For those who may have thought the French were always a little more, hmmmm, you know, open about sex, the latest Le Nouvel Observateur may come as something of a shock. The cover of France's leading weekly magazine of news and opinion--entitled "The New Sexuality of the French"--suggests the country is still coming to grips with the revolution in morals and manners that began 40 years ago in, you guessed it, that pivotal year of Boomer consciousness: 1968. The ensemble of stories includes everything from small talk about deep thinking--an interview with the aging nouveau philosophe Alain Finkielkraut--to a survey of sex toys. Some, we're told, "are useful for relieving stress."

The core of the coverage, however, is built around a survey of 12,364 men and women aged 18 to 69 conducted by the French National Agency for AIDS Research. It's a follow-up on a similar study done in 1992, and the changes revealed are more evolutionary than revolutionary: The traditional idea of men as predators and women "waiting for the warrior at the entrance to the cave," as the Nouvel Obs writes blandly, "just won't fly anymore. Henceforth, women want to take part in the hunt."  Backing that up are numbers that show men have about the same number of sexual partners over a lifetime today (12.9) as they did in 1970 (12.8), while the number of partners for women has increased from an average 1.9 in 1972 to 5.1 today.

With respect to gays, some prejudice endures and homosexual practice, at least as shared with those conducting the survey, seems to be pretty much the same as it's been for years: 4 percent of women say they have sexual relations with other women, compared with 2.6 percent in 1992; among men the numbers are unchanged at 4.1 percent. "The development of tolerance as a matter of principle, which is especially pronounced among the young, has not been enough to produce radical changes in private attitudes toward homosexuality," says the research agency's report.

And sexual practices? There's nothing in Le Nouvel Obs, in fact, about French kissing. But there are many other details about preferred approaches to sexual intercourse--or not, as the case may be. A checklist:

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."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has a genius for turning conciliation into provocation and common sense into cause for resentment, outdid himself recently when he proposed that fifth-graders identify themselves with individual children killed in the Holocaust, in effect adopting the memory of the dead.

The most widely read French news and opinion weekly, Le Nouvel Observateur, devoted several articles to the controversy in Thursday’s edition, including a petition for the proposal to be withdrawn: "We decline to discuss the nobility of the intentions, the good will and the level of spirituality that gave rise to such a project," says the appeal. "But we already see the effects of it and they are catastrophic. They divide communities -- even, and perhaps more so, the Jewish community."

In France this week, we’ve seen a local story spread round the world in flaming images. On Sunday, two teenage boys in the impoverished Parisian suburb of Villiers-le-Bel were killed when the small motorbike they were riding collided with a police car. The incident sparked local riots among youth who blamed police for the teens’ deaths. (An official investigation into the collision is ongoing.)

Whatever the real cause of the accident, it evoked echoes of the national riots that spread across almost 300 similarly economically depressed towns and suburbs throughout the country-and fears that something similar could happen again.  Back in October 2005, two teenage boys were electrocuted when they sought refuge from police in a power sub-station in Clichy-sous-Bois, another downscale suburb of Paris with large minority populations. That incident resulted in 10,000 torched cars and 300 torched buildings over three long weeks. The tough-talking Interior Minister in charge of law and order then, Nicolas Sarkozy, is now president.