France:Nicolas Sarkozy had to pause a long moment at the end of the red carpet leading to the Élysée Palace, because he arrived two minutes early for his investiture yesterday, as if he could wait no longer. With a distinctive walk, somewhere between an amble and a George Bush-like swagger, he approached president Jacques Chirac, who stood on the steps. Mr Sarkozy's solemn expression broke into an ironic smile.
The old president looked tired. Still suntanned from his Mediterranean holiday, the new president appeared full of vim and vigour. A few minutes earlier, we had seen the change of style at the Élysée. Mr Chirac's wife and daughter were active, but discreet. Mr Sarkozy wants to show off his family.
Wearing a close-fitting, taupe-coloured, satin dress, Cécilia Sarkozy, the new first lady, had walked up the red carpet, holding the hand of the couple's 10-year-old son, Louis.
"Madame la présidente! Petit Louis! Petit Louis!" the photographers shouted. It felt more like Cannes than central Paris.
Mrs Sarkozy was flanked by her two daughters from her first marriage to a television star, and Mr Sarkozy's two teenage sons by his first marriage. The Sarkozys are doubling the staff of the Élysée, on the grounds that they are a large family.
After a half-hour tour of the palace that included the nuclear bunker called the "Jupiter room", the two presidents re-emerged. With a frozen smile, Mr Chirac appeared strangely absent, distracted. Mr Sarkozy kept talking to him but Mr Chirac looked like he just wanted it to be over.
The palace staff applauded and cheered, many of them weeping. Their last image of Mr Chirac was a hand waving from the window of a black car, and the wrought-iron gate clanging shut behind him.
Inside, in the Salle Des Fêtes, a military band played music by Spanish composer Albeniz, the new first lady's grandfather.
A liveried usher announced: "Monsieur le président de la république."
Jean-Louis Debré, the president of the constitutional council and a most loyal Chiraqien, proclaimed Mr Sarkozy the sixth president of the Fifth Republic and the 23rd president of France.
In his inaugural address, Mr Sarkozy paid a brief homage to his three immediate predecessors. But the speech quickly veered into an indictment of Mr Chirac's record. The May 6th election was the victory of "the France that doesn't want to die", he said. He twice repeated that he had no right to disappoint the French people's demand that he "respect the given word" and "keep commitments, because never has confidence been so shaken, so fragile".
The French must have change, "because never has immobility been so dangerous for France as in this changing world . . . where any delay will be fatal . . . We have given in too much to disorder and violence."
He would demand results, "because the French are fed up with nothing ever improving . . . the French are fed up with sacrifices imposed on them without bringing results".
Mr Sarkozy promised "to break with the behaviour of the past, with the habitual way of thinking and intellectual conformity, which has done so much harm to our democracy".
Alluding to his decision to include leftist ministers in his government, Mr Sarkozy said there were "no sides in the service of France".
The new prime minister, François Fillon, will take over from Dominique de Villepin at 11am today. The government Mr Fillon will announce tomorrow is expected to include Bernard Kouchner, founder of Médecins sans Frontières and a longtime socialist, as foreign minister.
Mr Sarkozy rode up the Champs-Élysées, surrounded by hundreds of republican guards on motorcycles and horseback, standing in a Peugeot convertible, waving and blowing kisses to well-wishers. The new president then laid wreaths before statues of Georges Clémenceau and Charles de Gaulle.
In the Bois de Boulogne, at the monument to 35 young members of the Resistance who were machine-gunned to death by the Gestapo, he announced his first decision as president: that a letter by the 17-year-old Resistance hero Guy Môquet, written on the eve of his execution, would be read aloud in French schoolrooms every year.
Mr Sarkozy then left for Orly airport, en route to dinner in Berlin with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. The two leaders were to discuss Mr Sarkozy's proposal for a "simplified" version of the European constitutional treaty.
During the campaign, Mr Sarkozy offended some Germans by suggesting that the "Franco-German engine" of Europe was dépassé, by threatening the independence of the European Central Bank and by insisting repeatedly that "France never committed genocide. France did not invent the Final Solution".
But yesterday, Mr Sarkozy urged the young people of France to "remember that to end this unending cycle of vengeance, we had to build Europe". "Franco-German reconciliation is a miracle," he said, "and nothing must ever lead us to sacrifice the friendship between the French and German people".