PARIS — Serge Hefez, a practicing psychiatrist, has identified a new mental illness among the French: obsessive Sarkosis, an unhealthy fascination with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.
“As I listened to my patients during consultations, many of them mentioned Sarkozy by name,” Dr. Hefez said. “He’s penetrated some of their deepest fantasies. I noticed all this passion in people speaking of him, and I thought there is something particular about this man — he’s like a reflection of us in the mirror.”
The French project themselves onto Mr. Sarkozy, too, Dr. Hefez said.
“He’s the incarnation of the postmodern man, obsessed with himself, turned toward pleasure, autonomous and narcissistic,” the psychiatrist said. “And he exhibits his joys and sorrows, all his private life, his sentimental doubts and pleasures. He represents the individualism of the society to the extreme, that it’s the individual who counts, not the society.”
A year after taking office, Mr. Sarkozy can appear to be everywhere, at least in the world of television and print. The daily newspaper Le Figaro counts at least 100 books devoted to the French president, his life and loves, with more than a million sold, for $25.1 million.
Some of the titles display the fury and fascination that Mr. Sarkozy has stimulated: “The King is Naked”; “The Man Who Doesn’t Know How to Pretend”; “The Liquidator”; “He Must Go!”; “The Duty of Insolence”; and “Somersaults and Flips at the Élysée.”
Dr. Hefez analyzed this obsession in an article and then in his own book, “Obsessive Sarkosis,” in which he identifies related illnesses, like Sarkophrenia and Sarkonoia.
Last month, the magazine Paris Match ran a cartoon by Jean-Jacques Sempé showing a woman talking to a psychiatrist, saying: “I’m very worried. Sunday, at the Louvre, I asked a guard where to find the room of Egyptian Sarkozycophagi. At dinner with a musicologist, I said twice that my favorite opera is ‘Sarkozy Fan Tutte.’ I’d like to know if this is serious and how to cure it.”
Television covers Mr. Sarkozy’s every gesture, in both homage and mockery, itself an effort to create distance from the phenomenon that it perpetuates and magnifies. It is all part of what the French have come to call the “pipolisation” of political life, a term, presumably derived from People magazine, that refers to the idolatry of celebrities and soap opera. Dr. Hefez considers the trend an example of “democracy turning against itself, as Tocqueville foresaw.”
But Dr. Hefez, too, has been infected by the disease he was among the first to diagnose. And like any good analyst, he is fully aware of the problem, and the irony. The heated reaction to his article “was interesting for a psychiatrist and didn’t surprise me,” he said, laughing, “because it corresponds precisely to the obsession.”
The newspaper Libération ran a photo spread of models who looked like Mr. Sarkozy and his third wife, Carla, “at home” in the Élysée Palace. Mr. Sarkozy’s double exercises in Ray-Bans and a sweaty New York Police Department T-shirt, while Mrs. Sarkozy’s, in tight jeans, watches him adoringly, a guitar across her lap. In another of the photos, by Bruce Gilden, a preoccupied president lies with his head on his wife’s miniskirted lap, while she gazes into the distance.
In the last of the photos, the president, in boxers and socks held up by garters, his bare chest looking soft, sits on the edge of the bed, staring into the void, while his wife, standing in a silk nightgown, stares down at the back of his head.
For Dr. Hefez, Mr. Sarkozy’s quick marriage to the rich, beautiful model and pop star is telling. “She is the perfect feminine equivalent — very fascinating, very narcissistic, very occupied with herself,” Dr. Hefez said.
For the French, it was all too much, too fast. Mr. Sarkozy’s new relationship, first made public in the very unpresidential, un-French EuroDisney theme park less than two months after he and Cécilia, his wife of 11 years, announced their divorce, was seen in the collective consciousness as a kind of “betrayal of intimacy, of friendship,” with the French people, Dr. Hefez said.
“It’s true he’s in love, and that has balanced him, but the French have lost confidence in him,” the psychiatrist said. “All presidents lie, but this is a betrayal of friendship.”
The passion has soured, said Eric Empatz, editor in chief of Le Canard Enchaîné, a weekly newspaper that combines satire and investigative reporting. “This obsession of the French with Sarkozy has turned, and turned negative,” Mr. Empatz said. “The obsession continues, just as passionately, but now it’s negative. In that, too, it’s like a bad love affair.”
With his opinion poll ratings at historic lows, Mr. Sarkozy has followed advice, including that of his wife, to appear more presidential in public, and to appear less often. The “bling-bling” of rich friends and extravagant, chunky watches has been largely replaced by discretion, seriousness and carefully managed appearances.
“He fascinates everyone,” said a friend who knows Mr. Sarkozy well and did not want to be identified speaking about him. “He’s passionate, and he polarizes people.”
The French feel an intimacy with him as someone like them, but they also want a semi-royal president to represent the country. “So there was this slight misalignment between this man they identify with and this expectation they have of the president, any president,” the friend said. “Then couple this with too much money, or too many visible signs of it, which relates to the funny relationship the French have with money.” The result, the friend said, was disappointment.
The divorce and remarriage further upset the French. “He was theirs, and then suddenly he becomes hers, and now he has to restore this sense of ‘I’m yours, because I’m here to serve the country,’ ” the friend said, sighing. “Which is no question the case, but he has to demonstrate it.”
The Rue89 news Web site asked: “After a year of dependency, how can we stop being Sarkotoxicated?”
As yet, there appears to be no cure.
Models portraying President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla, in photos staged by the magazine of the newspaper Libération to accompany an article about the public’s “strange fascination-repulsion” with Mr. Sarkozy’s life and loves.
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