Rarely has a former president been so talked about. “Sarko after Sarko”, this is the subject on which our collaborator Etienne Girard and the journalist Laurent Valdiguié looked. (Marianne) in a book which appears this week in Seuil entitled The Godfather. Sarko after Sarko: the investigation. We publish here extracts concerning the links that the former host of the Elysée maintains with the heir CEO Arnaud Lagardère, who speaks without language. Unpublished.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the “godfather” of Arnaud Lagardère
There is something childish about him. A round face of a kid. A crude way of speaking. And a little something not serious. As if what he said didn’t really matter to him. Arnaud Lagardère, despite his 62 years, including twenty at the helm of his father’s group, continues to stand out in the cozy world of big bosses. He knows it. He is playing it. And above all, he doesn’t care. Without trying to hide it. “I refuse all lunches, dinners, that doesn’t interest me. And my holidays, I only spend them with family,” he announces without beating around the bush. And although he lives in the Villa Montmorency, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, a stone’s throw from Vincent Bolloré’s house, and a stone’s throw from that of Nicolas Sarkozy, Arnaud Lagardère never visits them in private. He never went to Cap Nègre, to Carla Bruni. And he only sees Bolloré, outside of work meetings, “through the car window”, or “when we take out the trash” [sic]. He lives apart, outside the world of bosses and business.
The Lagardère heir, unlike his father, was ultimately never part of this world. It remains to be understood how, since the death of Jean‐Luc Lagardère, recognized as a flamboyant captain of industry, this atypical and slightly despised son managed to remain at the head of this empire for so long. Against all odds. And also against himself. The key to this longevity? The person concerned says that he owes it to a man: his “brother”. “Call him my mentor, or my godfather if you prefer, but, yes, I owe everything to Nicolas,” admits Arnaud Lagardère. “Yes, I owe him my longevity.”
Installed in his father’s office, upstairs in the private mansion on rue de Presbourg, which faces the Etoile, the heir is inexhaustible. He is not disturbed by his phone or by an assistant. The office, with its faded hangings, looks like a mausoleum. A model airplane. An autographed football and a few scattered objects seem to have been added and plastered on the initial decoration of the ghost of the place. He calls him “Jean‐Luc”. More rarely “my father”. And cites it all the time, like an essential compass in the unknown of the present. Lagardère is convinced of this: many people have tried to take him out and “steal” his group. To hear him say, in twenty years, “almost the entire CAC 40” has been there. “Foreign predators too,” he says. “But Nicolas always stood in the way,” assures the heir in one sentence.
The heir and the minister have known each other for a long time without Arnaud Lagardère particularly remembering a first meeting. “It was Nicolas who took this initiative from my father, telling him that he would like to get to know me. He did with me what he did with Vincent’s children [Bolloré], by Bernard Arnault, of Bouygues. The new generation, the world after. It fascinates him, because it rejuvenates him.” “Nicolas and Arnaud” are six years apart. The first was born on January 28, 1955, the second on March 18, 1961. When he was stationed in the United States, in one of the group’s subsidiaries, between 1994 and 1998, Arnaud Lagardère remembers meetings at the town hall of Neuilly during his visits to Paris. He sees “the fire in the fireplace” again. For Sarkozy, it’s the time of his “crossing the desert” after the fiasco of the Balladur candidacy. Arnaud Lagardère evokes his “fascination” “for this guy at the bottom of the hole”, as he had seen his father, a few years earlier, on the edge of the abyss after the fiasco of the 5th TV channel. “That’s where the alchemy with Nicolas dates from,” he assures. He had taken a lot and I saw him bounce back, reborn like a phoenix, as my father knew how to do…”
Nicolas Sarkozy and Arnaud Lagardère in March 2007 before a political program on Europe 1.
© / AFP
“Show you’re the boss”
Little by little, Sarkozy is returning to the political game. Arnaud Lagardère returns to Paris. He is invited to meetings with the barons of the group, the “Jean‐Luc grunts” who all look down on him. No one, among these business veterans, who participated in the construction of this industrial giant that is the group which controls Hachette, Airbus and EADS, and is present in The world, Canal +, as well as a host of newspapers, does not take this nonsense very seriously. Furthermore, in this environment of polytechnicians loaded with diplomas, young Arnaud has the CV of an errand boy. All this also brings him closer to Sarkozy, also unloved in his community, the low-ranking politician, who did not make the ENA.
