Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni: The rise and fall of France's golden couple

France isn’t a betting country, but when Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni decided to get married in 2008, after a two-month courtship, many of France’s chattering classes were already starting to guess the likely divorce date.

These two, the siren supermodel and the twice-married ‘President Bling-Bling’ – a nickname given to him by the press due to his fondness for Rolex watches, gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses and hobnobbing with moguls – were publicity hounds, the perceived wisdom went. She loved power; he loved young women. It would never last.

‘She’ll drop him if he loses in 2012,’ a politician friend told me knowingly. (Republican Sarkozy lost to his socialist opponent François Hollande.)

‘His roving eye will find someone else the minute she’s off to have Botox,’ a Republican party grandee smugly predicted at a dinner party. Mistrust extended beyond France’s borders. ‘[David Cameron] gives us wonderful vignettes of the Sarkozys’ fake marital displays,’ Sasha Swire wrote blithely in Diary of an MP’s Wife, in an entry for 2010.

Thirteen years, one presidency and two election defeats (in 2012, and in the 2017 Republican primaries) later, Bruni and Sarkozy are still married, and by all accounts, closer than ever. This is despite the pair facing the ultimate relationship test – a string of legal challenges, brought about, Sarkozy claims, by ‘activist judges’, all of which he has strongly denied.

None of the investigations, of which there have been half a dozen, have ever come to anything – that is, until earlier this year when the former president’s luck ran out and he was finally convicted of trying to bribe a judge in 2014, two years after he left power.

News of the scandal dominated headlines in France and around the world, hitting Sarkozy hard. According to the prosecution, who wiretapped his and his lawyer’s mobiles for months, Sarkozy had suggested to the judge that he could secure a prestigious job for him in return for information about a separate case. In March, he was sentenced to three years in prison, two of them suspended. He is the first French ex-president to appear in court on criminal charges.

Almost immediately after his conviction, Sarkozy appeared on TF1’s evening news (France’s equivalent of Newsnight) and gave a forceful defence through clenched teeth. Like a cornered bull, exuding the kind of barely restrained heat you rarely see on French news shows, he told the nation he was appealing against this ‘miscarriage of justice’. He couldn’t believe that months-long wiretaps, without a proper warrant, were admissible in law. While the job allegedly promised was never given to the incriminated judge.

He was, of course, appealing, he said, but before he’d even lodged this appeal, Bruni took to Instagram: ‘What senseless persecution my love @nicolassarkozy… the fight continues, the truth will come out, #injustice’, she posted, with a garland of French flag emojis and a little broken heart.

Sarkozy – who remains free during the appeals process – and Bruni escaped lockdown in Paris, spending it with her mother and sister at Château Faraghi, her family’s 10-bedroom, 1930s villa at Cap Nègre on the Riviera. ‘It’s a big house, but I’m no longer used to living 24/7 with my mother and sister!’ Bruni recently joked to France 2 TV chat show host Babeth Lemoine.

‘The kids [the couple’s daughter Giulia, nine, and Aurélien Enthoven, 19, Bruni’s son by French philosopher Raphaël Enthoven] were running about all the time. Even when we’re not arguing, my mother, my sister and I talk incessantly – loudly because we’re Italians.

'I was composing, my mother [pianist Marisa Borini, 91] was playing the piano; it was noisy and messy, but my husband never batted an eyelid. When he wasn’t writing his next book or cycling in the mountains, he just sat among us, reading L’Equipe [France’s daily sports paper]. He was totally zen with it all.’

‘Zen’, a word the French overuse to describe harmonious, peaceful situations isn’t one you’d ordinarily use of the hyperactive, sometimes brutal Sarkozy. A successful Minister of the Interior (Home Secretary), a position he held twice, he ran his party, and then Cabinet, like a military operation, brooking no interference and firing underperforming ministers without qualms. His hair-trigger temper often plunged his communications team into despair.

Visiting the annual Paris Agricultural Fair in 2008 (an essential walkabout in a country where the farming lobby is strong) he shot back to a visitor who’d thrown a casual insult at him, ‘Get lost, you moron!’ in full view of a brace of TV cameras.

But from the beginning of their relationship, when Sarkozy was with Bruni he was a different man. Back in 2008, two weeks before their marriage, the model-turned-singer, who’d had a string of famous boyfriends including Eric Clapton, former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius and Mick Jagger, sat the French president in front of her computer.

‘Look at these pictures on the internet,’ she said, googling portraits of her in the nude by famous photographers from Helmut Newton to Jeanloup Sieff. ‘You realise that’s going to come out, yes?’ Sarkozy scrolled down appreciatively. ‘Oh, I love this one! Can I have a print?’

‘People thought my haste in getting married was inappropriate,’ said Sarkozy after his 2012 defeat. ‘But it was the most dignified and simple way to avoid Carla being burdened with the insulting status, at least in my eyes, of “official mistress”. I was mocked for saying, “With Carla, it’s serious.” Yet it halted innuendo, stolen pictures, off-colour jokes.’ Despite this, the pair’s romance has hardly ever been out of the spotlight – even after Sarkozy left power he was constantly compared to his successor, François Hollande, and the latter’s messy personal life, with competing ‘First Girlfriends’ and public complaints about their cost to the state. Boris Johnson, take note.

