With her husband lagging in opinion polls, the incumbent first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is playing an increasingly visible role in the election campaign ahead of the April 22 first-round vote.

The former supermodel-turned-singer-and-actress gave birth to President Nicolas Sarkozy’s daughter Giulia in October. Her frequent campaign appearances and interviews have sought to present a kinder, gentler side to the notoriously tetchy president.

“Thanks to Nicolas I’m living an extraordinary adventure,” Bruni-Sarkozy told Elle magazine recently in an interview in which she described how the president toils all-hours for the nation’s good, respects women and loves listening to her play guitar.

“This position has given my life a new dimension,” she went on. “In the middle of these serious crises, it allows me to understand the decisive issues of our country, so I can open people’s eyes to the lives of others, the French, and to listen more to their problems.”

Meanwhile, journalist Valerie Trierweiler has added a splash of glamor to the campaign as the partner of Sarkozy’s main challenger Francois Hollande. A self-declared “ordinary guy,” the Socialist candidate is leading in the polls, but is often derided as being rather dull. Trierweiler is credited with getting her man to lose some weight and dress a tad more snappily.

“That’s not true. He lost weight on his own and I loved him just as he was, even if he was carrying a few too many kilos,” Trierweiler said in her own interview with Elle. “I felt no need to change him, what I love in him goes well beyond all that.”

Trierweiler has been matching Bruni-Sarkozy for the media’s attention. The website aufeminin.com ranked the “fashion potential” of the “confidently elegant journalist” against Bruni-Sarkozy, an “artiste with top-class allure.” Taking into account such factors as “cool attitude” and “potential to seduce the French,” the “world’s leading online publisher for women” declared Bruni-Sarkozy the winner, but only by two points.

Trierweiler also has to face competition for the spotlight from Hollande’s ex.

Segolene Royal was Hollande’s partner for more than 20 years. They had four children together and followed parallel careers through the Socialist Party hierarchy until she edged him out of the running to become the party’s candidate in the last presidential election. On the eve of Royal’s defeat to Sarkozy in 2007, the couple announced they were no longer together.

Hollande had his revenge in last year’s Socialist Party primaries, scoring more than five times as many votes as Royal. Her decision to join him on stage at a campaign rally last week was a major media event.

“The cause we’re defending is bigger than us,” Royal told reporters. “That’s what allows us to put the past behind us and look to the future.”

Over in the Sarkozy camp, the president’s supporters have been accused of using the president’s ex-wife Cecilia Attias as a scapegoat for the bling-bling lifestyle that marked the start of Sarkozy’s term and have been a persistent source of criticism ever since.

She was the one behind the president’s Ray-Ban-and-Rolex style, says a new biography of Sarkozy. The cruises on a billionaire’s yacht and dinners in a swish Champs-Elysees restaurant “were all to please Cecilia,” said a pro-Sarkozy lawmaker quoted in VSD magazine last week. “He was really in love and wanted to reconquer her,” the anonymous politician added.

Beyond all the electoral tittle-tattle, Bruni-Sarkozy and Trierweiler have both tried to make serious points about the role of women in France. Trierweiler tweeted in disgust that she was being reduced to political arm candy when Paris Match, the magazine she writes for, ran a photo of her under the headline: “Francois Hollande’s charming asset.”

Trierweiler has praised Bruni-Sarkozy as a role model for managing to combine raising a child with her duties as first lady, charity work and a career. Bruni-Sarkozy also came to Trierweiler’s defense after suggestions she should curtail her career due to her relationship with Hollande. Trierweiler has shifted her journalistic focus from politics to culture during the campaign.

Meanwhile another famous journalist and politician’s wife is poised to make her comeback on French TV screens on election night. Anne Sinclair, editor of the French edition of the Huffington Post, will comment on the results for BFM TV.

She’s married to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who had been the Socialist Party candidate frontrunner until he was accused of assaulting a maid in a New York hotel room last May.

Although those charges were dropped, the scandal ruined DSK’s political career. He is now under investigation in France over allegations of involvement in a prostitution ring.

That never happened, despite lingering German fears that Sarkozy’s main challenger Francois Hollande risks undermining Merkel’s European fiscal discipline pact by embarking on an old-fashioned Socialist spending spree.

In the end, Sarkozy’s advisors decided he’d do better by distancing himself from Merkelian austerity and focusing instead on tried-and-tested vote winners in France, like getting tough on immigration and erecting protectionist barriers against China and other perceived villains of globalization.

That’s also made sharing a platform with him seem somewhat less attractive to Merkel.

Many in Europe are viewing the French election with concern. The fear is that whichever candidate emerges victorious from the second-round vote on May 6, both are avoiding any serious debate of the tough economic decisions facing France and the rest of the eurozone.

“They need to reform the French economy, the labor market, pensions. They need to face all the other challenges, but I’m not sure they are ready to have those debates in France,” says Piotr Kaczynski, of the Center for European Policy Studies, a think tank in Brussels. “It’s never easy to take those decisions, but it can become easier once you have had a public debate on them.”

The French electorate is perennially averse to moves to overhaul its generous labor and social-protection arrangements, even though rules like a 35-hour maximum work week, and high corporate taxes or social costs for employers that run at almost double levels in Germany are blamed for the country’s declining economic competitiveness.

