We've long known France affords its intellectuals the kind of adulation most countries reserve for rock stars (or, in particularly sad cases, footballers' wives). Where else but France can you declare, with a perfectly straight face and without fear of actual bodily harm, that your profession is "thinker"? Where else but Paris, for that matter, can a postmodern structuralist or a relativist post-structural modernist harbour realistic hopes of making it big on the telly?
And as the incarnation of their great country, French presidents have not hitherto been shy of highbrow passions. Mitterrand was prodigiously well read. Even the beer-swilling, sausage-scoffing and blokeish Jacques Chirac thought nothing of penning introductions to exhibitions of African sculpture at the Louvre, and built a whole new museum to the glory of primitive art. Any male British leader displaying such pretensions would have his sexual orientation questioned by Richard Littlejohn.
Thus far, though, bling-loving Nicolas Sarkozy has bucked the trend as a self-professed philistine whose preferred listening is Elvis Presley and who likes, it seems, nothing better of an evening than to settle down with a Gallic gameshow, a Sylvester Stallone or some dire French Carry On-style comedy such as Les Bronzés. But, possibly under the influence of his highly cultured wife Carla, he is changing. Not because of rock-bottom approval ratings and an election next year, obviously. But according to French media and a book published earlier this year, M Le President: Scenes of political life 2005-2011, by conservative journalist Franz-Olivier Giesbert, the pocket president has started "consuming culture in an almost obsessively systematic way".
Giesbert, who has known Sarkozy for 25 years, reckons the knowledge is "recently acquired", but real: "If he'd just mugged up on a few cheat-sheets, I'd have rumbled him." So what's he consuming, and what might it teach him?
Film
Fifteen Hitchcocks on the trot, Libération says. Good on maximising fear and anxiety in opponents, perhaps. Useful when you are France's least popular rightwing president and your Socialist rivals are always ahead in the polls.
Also, Charlie Chaplin's Limelight (about an older man and a younger woman falling in love and inspiring each others' lives – reassuring) and Lubitsch's Broken Lullaby, which was described by Time Out as "an ode to the power of sympathy". Always useful.
Literature
Guy de Maupassant. Six works in a weekend, Libération reports. Many of Maupassant's short stories look at the effect of war on civilians (are things really that bad in the Elysée?). Also Balzac (a fierce conservative whose insight into working-class life endeared him to many Socialists – handy), Céline (brilliant, but antisemitic) and Sartre (Marxist, existentialist – know your enemies. Legendary ladies' man – enough said).
