FRANCE: The Bastille Day festivities in Paris were host to a pointed minuet between President Chirac and his party rival. Lara Marlowe was there
When France's ambitious finance minister Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Cecilia, strode through the Élysée Palace during the annual Bastille Day party yesterday, guests joked they were sizing up the head of state's residence for new furnishings and curtains.
The next presidential election will not take place for three years, but in the meantime Mr Sarkozy's rivalry with President Jacques Chirac has become the country's favourite blood sport.
Last weekend, Mr Sarkozy committed yet another crime of lèse-majesté by trying to upstage the president's Bastille Day television appearance with an interview in Le Monde. "France is not afraid of reforms," Mr Sarkozy said, contradicting a theme dear to Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. "She does not dread change; she's waiting for it."
The run-up to Bastille Day was fraught with Sarko-Chirac clashes. First, the finance minister summoned 237 right-wing politicians to his ministry at Bercy, where he described Mr Chirac's rule as "a house of cards" on the verge of collapse. The president said he would not allow a cabinet minister to become head of his UMP party, a post coveted by Mr Sarkozy as a launching pad for the presidency. Mr Sarkozy then announced he'll decide this summer whether he wants to compete for the UMP job.
In a cabinet meeting, Mr Chirac upbraided Mr Sarkozy for daring to attempt to cut the defence budget.
Bastille Day was the perfect opportunity for Mr Chirac to put the upstart in his place, and if television viewers remembered only one sentence from the president's interview, it was: "I take decisions; he (Sarkozy) executes them." In the Salle des Fêtes at the Élysée Palace, the presidential remark drew laughter and applause.
Twice, in clear allusions to Mr Sarkozy, Mr Chirac denounced "politics with a lower case 'p'." Asked whether the unpopular Raffarin government would survive for another year, the president said: "I will not allow the ambitions or calculations of anyone [read: Sarkozy\] to perturb the (government's) action of the next three years." Rivalry and quarrels "have too often spoiled the work of the French . . . "
The Sarko-Chirac show all but overshadowed the nominal stars of Bastille Day: 250 members of the British armed forces. The Queen's Grenadiers and Horse Guards led the morning parade down the Champs-Élysées, to commemorate one century of entente cordiale. Nine Hawk aircraft from the British Red Arrows closed the parade with a blue, white and red fly-past over the avenue. The British military presence was purely ceremonial, none of the units in Iraq being represented.
Franco-British defence relations are excellent, commentators repeated. As Europe's two biggest military powers, Paris and London are leading efforts to build a European defence system. They are even building an aircraft carrier together.
But in other areas, the entente is less than cordiale. Only last month, Messrs Chirac and Blair clashed over the choice of a president for the European Commission. At his press conference at the Brussels summit, Mr Chirac singled out British opposition to the extension of qualified majority voting for criticism. Though it is customary for heads of state or government to sit beside Mr Chirac in the reviewing stand on the Place de la Concorde, neither Queen Elizabeth nor Tony Blair came to Paris for yesterday's ceremony. The defence minister Geoff Hoon filled in for them.
None of which prevented the Queen's Grenadiers from being the most popular attraction at the Élysée garden party - aside from Mr Sarkozy signing autographs. "They've been really lovely, extremely cordial," said Dominic Nicolas, who carried the Queen's colour for the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards. Women in cocktail dresses approached the 25- year-old Grenadier gingerly, asking for permission to stroke his bearskin hat. Couples lined up to be photographed beside him.
Despite their alliance through two world wars, earlier centuries seemed to cast a chill over the Franco-British theme. Le Monde reported that Capt St-John-Pryce of the Blues and Royals rode down the Champs-Élysées on a horse called Agincourt, after the battle in 1415 when Henry V decimated French knights. Grenadier Nicolas boasted that his Queen's company gained its present title at the Battle of Waterloo.