Whenever I visit Paris I am reminded that France is a republic still in search of a monarch. Why else would the president live in a palace? Where else are ministers still flanked by frock-coated equerries? This is as Charles de Gaulle intended. France's fifth republic belongs to an elite described by an elegant elision of birth, education and manners.
Or rather has belonged. What makes this year's presidential election campaign so interesting - aside, that is, from the welcome certainty of Jacques Chirac's departure from the Elysée - is the visible discomfort of the Parisian nobility. Politics, they have discovered, is no longer exclusively their property.
