In Pursuit of Acceptance.

In the non-French-speaking world, anyone who wishes to see first-hand the experience of human frailty in a position of political power can look to George W. Bush, whose well-documented failings and verbal idiocy have been a source of hilarity for his entire term as US President. For French speakers, however, we have the joy of current French President, Nicolas Sarkozy.

First, there was the controversy over his wife's refusal to campaign alongside him. Second, there were no surprises when said wife filed for divorce within months of his election victory. Third, there was his paparazzi-favoured whirlwind romance with Italian actress/singer/model Carla Bruni, who has previously been linked to an endless slew of desirable wealthy bachelors (Mick Jagger, for example). Fourth, there was the surprise marriage of Bruni and Sarkozy after only three months of courtship. Now, there's the beginning of the Sarkozy dynasty, with remarkably handsome 21-year-old Jean Sarkozy running a Bush-family-esque candidacy for the local Neuilly council.

What is most remarkable is that all of this has occurred since the 2007 election, only 11 months ago.

The French don't much like such personal controversies in their leaders, and Sarkozy's approval ratings have been falling steadily since his victory over the equally troubled Ségolène Royal. So now is the time when Sarkozy starts pulling out the big guns, and coming up with novel, imaginative policies which show his big heart and concern for humanity in the midst of personal crisis.

Like deciding that all 10-year-old primary school children should be entrusted with the memoirs a Jewish child their age who perished in the Holocaust 60 years ago.

In a move to combat what Sarkozy sees as growing anti-Semitism in France, he believes that all schoolchildren should be instructed to read memoirs of a child who was sent to a concentration camp in the early 1940s. Naturally, this has outraged Nationalist groups, including the still-popular Front National whose long-time leader, Jean Marie Le Pen, believes the gas chambers were little more than a footnote to World War II. But it has also outraged Holocaust survivors such as Simone Veil, who had previously greeted Sarkozy warmly when he became the first President in a decade to address the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France. Veil, not unreasonably, believes "we cannot do this to a 10-year-old... it would be unbearable."

The question is, why does a country so proud of its laïcité - the word given to the exclusion of religion from political matters - become so touchy when it comes to questions of Judaism and the Holocaust? How can France ban public schoolchildren from wearing religious symbols, including veils and yarmulkes, but demand such intense religion-centric education? Why is Sarkozy not also addressing the problems of social exclusion of Muslims, particularly those from post-colonial North Africa, in French primary schools? (This would be a more fitting policy, given his previous record of verbal harrassment against such ethnic groups.)

And why does multicultural education have to be inextricably linked to persecution? Can we not have a policy which positively reinforces equal citizenship and respect for people of all backgrounds, rather than singling out particular groups for which the rest must feel sorry? Will not such a policy have the counter-reaction of having French children continue to see people of Jewish heritage, such as myself, as somehow 'different' and 'excluded'?

Is this part of a personal struggle Sarkozy is enduring with his own Jewish heritage (he is part Hungarian Catholic, part Greek Jew)? Or does perhaps the France of Sarkozy still bear the guilt of the Vichy régime?

For an English-language article on the subject from Israeli newspaper Haaretz, click here.