Nicolas Sarkozy

Laurent Mellier remembers the dark days of 2003, when drivers would spot the French-flag sticker on his Honda and yell at him. Alain de Chalvron's low point came when a movie audience erupted after a character mentioned France and people around him began shouting insults. For one French diplomat in Los Angeles, it was watching children dump bottles of French wine into the street outside the consulate. "It was very insulting," the diplomat said.

If this story turned up on daytime TV, audiences would never believe it: The reformist president of France, on the rebound from his October divorce, is about take a new wife -- an Italian tire heiress and former supermodel who looks a lot like the ex, and who dated Eric Clapton, whom she dumped for Mick Jagger when he was still married to Jerry Hall, and who later married a long-haired French intellectual nearly 10 years her junior after living with his father, nearly 20 years her senior.

On the same day that a massive strike crippled public transportation here, President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Cecilia, announced the end of their marriage. On both fronts, public and personal, the president remained silent Thursday. Concerning the one-day strike challenging Sarkozy's plan to overhaul France's public sector, the French leader had no comment as he left for a European Union meeting in Lisbon.

President Bush and French President Nicolas Sarkozy saluted the thaw in the French-American relationship on Wednesday, finding common ground on Afghanistan and Iran -- two of the most troublesome foreign-policy challenges -- and suggesting they even agreed on Iraq, the bete noire of Washington's dealings with Paris. On a wind-swept lawn of George Washington's Mount Vernon plantation, the two presidents gushed about each other and the improved state of U.S.

Nicolas Sarkozy took office as France's 23rd president Wednesday and moved quickly to deliver on promises of change by assembling a Cabinet of historic diversity that is likely to include an internationally known leader of the leftist opposition. Sarkozy, 52, succeeded fellow conservative Jacques Chirac, 74, during an elegant ceremony at the Elysee Palace.

Every day, Fadela Amara, a small woman with what she calls "a big mouth," plunges into tough immigrant neighborhoods where her boss, Nicolas Sarkozy, dares not go. A high school dropout from the slums who became a celebrated feminist, Amara acts as the message and messenger to a world where France's new president is reviled: Soon after Sarkozy famously referred to unruly immigrant youth as "scum" two years ago, the projects erupted into France's worst riots in decades.

For the last 30 years, French presidents have been grave, deliberate men with lofty airs who struggled to lead often weak and divided governments. The inability or unwillingness of those leaders to enact reforms reinforced the stereotype that the French do not want change. Enter Nicolas Sarkozy, stereotype-buster.

France has been crippled for more than a week by a wave of strikes against President Nicolas Sarkozy's economic reforms. Aboard a sort of Noah's ark of labor unrest has been the typical French mix: public transit workers, civil servants, teachers, nurses, tobacco shop owners, air traffic controllers, fishermen. Even opera stagehands. On Thursday, nearly half of France's universities were shut down by protests, and soon lawyers and judges are planning to walk out over their own grievances.

The French want to be paid more to work less. When they're not on holiday, they're on strike. Or, as President Bush probably never said, the trouble with the French is that they don't have a word for "entrepreneur." It's all true except when it isn't. The word "entrepreneur" may have gone missing from the French spirit, if not from its vocabulary, but the new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is determined to bring it back and has the legislature working overtime in a special session to do so.

After weeks of what the French press branded "false suspense," President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday night finally announced what everyone expected: He will seek a second term in office. Sarkozy, 57, said it was unthinkable that he would not want to remain in his post given the "unprecedented crisis in France, Europe and the world. " "It would be like a captain saying at the height of a storm that he was giving up," he said on live television. The announcement came as Sarkozy's Socialist Party rival, Francois Hollande, has pulled farther ahead in opinion polls.