France: Patrician, dashing and handsome, Monsieur de Villepin can set pulses racing. But having read his latest book on poetry, Lara Marlowe wonders if he is not slightly cracked
It was the high point of his existence, Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin's moment of triumph.
On February 15th, in the UN Security Council, the tall, handsome French foreign minister delivered an impassioned anti-war speech that moved his audience to applause. The council would not give in to "haste, misunderstanding, suspicion or fear," de Villepin promised.
"In this temple of the United Nations, we are the guardians of an ideal . . . of a conscience."
The US Secretary of State Colin Powell listened stoney-faced as de Villepin concluded in a flight of lyricism: "It is an old country, France . . . who says this to you today, who has known wars, occupation, barbarity. A country who does not forget and who knows all that it owes to the combatants for liberty who came from America and elsewhere . . . "
That day, the minister-poet de Villepin outshone the minister-warrior Powell. But Americans mocked the French aristocrat. The Washington Post called him oily. The New York Times compared him to the lapin duracell - the battery-powered bunny who never stops.
French adversaries have called him worse: "Chirac's brain", scoff jealous rivals on the right. Bernadette Chirac never forgave de Villepin for persuading her husband to dissolve the National Assembly in 1997 with disastrous results. She nicknamed him Nero for his propensity for playing with fire.
De Villepin has now revealed that poetry is his secret weapon. "A single verse by Rimbaud or Celan," he writes, "shines like a powder trail on a day's horizon. It sets it ablaze all at once, explodes all limits, draws the eyes to other heavens."
At last we know what inspired the stellar performance in the Security Council.
De Villepin's seventh book, an 823-page essay on the power of poetry entitled In Praise of Thieves of Fire, was published yesterday by France's most prestigious publisher, Gallimard. The minister took the title from Arthur Rimbaud, who wrote, "So, the poet is truly a thief of fire."
To the courtiers excoriated by de Villepin in his previous book, about his seven years as secretary general of the Élysée (entitled The Cry of the Gargoyle), Thieves of Fire will confirm the minister's encyclopaedic knowledge of literature and boundless energy, six months short of his 50th birthday.
But his detractors will find in Thieves of Fire evidence that Dominique de Villepin may be slightly cracked. The Daily Telegraph remarked uncharitably upon reading the book that it was relieved France was not involved in the Iraq war. Mr de Villepin was a "dangerous lunatic", it pronounced.
What will Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld et al make of passages like this one? "And what does it matter where this path leads, nowhere or elsewhere, if the furrow continues flowering, if the flash of lightning still inflames the night: 'Indifferently, the poet transforms defeat into victory, victory into defeat...' ... If he still consumes himself, he refuses the enclosures of thought, certainties, to camp in the heart of the mystery, in the living spirit of the flame."
The quote about victory is from René Char. De Villepin quotes poets in almost every paragraph, stacks piles of footnotes at the bottom of each page and concludes with a 17-page bibliography.
Even the normally sympathetic right-wing magazine Le Point questioned the wisdom of publishing such a learned volume now. "The gaping wounds left by the Iraq war perhaps called for other words, other acts, or a humble silence," it said.
Since he became foreign minister a year ago, diplomats and journalists have been frustrated by de Villepin's elusive prose. At press conferences, one is carried away by the minister's enthusiasm, lulled by the ocean of words. But reread your notes, listen to the audio-cassette, and all substance seems to have evaporated.
Reading Thieves of Fire is a similar experience. There is no organised structure, no easily identified themes - just an exhaustive and exhausting attempt to bring together all poetry of all time and every country. Running through it is a feverish self-portrait of the minister as a "thief of fire".
De Villepin follows Joachim du Bellay, Paul Claudel and Saint-John Perse in the French tradition of diplomat-poets. French politicians are obsessed with publishing books now, but most use ghost writers; not de Villepin. Which raises the obvious question of how a man who has occupied government posts since graduating from the snobbish École Nationale d'Administration in 1980 finds the time.
In his preface, de Villepin says that his "breviary of feathers and lead shot" was "written in cupboards and backrooms, in the shadow of stages." Cupboards? The minister's taste has surprised some readers.
"He abundantly quotes Rimbaud, [Antonin] Artaud [who was insane], a poet who is little known to French people, Jean-Pierre Duprey," observes the poet André Velter. "These are all poets on the edge, who left, broke away. It's very surprising to see someone who is worldly, who is so established, manage to capture what is most mysterious, dangerous and risky in these individuals, who were meteors who burned out."
For de Villepin, the poet is by definition a rebel. "This poetry is inseparable from all revolution," he writes. "It sees itself as the upheaval of all orders, the affirmation of another life . . . "
Poetry has taken the place of religion. Writing of his childhood abroad, he says he needed the poetry that his mother imparted to him. "I had to have all these benedictions and complicities, to confront the exile that was mine in distant countries, to live alongside fear and to tame solitude. How necessary to me were all these charms . . . to drive away ill portents or dissipate hostile shadows!"
Only once, on the last page, does de Villepin seem to allude to the earth-shattering events of recent months. He recounts a walk through Manhattan with his brother, who subsequently died.
"Many years later, in the flayed city, facing the raging winds, I called upon the words of Rimbaud, Artaud or Duprey. At such a grave hour, how could one not think of these thieves of fire who lit up, for centuries, the furnaces of the heart and the imagination, of thirst and insomnia, to build an empire only within oneself. To silence in the heart of man vain war and, through the magic of words, exorcise demons . . . Yes, against blind forces, all the sterile powers, let us chose the battle which makes us greater. Hence this book, to refuse fatality and vertigo, to chase away fear that cries out from deep within us!"