Dominique de Villepin

Abstract

Daniel Vernet directeur des relations internationales, Le Monde, Paris.Translated by Susan M. Murphy.IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD--or was it the deed? Dominique de Villepin hesitates between Saint John and Doctor Faust. For this French minister of foreign affairs, who arrived at the Quai d'Orsay after the defeat of the left in the spring 2002 elections, the word deed. One might expect a careful, polished discourse, the usual technocratic jargon, from any civil servant whose career had taken the traditional path of studies--brilliant ones, at that--to Paris's Institut d'etudes politiques (Sciences Po) and the Ecole nationale d'administration (ENA, the prestigious training ground for the country's governing elite, whose graduates are known as enarques). Nothing of the sort from Dominique de Villepin: before being an enarque and a diplomat, he a poet, a lover of words, a manipulator of lapidary phrases.Consider one example: Jacques Chirac, whom de Villepin has served since the end of the 1970s, found himself in difficulty over a potentially embarrassing videocassette relating to the Paris public markets. De Villepin rode to the rescue, turning to none other than the 19th-century poet Arthur Rimbaud, from whose works the foreign minister managed to dig up the adjective abracadabrantesque. And this precisely the word Chirac chose on national television to characterize the affair involving the markets, in a masterful display of obfuscation that made everyone forget what the affair was supposed to have been about in the first place--namely allegations concerning bribes and under-the-table financing of certain political parties. The incident reveals a Dominique de Villepin who never finds himself at a loss for an explanation, a figure of speech or a lesson from history, and as always with him, the epic competes with the lyrical. Asked, during a short visit to Poland, about agricultural subsidies to Poland and the other candidate countries for admission to the European Union, de Villepin took advantage of the setting, Warsaw's historic marketplace, to wax eloquent about the relationship between Napoleon and Maria Waleska. Let the Polish peasants figure that one out.Several minutes later he was on the phone with Colin Powell to put the finishing touches on what would become UN Security Council Resolution 1441. Did he inundate the American secretary of state with historico-cultural considerations pertaining to the Middle East, or haggle over every comma? His colleagues confirm his ability to switch registers as easily as he devours a book of poems or masters a difficult file. It very rare to meet a man such as him, who both a poet and a very good squadron commander. Yes, an excellent commando, declares Jacques Chirac himself, adding that one of de Villepin's qualities is his pace. For every page I read, he reads four.Any self-respecting French politician must show a penchant for things intellectual and have published at least one book (of which he may not necessarily be the author). In de Villepin's case, no one doubts the authorship. This the man who, while serving as secretary general of the Elysee Palace, a post demanding constant vigilance, found the time to write a history of the hundred days, Napoleon's brief return to power following his exile to Elba and preceding his defeat at Waterloo, and then followed this up with a political essay poetically entitled The Cry of the Gargoyle (Le Cri de la gargouille). Shortly after assuming his current job of foreign minister, he published a tome on poetry that ran to more than 800 pages, entitled (again a borrowing from Rimbaud) In Praise of Fire Thieves (Eloge des voleurs de feu). Far from being a simple anthology of French poetry such as Georges Pompidou produced prior to becoming prime minister under, and subsequently successor to, President Charles de Gaulle, de Villepin's was a work teeming with ideas, nourished by decades of reading. …