As debate over the future of France intensifies, even the new president's exercise regime is under the spotlight. A leading philosopher has urged Nicolas Sarkozy to give up the "undignified" practice of jogging, and take up walking instead. The theory is that all the great European thinkers, from Aristotle to Heidegger, were walkers, whereas jogging is a modern and anti-intellectual fad, writes Frank McNally.
"Western civilisation, in its best sense, was born with the promenade," explained Alain Finkielkraut on a late-night TV panel discussion, as reported by the International Herald Tribune. "Walking is a sensitive, spiritual act," he added. "Jogging - it is management of the body." Other panellists agreed and blamed US presidents, starting with Jimmy Carter, for making jogging fashionable among world leaders.
To jog or not to jog is part of a much wider argument in France, where the soul-searching has been even greater than usual of late. In fact, Sarkozy's new finance minister, Christine Lagarde, wants the search called off - or at least scaled down. In a revision of the country's most famous idea - "I think, therefore I am" - she recently outraged intellectuals by suggesting that French people think; therefore they have low industrial productivity.
"Enough thinking already, roll up your sleeves," she lectured the National Assembly. To which the celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy issued the stinging response: "This is the sort of thing you can hear in café conversations from morons who drink too much." When it can get so ugly between the finance minister and the country's leading intellectual, it is somehow less of a shock to learn that France has been troubled of late by a rise in something called "bouliganisme". This is the name given to violence among boules and pétanque players: a spate of which led to games being suspended in one département earlier this summer.
Pétanque would normally be located at the less strenuous end of the physical exercise spectrum: somewhere between walking slowly and lying down. But the prize-money in local tournaments, combined with drinking, can give an edge to this gentlest of sports. In one recent incident, the like of which you wouldn't hear of even in Wicklow GAA, a bar owner was held against a wall and threatened with a sickle.
But getting back to the question raised by Monsieur Finkielkraut: is jogging, as he suggests, an undignified activity for a world leader? Or, to put the contrary argument, could this era of the jogging politician be seen as another stage in the ascent of man? Certainly, joggers seem to have inherited the earth, temporarily. Our own Taoiseach is among them, when his leg isn't at him. But jogging is almost compulsory in the White House, where a president who abstains from it may be seen as a lame duck. It confers an image of dynamism and charisma, especially when others have to follow you around. We all remember the jogging Bill Clinton pursued by a retinue of minders and photographers, like a modern, speeded-up version of the Twelve Apostles.
It is true that, before Jimmy Carter raised the ante, most political leaders could get by with walking. And maybe this was more conducive to reflection. But even in the old days, walking often had to have a point. The ruling classes of many countries were once notorious for their need, while strolling in the countryside, to shoot things. I suspect that golf only evolved as a way of allowing the élite to enjoy pedestrian exercise with reduced fatality levels.
A more convincing case for walking is that it has always been the aerobic activity of choice for poets. If Wordsworth had been jogging lonely as a cloud, he would have been disinclined to pause and admire the daffodils, thereby losing his rhythm. There could certainly be no question of him stopping long enough to compose the opening verse of his poem, or he would have risked tweaking a hamstring when he resumed.
Similarly, although the dry woodland paths he mentions sound ideal for it, Yeats almost certainly wasn't jogging when he wrote The Wild Swans at Coole. Even at a moderate pace, he would not have had time to count the swans. Or if he had, he would have said there were "about 60". A very slow runner might have counted the exact number. Only a walker would have said it was "nine and fifty".
The sole poetic tribute to jogging I can think of is Jonathan Richman's Roadrunner, a short-lived hit during the Carter administration. And while this does have a naïve charm, partly because the singer looked and sounded like Bruce Springsteen's happier younger brother, its lyrics were never likely to trouble the Leaving Cert English curriculum.
As a born-again jogger who also walks a lot, I can see both sides of the argument. Jogging feels undignified sometimes; although the sighting of a "power-walker" is usually enough to restore your self-respect instantly. As for its stimulative power, any benefits accrue only afterwards. In fact, like another well-known form of exercise - banging your head against a wall - much of the enjoyment from jogging is when you stop.
And yet there are occasional insights to be had while running. Why, only the other day - mid-run - I experienced a sort-of Cartesian dialogue in which my mind argued in favour of the benefits of regular jogging while my knees protested that they had suffered enough.
The latter pressed home their point in the context of Descartes's dualism, which holds that the mind and body are separate substances, capable of mutually independent existence. They presumed sarcastically that my mind was familiar with this concept. And in short, they suggested that, if it fancied any more jogging in future, it might consider doing it alone.