EUROPEUS

(By Adam Gopnik / Source : The New Yorker) To understand Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been President of France for three intense months, it helps to know the story of the human bomb. “It was in 1993, when Sarkozy was the mayor of Neuilly,” Philippe Labro, the novelist and talk-show host, recalled over lunch a week or so after Sarkozy received his first Bastille Day salute as President. (Neuilly is a small leafy suburb of Paris.) “A psychotic took over a nursery school. He strapped explosives to his body, and he held the children hostage. He called himself H.B., the human bomb. He had an incoherent set of demands—a true lunatic—and the police surrounded the place. Sarkozy went into the school, completely alone, and began to talk to the human bomb. He engaged him in conversation: what did he want, what were his problems, could he solve them?...

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