spot, led Mr. Sarkozy to be elected by a majority of female voters, despite an opponent who would have been France's first female leader.

Mr. Sarkozy is a president who has been defined, from the start, by the women at his side. To understand the strange transformation of the French President, after only a year in office, from saviour to charlatan to man of mystery, it is best to examine the astonishing group of women who have accompanied him.

Cécilia

That Sunday night a year ago, Mr. Sarkozy's sculpted, intellectually acute and emotionally aloof wife set the tone. Nicolas was a new sort of Frenchman, a child of immigrants and grandchild of Jews whose entrepreneurial, street-thug bearing seemed a total break from the distant, fatherly hauteur of every leader since Charles de Gaulle.

Cécilia was the New Frenchwoman — independent, volatile, willing to contradict her husband, often dominant in the relationship. For years, she was his chief political adviser, regarded by all as the source of political sanity in his schizophrenic milieu.

On that giddy Sunday night on the edge of the Seine, Ms. Le Tallec and her friends talked of a French Camelot, Cécilia's Jackie to Nicolas's JFK, or perhaps the other way around.

"Together, we are going to write a new page of history," the President told them, and they wept some more. Everyone was a believer.

A year later, when I call her up, the tears of joy are gone. Ms. Le Tallec has a job in the new Sarkozy economy, selling bandwidth on a satellite system, but she has lost her faith in the man. "So much has happened in the past year, but none of it was what I had hoped for," she says. "Now, I look at him and I wonder how this can be the face of France."

Millions of others seem to agree: Mr. Sarkozy has plummeted in the opinion polls, reaching a low usually reserved for the end of a president's third term, not the beginning of his first.

Ms. Le Tallec turned her back for good on the mood of May, 2007, when she learned that Mr. Sarkozy would be welcoming Canada's own Celine Dion, his favourite singer, to the Élysée Palace next week to be anointed a Knight of the Legion of Honour alongside fashion designer Giorgio Armani.

This side of Mr. Sarkozy is off-putting to many voters, including Ms. Le Tallec, who would have preferred a man of slightly loftier obsessions. While it might reflect France more honestly than earlier presidents' operas and grand museums (this is a country whose appetite for maudlin pop is almost limitless), even admirers of Ms. Dion and Mr. Armani have come to admit that Mr. Sarkozy has displayed too much of the oversized sunglasses, perma-tanned friends, yachting vacations and, notably, his new, supermodel wife.

They worry that he's not a JFK so much as a Silvio Berlusconi, the vanguard of a continent-wide wave of Eurotrash conservatism, a movement stretching from Sweden through Germany to Italy and including, as its most recent members, the mayors of both London and Rome, an army of mildly intolerant non-reformers seeded heavily with orange-skinned playboys.

That, anyway, is the verdict at the moment. It may not last the month. The depth of France's financial troubles, and the force of other women at the President's side, may well drive the "bling" out of the headlines.

But none will ever return him to the highs of Cécilia's moment. When she flew to Tripoli last July, on a successful mission to negotiate with Moammar Gadhafi to release five long-imprisoned Bulgarian nurses from their death sentences, it was as the country's de facto foreign minister. Some officials complained about protocol, but for the public it seemed a bargain: With one vote, they had elected a brilliant partnership.

Even as this was occurring, though, Cécilia was beginning to fade from the scene. Domestically, things were not going well, and in Mr. Sarkozy's world, it seems, the household sometimes trumps the state.

The real political genius of Nicolas Sarkozy emerged elsewhere, in his cabinet.

Rama

With her deep black skin and cornrow hair, Rama Yade is everything a French conservative cabinet minister is not supposed to be — Senegalese, Muslim, young and outspokenly left-wing. And when Mr. Sarkozy appointed her as the Minister of Human Rights, it was not a token gesture. In one of the most male-centred and monochromatic political systems in Europe, he appointed a cabinet that was half women and heavily laden with ethnic minorities. And its diversity only began there.

Ms. Yade took her place alongside his Justice Minister, Rachida Dati, a Moroccan citizen and Muslim known for her tough-on-crime approach, and his Urban Affairs Secretary, Fadela Amara, an Arab-rights activist and feminist who was a star of the Socialist Party.

"He has always thought like someone from a minority," Ms. Yade told an interviewer. "He's always thought that people did not want him, that he was somehow illegitimate. So that's why he understands minorities so well: He thinks of himself as not completely French. He has a particular sensitivity about that."

That perception has allowed Mr. Sarkozy to crack down on immigration in ways that would be considered authoritarian coming from anyone else, with mass deportations of undocumented workers and a brutal restriction on family-reunification immigration. Half his cabinet has denounced these policies, but it also provided their cover.

The 2007 cabinet also will be remembered as one of history's great political checkmates: In a week of dramatic appointments, Mr. Sarkozy demolished not only the concept of identity politics as the domain of the left, but also any chance the opposition parties had of forming an electable government in the foreseeable future.

By making Socialist stars Bernard Kouchner and Jean-Pierre Jouyet his foreign ministers, and the party's most impressive and electable figure, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the new head of the International Monetary Fund, Mr. Sarkozy effectively bought up the French left's best hopes. Making a Defence Minister of Hervé Morin, an important figure in the rising centrist movement, helped to stave off that challenge as well.

People wondered how all these coups of co-optation were going to merge into a single government that would speak with one voice on policy. The answer soon became apparent: They wouldn't.

The French government now is something like an endless rugby scrum, arriving at positions through violent acts of pushing and tugging between competing and sometimes opposing ministries that don't hesitate to denounce one another. Mr. Sarkozy and his advisers reserve the right to seize the ball, but that often happens only after months of head-grabbing and ear-pulling.

