TWO days before the first round of the French presidential election last month, Nicolas Sarkozy donned a red checked shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, mounted a small white horse named Universe and rode around the Camargue. A gaggle of reporters and cameramen followed him in a cart pulled by a tractor. The black bulls on the nearby pasture stayed away.
"A vague resemblance to the look of George W Bush on his Texan ranch," is how the left-leaning newspaper Liberation described Sarkozy, who was elected president last Sunday, beating the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal in a runoff. The newspaper di
smissed the event as a media stunt, saying: "Everything for the image, right up until the last minute."
Sarkozy is unabashedly pro-American, a man who openly proclaims his love of Ernest Hemingway, Steve McQueen and Sylvester Stallone and his admiration for America's strong work ethic and its belief in upward mobility.
The last film that made Sarkozy cry was Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion. He calls himself "proud" to wear the label "Sarkozy the American".
In his acceptance speech, Sarkozy reached out to the United States, signalling his desire to end the tension that existed with Washington during Jacques Chirac's presidency.
Addressing his "American friends", Sarkozy said, "I want to tell them that France will always be by their side when they need her, but that friendship is also accepting the fact that friends can think differently."
He was so pleased with the message that he told one American friend just before the speech, "I'm going to talk about America!"
There must have been relief in the White House that Bush didn't have to call Royal to congratulate her. She said during the campaign that she would never kneel before Bush the way she suggested her opponent had done. She tried to tar Sarkozy as an imitator of what she called Bush's phoney compassionate conservatism. She even told a Hezbollah lawmaker in Lebanon last December that she agreed with him when he talked about the "unlimited dementia" of the Bush administration.
Now, with Tony Blair stepping down as Prime Minister and uncertainty about how Gordon Brown might continue the 'special relationship' with Washington, Bush was able to congratulate the man who wants to be his new best friend in Europe.
"They had a friendly, very friendly chat," said David Martinon, Sarkozy's chief of staff. "Mr Sarkozy wants to improve the relationship with the US, to renew it. There's a need for a change. There has to be a way to restore confidence."
Sarkozy is Bush's kind of guy: brash, tough-talking and proud of it. Sarkozy's vow to rid the troubled suburbs of France of delinquent youths - he called them "scum" - is the French equivalent of Bush's challenge to "Bring 'em on".
Both men are teetotallers. Both are disciplined exercisers: Sarkozy jogs, but like Bush, is a fearsome bike rider.
In Washington, Sarkozy's victory has been warmly welcomed. "We certainly look forward to cooperation with the French," said Tony Snow, the White House press secretary. "We know that there are going to be areas of disagreement. But there are certainly real opportunities to work together on a broad range of issues."
The two presidents will meet in Berlin next month for the G8 summit of the leading industrial nations, and Sarkozy is expected to visit the US for the opening of the UN General Assembly in September.
The Democrat Senator, Charles E Schumer, said: "It would be nice to have someone who's head of France who doesn't have a knee-jerk reaction against the United States."
His Republican counterpart Richard G Lugar said Sarkozy would be favourable to the United States, adding, "Clearly his views are more in line with ours."
Republican Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, praised Sarkozy as "the candidate of change".
Certainly, Sarkozy has promised never to behave in the "arrogant" way the French government did in making threats against the US in the prelude to the Iraq war. "You must have loathed us then," he said in a speech in Washington last September. But although he has a bellicose air, he has never suggested that had he been president at the time he would have sent French troops to fight in the American-led invasion.
"I have been in every meeting Mr Sarkozy has ever had on the subject, and no, no, he would never have sent troops," said Martinon, who also serves as Sarkozy's foreign policy adviser.
Indeed, Sarkozy has long defended France's decision to stay out of the war, citing the bitter lessons of his country's tortured history in Algeria and Vietnam.
"We were kicked out of Algeria fewer than 50 years ago, so don't tell us that we don't remember and that we don't understand," Sarkozy told an audience at Columbia University in 2004 in explaining France's decision to stay out of the Iraq war. "We lived what you are living through in America before you. We were in Vietnam before you, and our young people died in Vietnam."
He added: "In France, history is something that counts. Please don't be angry with us because we remember what happened to us.
"Is there even a single country of the world, at any time of history, that was able to maintain itself in a sustained way in a country that was not its own, uniquely by the force of arms? Never, not a single one, even the Chinese."
That analysis of the Iraq war sounds remarkably similar to the one articulated repeatedly by Chirac both publicly and during private meetings with Bush.
"In Algeria, we began with a sizeable army and huge resources, and the fighters for independence were only a handful of people, but they won," Chirac said in an interview in September 2003. "That's how it is."
Revolution in the air
Nicolas Sarkozy is convinced that France needs to reform along the Anglo-Saxon model, pointing out that les rosbifs are able to buy houses on the French side of the Channel because of their stronger economy. He believes that the French are not inherently anti-reform, just that they have not yet had the right leader.
Sarkozy wants to create an incentive for the French to work longer then the standard 35-hour week by making overtime exempt from tax and social security payments. Cynics might say that these extra hours will be the only time the French will actually work, after spending the rest of the day having coffee breaks while puffing on Gauloises and enjoying a two-hour lunch break.
His plans to increase taxes on polluters are likely to be welcomed in a country that has turned green later than other parts of Western Europe, although campaigners will be angry at his planned expansion of nuclear power.
Ups and downs of the French connection
• 1778 France backs nascent US in American War of Independence
• 1886 France gifts the US the Statue of Liberty
• 1917 US sends troops to France during First World War
• 1920s Paris becomes a magnet for US artists, writers and performers
• 1944 US forces invade France as part of Allied liberation of Western Europe from the Nazis
• 1949 Both countries are founder members of Nato
• 1950 Worried by the spread of Communism, the US begins covert aid to France in Indo-China
• 1956 US fails to back France and UK during Suez invasion
• 1958 France decides to develop its own nuclear deterrent
• 1966 France under General Charles de Gaulle pulls out of Nato's integrated military command
• 2003 France criticises US stance over Iraq. US renames French fries 'Freedom fries'.
