Sarkozy and Villepin: A Tale of Two Classes

They may both belong to France's conservative party, but President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Prime Minister Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin could not be more different. Tall, elegant, and ostentatiously erudite, Villepin was a career diplomat who gained the Matignon without ever having run for office. Short, petulant and sparking with excessive energy, Sarkozy marched to the Elysée Palace by winning an election, using old-fashioned political grunt work and his Cabinet posts to establish a reputation for delivering results. Along the way, the two men's conflicting styles and rival aspirations turned them into bitter enemies. Now, two years after Sarkozy won a sometimes vicious scrap to become the conservative presidential candidate, they are facing off again.

This time the setting is a Paris criminal court, which is examining a smear campaign allegedly overseen by Villepin in 2004. The President and his backers maintain that those behind the smear, which linked Sarkozy to illegal kickbacks from arms sales, not only set out to derail his presidential bid but continued to use evidence of wrongdoing even when they knew that it was fraudulent. Villepin and his supporters deny any such campaign, and say Sarkozy is using the trial — and his presidential power to influence it — to pursue a personal vendetta. (See pictures of Nicolas Sarkozy.)

The case could decide the political futures of both men. But as all of France watches agog, it has also come to symbolize the huge chasm in class and upbringing at the heart of France's political class and the country itself. "Their confrontation isn't just one of politics and ideology, but a battle of culture and class between the petit bourgeois and the aristocrat; between the lofty, cerebral leadership figure and the pragmatic official driven to get things done — and it cuts across France's entire political landscape," says political analyst Stéphane Rozès, president of CAP, a consultancy. "Dominique de Villepin is a man of the 19th century whose weapons are words, while Nicolas Sarkozy is a postmodern man who wants action, not talk ... Each man represents a class of French politicians seeking ascendancy over one another." (See pictures of the French celebrating Bastille Day.)

That struggle is playing out in the same Paris courtroom in which a French revolutionary tribunal sentenced Marie Antoinette to the guillotine in 1793 (a detail that may not thrill history enthusiast Villepin). At the core of the trial is the Clearstream affair — a scandal named for the Luxembourg financial clearinghouse where 89 French politicians, businesspeople and public figures purportedly held accounts containing illegal kickback money from arms sales. A list of those names — including Sarkozy's — was brought to Villepin's attention in 2004, but was later deemed to be a fraud by a top French spy called in to vet it. A Villepin intimate has testified he sent the list to a justice official convinced it was authentic, and that it wasn't until later that he learned the list was definitely a fake. What the judge overseeing the trial must now determine is whether Villepin ordered the forged list to be circulated hoping it might torpedo Sarkozy's presidential run — or whether Villepin himself is, as he claims, the innocent victim in the affair.

The trial has already provided drama. "I am here because of the decision of one man and the obsession of one man: Nicolas Sarkozy," Villepin declared, with the type of flair and indignant passion that he used to irk American officials when, as French Foreign Minister, he floridly denounced U.S. plans to invade Iraq. By way of retort, Sarkozy created an uproar on a nationally televised interview by referring to the defendants in the case as "guilty," ignoring the presumption of innocence central to France's legal system. The people responsible for the smear, Sarkozy said earlier, should "hang ... on a butcher's hook."

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