Ms. Yade has become one of the stars of this internal opposition. In December, when Mr. Gadhafi was rewarded with a state visit to France, she declared that France was being used as "a doormat for wiping off the blood of his victims."

In most any other government, that would be a firing offence. Instead, Ms. Yade told the Sunday Times, she received a warm-hearted ticking-off from the President, "more affectionate than political."

Mr. Sarkozy has tolerated equally outspoken denunciations from Mr. Kouchner (who wished France had attacked Beijing more aggressively on human rights before the Olympics) and Mr. Morin (who does not like France's participation in the Afghanistan war).

On the other hand, ministers can suddenly find themselves cut off. Mr. Kouchner found himself removed from one of the key foreign-affairs files last year when Mr. Sarkozy's chief palace adviser, Claude Guént, was sent to Syria to try to negotiate a peace deal. And this year, the decision (in part to answer Canada's demands) to send 700 extra troops to Afghanistan was made by Mr. Sarkozy's Élysée insiders against the wishes of the Defence and Foreign ministries.

Elizabeth

The red line of French politics was established in 2005, when a strong majority of voters rejected the European Union constitution because they believed it represented an imposition of "Anglo-American capitalism" over the "social Europe" of France.

That moment, more so even than the Iraq-war debate of 2003, established the ideological boundary between France and les anglais. From the start, Mr. Sarkozy pledged to cross that line: France would move closer to the Anglo world, ending the long years of "freedom fries" and Old Europe/New Europe animosities.

One of his first acts was to have Mr. Kouchner visit Iraq, shortly before his own fence-mending trip to Washington. But it was Mr. Sarkozy's visit to London in March that was received as the true new entente cordiale, a bridging of the Channel after many lost decades. Or at least that was how it was seen by the tabloids, which were absorbed by the image of his new wife, the former Carla Bruni.

But Mr. Sarkozy used his proximity to Queen Eliabeth II, his new strongwoman foil, to do something quite different. During a speech to London business leaders, with the Queen seated beside him, he first praised the British way of capitalism, then buried it, departing from his prepared speech and telling the Brits that they ought to take a closer look at the state-driven French way of making money.

"Competition and freedom can withstand a certain amount of regulation," he said. "A lack of rules doesn't spell freedom; it spells chaos. It is the capitalism of speculators. … I wanted to say to the British government, we mustn't defend the established order — we've got to defend a fair world order."

That declaration, along with much of his humanitarian-focused foreign policy, has led many French arch-conservatives to fear that Mr. Sarkozy has betrayed them. And some leftists too: "Sarkozy steals from the Left once again," read a headline in the socialist newspaper Libération.

Both sides are missing the larger strategy at work — to use the French presidency of the European Union, which begins this summer, to put a French stamp on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Europe (through the creation of a new EU military force) and the world. His plan, Mr. Sarkozy has proudly announced, is to "create a politics of civilization to establish France as the soul of the new renaissance which the world needs."

Christine

Before France can take over the world, however, it will have to get itself out of bankruptcy court. And there the world will meet Mr. Sarkozy's other secret weapon — a woman more powerful and controversial than any of his wives.

Christine Lagarde, France's first female finance minister, is widely acknowledged as an administrative genius and a true believer in unregulated capitalism, the Robespierre in the Sarkozy revolution, a figure more Sarkozian than Mr. Sarkozy himself.

While he has a teasing relationship with the Anglo-American world, she writes her cabinet memos in English and denounces French society for spending too much time thinking.

Today, her moment has arrived. Despite Mr. Sarkozy's promise of grand economic reforms, France's economy remains in terrible shape. His first round of reforms last fall helped to open up labour markets, with important changes to the basic labour contract, causing a fall in unemployment. But economic growth remains weak, at lower than 2 per cent, and consumer confidence is at an all-time low. France has the highest rate of public debt in Western Europe, at 64 per cent of the GDP.

The spending cuts the government will soon announce will be dramatic for a country that never adopted the restraints others did 20 years ago. When I visit the Defence Ministry, a senior official takes me aside and tells me his fears: The 60 Mirage fighters devoted to nuclear first-strike penetration will be cut to two squadrons and the nuclear submarine fleet may — horrors — be shared with Britain.

"This really cannot happen," the official says, without irony. "These are our crown jewels."

Imagine this agony spread across the entire government, including its famed culture, education and social-service sectors. France, at last, might get the mass demonstrations that Mr. Sarkozy's administration so far has escaped.

And it may be Ms. Lagarde — another tall, elegant woman at Mr. Sarkozy's side — who will take his promises and run with them, while the President, to many French voters, appears lost in a celebrity netherworld.

Carla

That, of course, is where his new wife comes in. For those supporters who wonder where the much-promised reforms went — why the 35-hour work week, for instance, is still in place — Ms. Sarkozy provides the answer.

Mr. Sarkozy made no secret of being lost in love throughout much of the winter. Ministers and aides tell stories of entire days of meetings missed, major agendas forgotten or delegated to ministers, important files left unread, in his adolescent and almost slapstick pursuit of love.

When the romance went public with hand-holding at Euro Disney, it seemed fitting: There, at the most American place in France, was the merger of the Italian-Swiss model and the Hungarian-Greek-French politician — the apotheosis of the New France.

Many French observers found it all too cute; others found it too familiar — the ring he gave Carla was almost identical to the ones on the fingers of his two previous wives, and she has begun taking on the role of political adviser.

On that front, there may be hope. Mr. Sarkozy has begun wearing less-flashy jewellery and reducing his party appearances. He recently was seen attending a play — his first recorded consumption of non-pop culture. A new, more serious Nicolas may be emerging from Carla's laboratory.

Celine Dion may be waiting in Mr. Sarkozy's living room, but there are other women in the back rooms with bigger plans for him yet.

Doug Saunders is a member of The Globe and Mail's European bureau.