Home Away From Home: The prince in his accommodations at Forward Operating Base Delhi on Jan. 2, 2008. Photo: John Stillwell / AP-pool.

Around 5pm GMT this afternoon, the breaking news started coming--Prince Harry, the second son of Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana, was fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. The way it was presented, it was almost as if the red-haired party-loving Brit was fighting a one-man battle in the dusty environs of Helmand province. Video started appearing on the BBC, showing the prince firing guns, doing foot patrols and on the telephone doing his high pressured job as a Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC).  The prince it seems has been in Afghanistan since mid-December (missing his family's annual Christmas celebrations in Sandringham) . How could the news have taken this long to get out? Because there was a gentlemen's agreement between the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the British press. Fleet Street agreed not to report the deployment in exchange for having access to Prince Harry in the field. Under the blackout deal the British media had access to pooled footage, interviews and photos of the soldier prince that otherwise wouldn't have been released until Harry came back from battle in April.

It's hard to believe that anyone could long for the good old days of Jacques Chirac, but when President Nicolas Sarkozy visited the Agriculture Fair in Paris a few days ago, he managed to remind the French how comfortable they used to feel with his lanky, laid-back predecessor. When Chirac visited the annual fair, he did so as a bon vivant. Sarkozy, on the other hand, went through it in an overheated rush, using language fit for a scrum in the Metro. The video of the event captured by the tabloid daily Le Parisien has been watched by more than three million viewers:

(You can see it with relevant translation on The Shadowland Journal.) The climax comes when Sarkozy is shaking hands with the crowd and one man pulls back, "Ah, no, don't touch me." Sarko, his fixed smile unwavering says, "Get lost, then." To which the man responds, "You got me dirty." To which Sarko responds (this is a polite way of putting it), "Get lost, you jerk."

The French don't like their presidents to talk that way in public. (Chirac's language was plenty salty in private.) But the real problem is that they're discovering they just don't like Sarkozy. The cover story of this week's Le Nouvel Observateur explains why. In the lead article headlined "And if this were to end badly ...," François Bazin writes that other presidents have been unpopular, but for the most part late in their terms. When Chirac's ratings took a nose dive in 1996, early in his first mandate, his prime minister, Alain Juppé, took the fall.

But Sarkozy wants all attention fixed on him, and is managing to attract opprobrium to the office of the president itself. "What's happening today is literally unimaginable," writes Bazin.

"In the current political equation," he says, "there are plenty of other factors that enter into to the bottom line. The international crisis that's sinking growth. A campaign slogan ('Work more to earn more') that's remembered only too well and that's come back like a boomerang. All that creates turbulence, but doesn't justify the sense of an impending crash.The mistake of the president, what has really cost him, goes much further than management of change that's often contrarian and always marked by traces of narcissism that are a bit childish.

"The breaks with past conceptions of a modern presidency that Sarkozy has introduced are all symbolic in nature," writes Bazin. "His cardinal sin is to have called into question, sometimes just with little details or simple matters of behavior, that which legitimizes the authority of the head of state in a country like France." One day he manages to diminish the secular character of the French Republic (which is, to the French, almost sacred). The next he tries to tweak the nation's conscience by making 10-year-olds "adopt" victims their age killed in the Holocaust. On yet another day, he undermines the institutional rules that regulate the relationship  a president has with his ministers, parliament, and the constitutional council. "There's no such thing as good governance without measure and distance," says Bazin. "And that presumes that the head of state is something other than a gang leader you can collar and talk to using he familiar 'tu.' And that also implies a certain simplicity needed in the 'republican monarch' ... who should not be transformed into a jet-setter fascinated by the glitz of power...."

"At the center of the rumbling political and media storm, the president has chosen to expose himself more than is reasonable," Bazin concludes " Every day he makes a statement that's offensive or provocative in some way, radicalizing and shamelessly playing up to a disoriented public opinion that just wants to feel secure. Dividing and victimizing. More than a method, it's the formula of every man for himself. Nicolas Sarkozy is out walking with a lightning rod in his hands. The risk for him—and above all for the office that he holds—is that the thunderbolts will not come from the presidency but land on it, which is not at all the same thing."