Sarkozy Pays Tribute To Wartime Leader de Gaulle

Accompanied by his predecessor Jacques Chirac Sarkozy said de Gaulle remained an inspiration to modern France.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy paid tribute to one of France's greatest heroes on Friday when he opened a memorial to wartime leader and former President Charles de Gaulle.

Accompanied by his predecessor Jacques Chirac, who originally proposed the combined film and pictorial exhibit and memorial in the Hotel des Invalides in Paris, Sarkozy said de Gaulle remained an inspiration to modern France.

Sarkozy has been struggling with sliding approval ratings and controversy over his personal style, friendship with billionaire tycoons and high-profile marriage to former fashion model Carla Bruni.

But he claimed kinship with the general, whose austere patrician manner contrasts in many ways with his own. "Gaullism was never an ideology, Gaullism was never a religion," he said in a speech to an audience of several hundred schoolchildren and former associates of de Gaulle.

The former general's record as the exiled leader of the Free French during World War Two and the founder of the Fifth Republic in 1958 has ensured him an unrivalled place in French political life.

His suspicion of the "Anglo Saxon" powers of America and Britain and his determination to back France's military power with a nuclear force of its own did much to form France's postwar image of itself.

Like other centre-right leaders, Sarkozy, whose UMP party is the successor to the Gaullist RPR, pays regular tribute, marking the anniversary of de Gaulle's death in 1970 with annual visits to his home village of Colombey-Les-Deux-Eglises.

He campaigned for the presidency on a ticket of "rupture" with the policies of decades of previous French leaders but said de Gaulle had himself struggled to overcome entrenched opposition for much of his career.

"It is not the least of the paradoxes of our country's history that we unanimously celebrate the memory of the great man even though his legitimacy was disputed throughout his whole existence," he said.

"In his desire to restore the authority, the dignity and the prestige of the state, General de Gaulle never feared taking on all forms of corporatism, conservatism, clientelism," he said.