France’s Equivalent Of The Scarlet Letter Becomes A Political Football

La Princesse de Clèves is a 17th-century novel “that most French people are force-fed at school and are happy never to read again.” President Nicolas Sarkozy has made a habit of mocking the book, and now his “personal vendetta – cloaked in anti-elitist demagoguery – has managed to turn The Princess of Cleves into an unlikely symbol of political resistance.”