[i]“Le merde’ !!”[/i]
[quote] New book takes aim at Chirac
March 28, 2006
PARIS: A bestselling new biography accuses French leader Jacques Chirac of presiding over a national drift
into inertia, division and debt.
The Tragedy of the President, by political journalist Franz-Olivier Giesbert, has sold almost 200,000 copies in two weeks -
a new print run is under way - and is the talk of Paris for its damning yet affectionate portrait of the 73-year-old French
President.
According to Giesbert, who edits the Centre-Right news weekly Le Point, Chirac has “been transformed with age into the
incarnation of French decline”.
Through a political career that began in 1962 in the cabinet of Georges Pompidou, led to two terms as prime minister and
concluded with 12 years in the presidency, he has come to live “in concubinage” with the Republic.
“So close are they that at the end they have come to resemble each other: which, given their respective states, is a
compliment neither to the Republic nor to Chirac,” he writes.(more story at link)
The Austrailian[/quote]