Le jogging de Supersarko

French thinkers and writers love to stroll -- to ambulate, that is to say, in a manner that is purposeful but not rushed, neither speeded up nor slowed down. An unfortunate side effect of the liberalization of the economic sphere in the early 19th century, of course, was the spirit-of-capitalism-powered acceleration of foot traffic in Paris. The hurried pace of modern city life so disgusted self-invented aristocrats like Nerval and the teenage Baudelaire that they practiced flanerie -- conspicuous dawdling, ostentatious loitering. When Nerval led a lobster on a pale blue leash through the gardens of the Palais-Royal, it wasn't because he was on the brink of madness, as legend has it; it was a form of anticapitalist (though not necessarily left-wing) street theater, an insult to all the hustlers and bustlers. And when Baudelaire fled to Belgium, near the end of his life, to escape his creditors, he complained bitterly that "strolling, so cherished by peoples endowed with imagination, is impossible in Brussels."

So you can imagine how French intellectuals and critics feel about jogging. In his philosophical travelogue "America," published in English translation in 1988, Baudrillard was caustic:

You stop a horse that is bolting. You do not stop a jogger who is jogging. Foaming at the mouth, his mind riveted on the inner countdown to the moment when he will achieve a higher plane of consciousness, he is not to be stopped. If you stopped him to ask the time, he would bite your head off.... Decidedly, joggers are the true Latter Day Saints and the protagonists of an easy-does-it Apocalypse. Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his Walkman, cocooned in the solitary sacrifice of his energy.... Do not stop him. He will either hit you or simply carry on dancing around in front of you like a man possessed.

The latest victim of French stroll-mindedness is that country's recently elected president, Nicolas Sarkozy, an economic liberalizer who not only bashes the welfare state like a good American go-getter but ambulates like one, too. That is to say: he jogs.

An hour after he took office in May, "Speedy Sarko" and his prime minister were driven off for a jog in the Bois de Boulogne. Sarko returned to work an hour later, running up the steps of the Elysee presidential palace. In shorts. Soon after that, Sarkozy went on holiday, where his first order of business was jogging on a small island off the Malta coast.

Naturally, this sort of thing has caused paroxysms among France's remaining intellectuals, according to a Times of London story published yesterday:

"Is jogging right wing?" wondered Liberation, the left-wing newspaper. Alain Finkelkraut, a celebrated philosopher, begged Mr Sarkozy on France 2, the main state television channel, to abandon his "undignified" pursuit.... "Western civilization, in its best sense, was born with the promenade," [claimed Finkelkraut]. "Walking is a sensitive, spiritual act. Jogging is management of the body. The jogger says, 'I am in control.' It has nothing to do with meditation."

Perhaps Sarko's Socialist opponents should look into lobster-walking...