PARIS, April 16: Nearly a year into his term President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has hardly mentioned the arts or culture. In late February he said that French cuisine should be added to the UNESCO World Heritage list.

De Gaulle had Andre Malraux at his elbow. Francois Mitterrand renovated the Louvre. Just before he left office, Jacques Chirac opened an immense museum for non-Western cultures, designed by Jean Nouvel, which in its confusing, heart-of-darkness, overwrought layout epitomizes a certain kind of French arrogance and architectural megalomania. Naturally, millions of tourists now flock to it.

Every French president since the liberation has cooked up some such pharaonic new museum or opera house or library or initiated some legacy-minded cultural programme, until now. Sarkozy’s taste is said to be for Lionel Ritchie and Celine Dion. (Mitterrand mulled over Dostoyevsky; de Gaulle consumed Chateaubriand.) The current President’s fondness for showbiz pals, his marriage to the Italian model-turned-singer Carla Bruni and the appointment of a culture minister, Christine Albanel, who is intelligent but widely regarded as weak among Sarkozy’s ministers, have combined to produce something of a culture shock.

“A rupture,” is what the political scientist Pascal Perrineau calls it.

“An incredible change,” said Jean Lacouture, de Gaulle’s biographer. One recent afternoon he sat in his study overlooking the Seine, meditating on this turn of events. “When de Gaulle returned to a liberated France in 1944,” he recalled, “he made a show of visiting famous writers like Paul Valery and Francois Mauriac. It was his way of declaring a renewed sense of French glory.”

These days Paris kiosks advertise copies of a special issue of Le Canard Enchaine, the satirical newspaper, with yet another photograph of Sarkozy in his familiar aviator Ray-Bans, a yacht and a private jet superimposed onto his two mirrored lenses. “President Bling-Bling” has already become a cliche. “Sarko l’Americain” is another common insult. The French, though, may soon have to think up a fresh one if (and you can almost hear Mitterrand starting to turn in his grave) the United States elects a president who delivers speeches like the one Senator Barack Obama gave on race while this country has its first modern leader not to have graduated from the country’s upper-crust schools, a head of state who on a recent visit to the Vatican arrived late, with an exceptionally crude French stand-up comic named Jean-Marie Bigard in tow. The coup de grace: The hyperactive Sarkozy reportedly text-messaged somebody or other while with the pope.

That incident infuriated some French Roman Catholics along with many stodgy Gaullists and other traditional French conservatives who, though they helped elect him, now find Sarkozy, to put it bluntly, vulgar.

“His acquaintance with television and media people, with stars, the way he behaves, all this is an annoyance for the right,” Herve Mariton acknowledged. He is a young, worldly, neo-Gaullist member of Sarkozy’s ruling center-right Union for a Popular Movement in Parliament. He stopped briefly to talk at a busy cafe across from the National Assembly and admitted that he had not been the president’s most ardent admirer.

“Our president may not be exceptionally cultivated, but he’s also not a stupid man,” Mariton offered. “He wants to prove to a part of the elite that things have changed. Like other aspects of government, our cultural policy had become incestuous. So for the president to create a certain distance from it can be good.

“Ignorance is not,” he added before saying that he had to dash back to the Parliament.

Patrick Rambaud is not so diplomatic. His satiric novel The Chronicle of the Reign of Nicolas the First has become a bestseller here. An old-style French leftist rooted in the ethos of 1968, he was visiting his Left Bank publisher’s office the other morning. The making-fun-of-Sarkozy business has brought him a surprising windfall.

“We are all ashamed,” he said, about the president’s lack of interest in culture and his general bucks-and-babes style. “I mean, taking Bigard to the pope. Even as a writer I couldn’t have invented that.” (Truth be told, he sounded more grateful than angry.) Rambaud recalled the sophistication of earlier presidents. Sarkozy has almost inspired in him a nostalgia for de Gaulle.

“Look, we need a president who is cultivated,” he said, as if for a Frenchman this were as indisputable as the superiority of Petrus. “It goes back to the days of the kings.”