Sarkozy and Bruni met on a blind date in 2007 and it was love at first sight (‘literally’, Bruni said). Publicly dumped by Cécilia, his second wife, after 19 years together, weeks after he’d been elected president, Sarkozy was, says his friend, the adman and pollster Jacques Séguéla, ‘rattling about the Elysée in a complete funk’. Séguéla decided to throw a dinner party. ‘Carla had just mentioned she wanted to meet someone single. I rang Nicolas and invited him to dinner at my house. Eight people: three couples, and these two.’

From all accounts, they only had eyes for each other. As the party came to an end, Sarkozy offered Carla a ride back to central Paris. Minutes after he dropped her off at her 16th arrondissement house, Bruni was on the telephone to Séguéla. ‘Your friend is bizarre! He didn’t even come up for some coffee! And he said he would call me, but he hasn’t!’

‘I told her they’d only been parted five minutes!’ Séguéla recalls. ‘It was my best success at matchmaking ever.’ The pair have been inseparable ever since.

In her 2017 English-language album, French Touch, Bruni covered Tammy Wynette’s Stand by Your Man in her cool, breathy style; but her sentiments, it seems, are as fiery as the original. She has, in fact, written several songs about her husband – and his enemies. One, The Penguin, is said to lay into Hollande for his lack of manners when he took over at the Elysée. ‘Yes, I did once say I found monogamy boring, but that was before I got married. I love my husband very much, you see,’ she told French Elle. Ten years later, you believe her.

That said, Bruni has remained friends with almost all her exes – one of her songs famously talks of her ‘30 lovers’. Magnanimous in victory, Sarkozy, the child of an acrimonious divorce, has eagerly gone with it. Enthoven (to whom Bruni once dedicated the song Raphaël) visits regularly. So do other former partners – even once, it is said, Mick Jagger.

When Sarkozy first met Enthoven, shortly after marrying Bruni, Sarkozy surprised him by using the informal ‘tu’ immediately. ‘You’re the father of my wife’s son, you’re part of the family now,’ he told Enthoven. But then, in private, Sarkozy has always yearned for the security of a big extended family. ‘I have suffered for so long as a child not to have the family I dreamed of,’ he wrote in his 2016 book La France Pour la Vie, ‘that I’ll do anything to protect mine, almost obsessively.’

Born in 1955, Sarkozy was the middle boy of three sons. His father, Pál Sarkozy, was a minor Hungarian aristocrat who fled the Communist regime in 1948. He set up a successful advertising agency, dumping his French wife Andrée after eight years of an increasingly embattled marriage when Nicolas was four. Andrée, known to all as ‘Dadu’, was determined to support herself. She went back to law school, passed her bar exam, found work, and rented a flat in the wealthy suburb of Neuilly for her and her boys.

Pál would see his sons two Sundays a month, usually taking them to lunch at a Paris pizzeria. His favourite sport was berating Nicolas. ‘Your marks at school are terrible, you’re short and you have a foreign name; you’ll never account for anything in life,’ he would say, helping fuel his son’s lifelong ambition. Sarkozy once remarked that, while he felt inferior in relation to his wealthier and taller classmates (he is 5ft 5in), ‘What made me who I am now is the sum of all the humiliations suffered during childhood.’

While he never experienced real poverty, he felt acutely that he was ‘different’. His divorced mother had to work; his name was foreign (for a couple of months at school he experimented with using his full name, playing on the aristocratic cachet of being Nicolas Sarkozy de Nagy-Bócsa) and they lived in a flat in the ‘wrong’ part of Neuilly.

Politics was a straightforward path: his beloved grandfather, the successful urologist Dr Benedict Mallah, a lifelong Gaullist, took the small boy on his shoulders to march in support of Le Général – Charles de Gaulle. Sarkozy joined the young Gaullists association aged 18 and was soon spotted by the party’s talent scouts, as well as by a junior minister called Jacques Chirac.

At 28, Sarkozy became mayor of Neuilly, but really rose to fame 10 years later when he negotiated a hostage situation in a kindergarten. A 42-year-old man called Eric Schmitt had strapped sticks of dynamite to his body, calling himself a ‘Human Bomb’ and threatening the teacher and the class, while demanding a 100 million French franc ransom.

While the police surrounded the school, Sarkozy went in alone, negotiated, and heroically delivered bagfuls of cash, carrying the children out until the police finally took over and shot the bomber dead.

Thanks to his bravery, the French public saw a forceful personality in Sarkozy, utterly unlike the technocrats usually found in the job. Partly on the strength of the Human Bomb incident, Sarkozy became Jacques Chirac’s Minister of the Interior in 2002, a job that ended up defining him as the law-and-order candidate of the French Right. Five years later he ran for president.

