Another day, another internet controversy about Nicolas Sarkozy's relationship with his wife Cecilia and his powerful friends in the media.
For weeks, Paris gossip has speculated about frostiness and long faces between the president-elect and his wife. But journalists from the Sunday paper, Le Journal du Dimanche, discovered that Mrs Sarkozy had delivered the ultimate snub to a political husband: she had not turned up to vote in the May 6 election that saw him take power.
As a political story, it was dynamite, but the article never appeared in the paper. Instead, the website Rue89.com, created by former journalists from the left-leaning daily Liberation, reported the article had been "censored" by the paper's managing editor and its owner, a wealthy industrialist friend of Mr Sarkozy.
The managing editor Jacques Esperandieu denied any interference. He told Agence France Presse that he had decided not to publish the story after long deliberation, deciding it concerned "the private sphere." He said he received "a certain number of phone calls from people stressing the very private and very personal nature of the information."
Mr Sarkozy's spokesman also denied any of his entourage had applied pressure to the paper.
But this afternoon journalists' unions at the Hachette-Lagardere group, which owns the Sunday paper, issued a statement denouncing "new interference" from the powers that be. They said they were "victims of an attack against freedom of expression".
