One observer notes Sarkozy’s “crazy appetite for living on the edge.” GERALD SCARFE

To understand Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been President of France for three intense months, it helps to know the story of the human bomb. “It was in 1993, when Sarkozy was the mayor of Neuilly,” Philippe Labro, the novelist and talk-show host, recalled over lunch a week or so after Sarkozy received his first Bastille Day salute as President. (Neuilly is a small leafy suburb of Paris.) “A psychotic took over a nursery school. He strapped explosives to his body, and he held the children hostage. He called himself H.B., the human bomb. He had an incoherent set of demands—a true lunatic—and the police surrounded the place. Sarkozy went into the school, completely alone, and began to talk to the human bomb. He engaged him in conversation: what did he want, what were his problems, could he solve them? But first he had to let the children go. Well, half an hour later, out comes Nicolas with children in his arms and all around him. Later, of course, the police went in and shot the human bomb dead.” He shrugged. The French police are not known for their gentle touch with psychos.

“This was the first time that many people in France had even heard of Nicolas Sarkozy,” Labro went on. “That was the moment he was introduced to the French people. Two things were apparent. Courage? Yes. But also an almost crazy appetite for living on the edge that is completely outside the normal experience of French politicians. He likes risks, enjoys risks, revels in risks.”

In the days since the election, the sense of Sarkozy as a risk-taker has grown stronger, and so has the sense that he is something of a human bomb himself, an unknown explosive quantity whose ends and effects are hard to gauge. His timer is ticking. This makes his aura in France very different from his aura in America, where no French personality since Brigitte Bardot has been such a projection screen for wishful dreams and onanistic fantasies. The fantasy on the American right is that he is staunchly pro-American, pro-market, and sympathetic to the Republican agenda. Like Bardot, though—an extreme French nationalist who turned out to love animals more than Americans—he is bound to disappoint as they discover who he really is and what he really wants: a French nationalist with a rage for modernization, and largely European horizons. His French supporters, meanwhile, who understand this, admire his confidence and his daring. But the human-bomb factor casts a sense of portent over what is, in other respects, an enormous sense of possibility.

Though Parisians who voted for Sarkozy would like to believe that the feeling in the city is “Blairite,” it is really nothing like the spirit of May, 1997, in London—a moment that, in retrospect, seems almost Kennedyesque in its exuberance and willed innocence. The feeling in Paris is more like the spirit surrounding the ascension, in 1992, of Bill Clinton, a politician whom Sarkozy (said to be an avid “West Wing” viewer) admires and emulates: old doubts about the “character” of the new guy are for the moment overwhelmed by his energy, his brains, and his obvious gifts—but lying in wait is a strident, powerful opposition that, with an intensity that seems to an outsider disproportionate to any offense, hates him, really hates him, and is waiting for a chance to get even.

Sarkozy, knowing this, spent his first two months engineering a series of audacious tactical coups that were of exactly the human-bomb type: walking up to dangerous men and defusing them. He disarmed the two most potent politicians in the Socialist Party—the international activist Bernard Kouchner, whom he made his foreign minister, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the finance minister for the former Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, whom he got appointed head of the International Monetary Fund. At the same time, by talking tough on immigration and crime he stole votes, mostly in the South, from the extreme-right National Front—whose leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, had made it to the final round of the previous Presidential election. He brought many of Le Pen’s supporters into his own party, even at the price of being mildly respectful to the evil old man.

Yet politicians who are in a position of strength and have radical programs, Thatchers and Reagans, do not fill their cabinets with members of the opposition, since they understand that members of the opposition are likely eventually to oppose them. And so there are doubts about whether Sarkozy has any strategic vision to go along with the tactical brilliance, any plan for France beyond the old one of getting power and keeping it.

There are certain realities of Sarkozy’s position that are easily overlooked—again, not unlike Clinton’s in 1992. His election, over the Socialist Ségolène Royal, was far from a rout; and in the legislative elections that were held the following month, as a kind of consolation for the losers, he actually lost ground. A stronger Socialist candidate—Strauss-Kahn, say—could likely have won the election for the left. The election was really won only on the night of the Presidential debate a few days before the final round of voting, when Royal harangued Sarkozy for two and a half hours about his weaknesses and flaws as a man and as a politician. This allowed Sarkozy to look wistfully harried and play the one part that he had never had the chance to play before—a sympathetic, erring middle-class French husband being blasted by a furious wife.

Gossip swirls around Paris about Sarkozy’s relationship with his own wife, the darkly beautiful Cécilia, as it did in Washington about the Clintons, but it tends to come down to a fairly coherent story, which is that both have had romantic attachments outside their marriage but have come back together now not from convenience but out of real passion—he adores her the way short, ambitious men adore beautiful women who are taller than they are but tolerate their advances. He sent her off to Tripoli to rescue the Bulgarian nurses—a group of unfortunate women who had been sentenced to death by a Libyan court on the implausible charge of deliberately injecting Libyan children with H.I.V. She brought the nurses back, but there have been allegations—strongly denied—that the mission’s success was connected to an arms deal between the Libyans and the French. Anyway, there seemed something unduly personal about using one’s family, rather than the usual channels of Euro diplomacy, to make an international deal, even an impeccably humanitarian one.

People close to Sarkozy like to say that he is an American manqué, meaning that in the normal run of twentieth-century things, his family—Greek Jews on his mother’s side, minor Hungarian nobles on his father’s—would have kept going west and ended up in New York, where he would now be running a private bank and sitting on museum boards. But an American manqué is not at all the same thing as someone who is pro-American. He is not reflexively opposed to American interests, as Mitterrand was and as Chirac became. The point of his so-called Americanness, though, is to be able to act the way an American would if he were running France. He is surrounded by people who admire and understand America, but what they have taken from it is the habit of high-spirited enterprise and self-assertion. Sarkozy is a statist, unrepentant and unreformed, and determined to use the levers of government for its own good. By “reform” Sarkozy means growth and a crash course in modernization. By reform, he means, in a nutshell, anything to catch up with London. He is eager, even desperate, to modernize France—to make it competitive on every front with the other leading Western nations—but he does not place any particular value on doing it chiefly through entrepreneurial capitalism outside the control of the state. He would like to lame the unions—he has already proposed, and in part achieved, legislation to compel minimum services during transportation and education strikes—but he does not embrace the rest of the Thatcherite program of liberalism. His model for the future is something more like the Airbus program: a pan-European, state-centered, semiprivate enterprise to catch up with and outdo those American airplanes. (In fact, one of his first acts was to help streamline the Airbus bureaucracy, which previously had two parallel French and German lines of descent, just as one of his first acts was to ask Angela Merkel, the German premier, to lunch with Airbus workers in Toulouse.)