All of us in France now inhabit what the über-hip Parisian magazine Technikart calls "Sarkoland". No one yet really knows what this means, but cultural commentators guess: meaner police on the streets, authorities picking on immigrants, more crap commercial television and a general downturn in the fortunes of the leftist Parisian media elite. To this crowd, Nicolas Sarkozy is a philistine thug with a Neanderthal hatred of anything he does not understand.
But this has not stopped former leftist intellectuals - including the philosopher André Glucksmann and the writer Pascal Bruckner - pledging allegiance to him. The new ruling elite in France will be supported by a cabal of "néocons à la française".
The strange mood of Paris as Sarkozy takes up the reins is captured in a political thriller by Erik Emptaz, 1981 (Grasset, 2007). Set in the year Mitterrand's new government swept to power, it is narrated by a young right-winger who, like many at that curious moment, feared that "Mitrand" would establish the Kremlin at the Élysée. Although Emptaz is an editor at Le Canard Enchaîné - the French Private Eye - this is a book strangely devoid of cynicism. Instead, it lays bare the emotional complexities and tensions that culminated in Sarkozy's victory. Strangest of all is the fact that, amid the predictable flurry of Sarkozy biographies, this detailed and touching novel has received little or no critical attention.
In contrast, the rise of the new French right has been welcomed across Europe in unlikely quarters. In Austria, the centre-left newspaper Der Standard has urged eastern Europeans to rally to Sarkozy as a model democrat. The German daily Die Tageszeitung hails Sarkozy for making a final break with the failed utopianism of 1968. In the Italian and Spanish centre-left press, he is hailed as the potential saviour of the European project. No less hysterical have been the claims, made in France by Sarkozystes themselves, that 2007 is the new 1989 - the year when political and cultural barriers fall across Europe to usher in a new age of trans-territorial freedom.
Everyone left in the real leftist opposition knows that the better comparison is with 1979. France is in for a hard dose of Thatcherism (uncoincidentally, a new and largely approving biography of Thatcher by Jean-Louis Thiériot is about to hit the French bestseller lists). But Sarkozy is no enemy of culture: like Thatcher, he is likely to inspire a thriving counter-culture of protest.
Indeed, in the north-eastern arrondissements of Paris - the traditional home of revolutionaries - a group of anarchists has already begun a campaign of vandalism and graffiti against the "values of Sarkoland". The witty, Banksy-style artwork of the unknown anarchists has made them local heroes among Parisians. "These people are not simply casseurs (hooligans)," says "Jacquot", a drinker at the bar of Les Tontons in south Paris, "they are simply revolting against 'la France Berlusconisée'. They are heroes: they just trying to save French culture."
