Les Intellectuelles s'enculer avec ses tetes

Sacre Bleu!

While we British are fortunate that the presentational style of politics has so utterly ended in the course of the last week, the benighted French are reeling under the dastardly tactics employed by their new President Nicolas Sarkozy. Already under suspicion from the Left for, among other things, comprehensively defeating the Socialist candidate, Sarkozy has stirred up a cloud of indignation, mingled with Galloise smoke from a hundred cafes on the Left Bank.

His crime, obvious when you think about it, is that he jogs. The President of France is a jogger. This is a bad thing for three reasons. The first is that jogging is right wing. Oh come on, of course it is: “Jogging is of course about performance and individualism, values that are traditionally ascribed to the Right,” Odile Baudrier, editor of V02 magazine, a sports publication, told Libération.

It is also profoundly un-French:

Alain Finkelkraut, a celebrated philosopher, begged Mr Sarkozy on France 2, the main state television channel, to abandon his “undignified” pursuit. He should take up walking, like Socrates, Arthur Rimbaud, the poet, and other great men, said Mr Finkelkraut. “Western civilisation, in its best sense, was born with the promenade. Walking is a sensitive, spiritual act. Jogging is management of the body. The jogger says I am in control. It has nothing to do with meditation.”

Last, but by no means least, M Sarkozy's habit of moving at a pace halfway between a walk and a run is nothing less than a calculated ploy to brainwash the trusting citizens of France:

The “hypnotic” daily images of presidential running are not innocent, said Daniel Schneidermann, a media critic. Mr Sarkozy uses the video images of his jogging as “a major weapon of media manipulation”, said Mr Schneidermann.

All of this goes to show that while British intellectuals beoman the absence in Britain of the sort of reverent and respectful treatment shown to their kin in France, there may be a perfectly good resaon for this: they're all talking bollocks.