In March 2003, the death of Jean-Luc Lagardère was announced for the first time by mistake. “Chirac calls me saying: ‘So, poor Jean-Luc has died.’ No, no, dear president, but it’s true that he’s not well,” his son remembers. “Nicolas was fantastic at the hospital. He took time for me. Bad tongues say that he regains influence in a media group, but I felt a real friendship. In difficult times, he has experienced so much himself, he is incomparable.” After the funeral of Jean‐Luc Lagardère in Saint‐François‐Xavier, behind the Invalides, in the presence of the entire CAC 40 and part of the government, Sarkozy taunted the heir: “He said to me: ‘Take some time, if you need to cry, you go home. But when you’re in the office, you don’t show anything. You show that you’re the boss.’ That’s where he helped me a lot.”
“Show that you are the boss”, the phrase, reported twenty years later, says everything about the issue of the moment. Because for this only son, following the sudden death of the patriarch, nothing is yet completely acquired. Jean‐Luc Lagardère, who had not anticipated the worst before his hip operation, had not really put his inheritance or his succession in order. Its last written provisions date from 1995.
Since then, Nicolas Sarkozy has never stopped sponsoring the heir. “There have always been people who did not necessarily wish us well, who hoped to include us in a large group of media, confides Arnaud Lagardère. Everyone knew that Nicolas was the closest to the group. So, they all went through him. Then Nicolas said to me: ‘Arnaud, what do you want to do? Do you want to change your life? Do you want to earn money?'” The boss of group that bears his name remembers the attempts of Jean‐René Fourtou, then head of Vivendi. He also mentions Patrick Sayer, the president of Eurazéo, from 2002 to 2018, former managing partner of Lazard. They had their sights set on his group. “And many others, he smiles. Each time, Nicolas told them: ‘We’re not touching Arnaud.’ He told a lot of people.” Arnaud Lagardère wants to stay in charge. And, essentially, sells the fabulous industrial empire he inherited by apartment. He separated from EADS in 2013, for 2.5 billion euros. That year, he also sold his 25% of the Amaury group, which allowed him to have a foothold in The Parisian and in The Team. He will also sell his 20% in Canal +…
The painful episode Paris Match
April 2005. The Lagardère group organizes its annual seminar in Deauville. Around the heir, all the important executives of the global giant. And two political guests, Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, who accepted the invitation that François Hollande had declined before her. “I present to you my brother,” says Arnaud Lagardère, introducing the man who is president of the UMP and who will not become Minister of the Interior until June. This is the first time that the link between the two men has been revealed in public, so openly. It’s all the talk since everyone knows that Sarkozy will be a candidate in 2007. But on August 25, 2005, on the cover of Paris Match, Cécilia Sarkozy is photographed at the foot of a building in New York in the company of another man, Richard Attias, with whom she consults the plans of an apartment. Her lover makes the headlines…
Arnaud Lagardère remembers this day as “absolute horror”. “I’m in the United States. It’s Nicolas who calls me. So it’s him who tells me. He says to me: ‘I can’t imagine that you don’t know about it.’ That’s his first sentence. He’s cold. He’s not mad at me for knowing, he’s mad at me for not holding things tight enough and for not knowing about this kind of thing. things. I tell him: ‘I want you to believe me, I don’t know. – I believe you, but in this case, it’s negligence on your part. – Yes, it’s negligence. negligence on my part.’ It’s horror for him at that moment.’ Obviously, given their links, if he had been consulted, Arnaud Lagardère would have prevented the publication of what will be one of the best sellers of the year for his weekly… When he talks about the episode today again, Nicolas Sarkozy remembers a humiliation in a public square. He mentions the “hyena’s looks on him”, when leaving the Council of Ministers. This “image of the cuckold”, he says between his teeth, his eye still dark. The wound, at the time, is immense. In addition to that of his self-esteem, there is also the damage to his family…
So at the head of Paris Match, Alain Genestar, former boss of JDD, had until then good relations with his son Lagardère. He also did not anticipate the lightning that his editorial coup would provoke. Everyone close to Nicolas Sarkozy remembers his black anger. “He even imagined that Villepin was behind it… It was terrible… Plus, we had to live with Genestar because it was complicated to fire him straight away even if, honestly, I was dying to do so. We separated a year later,” says Arnaud Lagardère. Sarkozy will never be mistreated again.
“We remained angry for a while, and things returned to normal,” continues Lagardère. Sarkozy remarried to Carla Bruni is probably the politician of the last twenty years to have made the most covers of Paris Match… Elected to the Elysée, he will present the Legion of Honor to his “brother” Arnaud in his office. “It was a Sunday, there were four of us, my two eldest, their mother, and just Nicolas, it was an unforgettable moment,” remembers Arnaud Lagardère, who found his mentor. The scene also says a lot about their relationships and the solitude of the Lagardère heir. Many others like him would have organized a festive ceremony with people for their Legion of Honor presentation, moreover by the president at the Elysée… Not him. His family is Sarkozy.
The Godfather. Sarko after Sarko: the investigation. (The threshold). Published on September 29, 2023.