Carla Bruni, 12 years Sarkozy’s junior, would have had no time for him then, as a Left-winger from a rich northern Italian industrial dynasty. Born in Turin, as a child she lived a privileged life, dividing her time between a 16th-century palazzo outside Turin and a large apartment in Paris.

In 1974, when Bruni was seven, the family were forced to flee Italy after kidnapping threats from the far-Left terrorist group the Red Brigades. They moved to France, and Bruni was sent to boarding school in Switzerland.

She dropped out of architecture studies in Paris to start modelling at 19, shooting to the top through a combination of beauty, steely determination and good manners. (‘She was always on time, always polite with everyone, and she’d always come to me after a show to ask what she could improve,’ the couturier Christian Lacroix once said.)

She remains universally liked by everyone – except the wives of the men she had affairs with (Justine Lévy, who was married to Raphaël Enthoven when Carla swept him off his feet, once wrote an angry roman à clef calling her a ‘Botoxed witch with a Terminator smile’). But Bruni’s friends, men and women, say she’s funny, puts people at their ease, and is very straightforward.

By the 1990s, Bruni ranked among the 20 best-paid models in the world, with earnings of $7.5 million in her best year. After 10 years, she turned to music ‘rather than be told I was too old’: her mother was a pianist; her father, Alberto Bruni-Tedeschi, was a noted composer and successful industrialist. Bruni’s debut album sold two million copies worldwide.

In short, hers could be the story of a cosseted liberal, but with what she once called ‘fault lines’. At 28, as the man she thought was her father lay dying, her mother confessed that her biological father was a lover of hers, Maurizio Remmert.

‘Strangely, I wasn’t surprised,’ Bruni said later. ‘I know my parents liked one another, but were living largely separate lives. It was stranger to realise that my [older] sister Valeria knew, and every now and then we still talk about it, how she and my mother felt it wouldn’t have helped for me to know.’

Bruni has since met all her ‘other’ family: Remmert is a successful Brazilian businessman, and was invited to the Sarkozys’ 2008 marriage. Bruni’s half-sister Consuelo Remmert worked as an adviser in Nicolas Sarkozy’s office.

Bruni has been in therapy for over 15 years, which may be what enabled her to write a song called Un Garçon Triste (A Melancholy Boy) about her husband: she recognised fault lines in him, too. ‘He gives himself great airs so as not to drown, he likes to play the king’ goes one of the lines.

Both found themselves growing up in a well-off milieu in which they were perceived as slightly different, and each built up a persona to deal with this insecurity. Tellingly, they are not shy of confessing admiration for the other.

‘I think each of them believes at heart the other is too good for them, really, and can’t quite believe their luck,’ says a former colleague of Sarkozy in the Gaullist Party. ‘It takes them out of themselves, really.’

Sarkozy’s bribery conviction is without doubt the lowest point in the career of a politician who, more than any other, symbolises law and order. But his detractors who think this career is over are way off the mark.

However unloved he may be with the public, French political wisdom used to go, ‘If it’s chaos, it’s Sarko,’ meaning that if the country finds itself at a catastrophic juncture – terrorism, financial crisis, natural disaster, a pandemic – Sarkozy remained for a long time the one leader they would trust to deal with it. Until recently, this threw a shadow over Emmanuel Macron’s chances for a second mandate when the country returns to the polls next year.

When lockdown is finally lifted, the Sarkozys will take up their old life in Paris again. In addition to awaiting his appeal, Sarkozy is preparing for the next legal case against him – this one about campaign overspending, scheduled to start at the end of this month.

This, observers believe, will be another big challenge, but while the French have a short fuse when it comes to financial scandals, they have a higher tolerance for campaign financial irregularities, as long as there is no personal enrichment.

While he waits for his next day in court, all eyes are turning to his next move. His situation means there’s almost no likelihood of him running for office for a third time next year, even if he was considering it – it would take a lot of chaos to bring Sarko back. But as things stand he could support one of the conservative candidates, or even Macron in the centre ground.

Meanwhile Sarkozy watches Macron battling plummeting polls – the French are angry with the president’s handling of the Covid crisis, his perceived arrogance and what most people see as his disconnect with the common man.

As a former lawyer, Sarkozy is keeping himself busy rejoining the Paris Bar, where he advises on international business deals. He also sits on several boards and is registered with the Washington Speakers Bureau, which also lists Tony Blair, at an estimated rate of £100,000 a lecture.

‘I’d rather he went and made some money,’ Carla told a TV interviewer when asked about his future political ambitions.

‘He never did, you know? So he’d like that.’ Supportive of his aborted run in 2017, she told Spanish Vanity Fair the same year, half jokingly, that if her husband wanted to run again, he’d better not flinch at divorce.

‘Politics makes people quite strange. They are either very aggressive or very submissive, there is not much in-between. Media attention makes everything worse. Me, I like peace.’ 

Whether she’ll get it is another story. Because if the last two years tell us anything, it’s that you should never underestimate Sarko.