Although both Sarkozy and Hollande agree that France needs to boost growth and balance its budget, neither has prepared the electorate for the painful measures that may be needed to do that.

Instead, Sarkozy has focused on protecting French markets from foreign competition, while Hollande has promised to raise taxes on the rich to create tens of thousands of new public-sector jobs.

With Hollande leading in the opinion polls, Sarkozy in recent days has been issuing warnings that his rival’s tax-and-spend plans risk sending France the way of Europe’s southern crisis victims.

“You want the left? You’ll get Greece, you’ll get Spain,” Sarkozy told a campaign rally last week.

Hollande has been seeking to reassure European leaders that his demands for a greater commitment to economic growth will not lead to loose spending or a disintegration of the new treaty designed to guarantee fiscal discipline in the eurozone.

The German press has reported that, with an eye on Hollande’s opinion poll ratings, Merkel’s office has opened tentative contacts with the Socialist candidate. If Hollande does win, it will be essential that he quickly establishes a working relationship with Merkel on how to tackle the euro crisis.

Already jittery over Spain, Portugal and Italy, markets are likely to pounce on any signs of French wobbling on fiscal discipline or Franco-German divisions, especially since a Greek election called for May 6 will add to the political uncertainty.

“If the financial markets become restless again, as they have been doing of late, then that narrows Francois Hollande’s political room for maneuver should he be elected,” says Thomas Klau, who heads the Paris office of European Council on Foreign Relations. “The more nervous the markets are, the less he can afford to add to the uncertainty by triggering major tensions with his partners.”

European observers have discounted some of the more contentious declarations from Sarkozy and Hollande as campaign rhetoric designed to stop them losing votes to candidates on the political extremities.

Sarkozy is threatened on the right by the National Front candidate Marine Le Pen, while Hollande risks losing first-round votes to the Communist-backed Jean-Luc Melenchon.

Few take seriously Sarkozy’s threat to pull out of the European Union’s passport-free travel zone, and his appeal for protectionist trade measures is unlikely to muster support from other European nations.

“The call for a Buy European Act does reflect a strong French conviction, shared across the party political spectrum, that the present state of globalization is highly damaging for Europe,” Klau said. “This is viewed with a degree of concern by free trade apostles in the UK or countries like Germany, which do very well out of the current situation. This is not an agenda that France can hope to shape on its own.”

That reflects another reality the winner will have to come to terms with on May 6: the euro crisis has clearly revealed that the Franco-German partnership that was the driving force behind the European Union is no longer a marriage of equals.

“It’s hard to resist the temptation to compare the decadence or the disorientation of France with the personalities of the presidential candidates,” columnist Miguel Angel Bastenier wrote Tuesday in the Spanish daily El Pais. “If there are any remnants of that partnership that is supposed to run the European Union … it’s only because Berlin finds it more convenient to have somebody to share the burden of dealing with the crisis.”

Now reports have emerged that Merah had traveled to Afghanistan and Israel in 2010 and had been interviewed by France’s domestic intelligence Agency, Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur (DCRI).

According to Le Monde, Bernard Squaricini, head of DCRI, was quoted saying that Merah asked for a local DCRI agent by name during the standoff.

According to Squarcini, Merah shocked the agent by saying: “Anyway, I was going to call you to say I had some tip-offs for you, but actually I was going to [kill] you.”

MSNBC quoted Yves Bonnet, a former head of an intelligence agency that was merged with DCRI in 2008, as saying that having a contact at the DCRI is reason for suspicion.

“This is not trivial,” Bonnet said. “I don’t know how far his relationship, or collaboration, with the service went but it is a question worth raising.”

According to Il Foglio, Merah’s trip to Israel and Afghanistan was made with the knowledge of the French foreign secret service, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure.

A spokesman for the agency has dismissed that report, the Independent reported.

Le Canard Enchaîné newspaper reported on Wednesday that Merah and his family were bugged by the DCRI from March to November last year.

However, Squarcini has denied these reports, insisting that that Merah was not helping authorities. He was not “an informer for the DCRI or any other French or foreign services,” Squarcini said, Liberation reported.

Merah, who was shot dead on Thursday at the end of a 32-hour police siege in Toulouse, was believed to be responsible for a killing spree in the city and in nearby Montauban that left seven people dead, including three children.

Authorities had reported early on that Merah was believed to have worn a video camera as he carried out the killings.

According to Le Parisien, the package bore a postmark dated March 21, or the day Merah was cornered by police. The newspaper said investigators were working to determine if the package was mailed by Merah himself on Tuesday evening March 20 or by an accomplice on the morning of March 21.

According to Reuters, a “source close to the investigation” said the video comprised a montage and audio of Islamist war songs.

An al-Jazeera employee confirmed this account, acoriding to Reuters.

A year abroad is far from a rare experience for American college students these days, but it’s a surprisingly undercontemplated custom; Kaplan — a professor of French at Yale and the author of a memoir and several prize-winning books on French history — singles out a recently-published academic study by Whitney Walton. However, most attempts to understand the transformative visits of young Americans to other countries have come in the form of coming-of-age memoirs and autobiographical first novels. About Paris, above all, American youth has spun extravagantly romantic fantasies of self-discovery, blossoming cosmopolitanism and creative ferment.

Jacqueline Bouvier arrived in 1949, to a Paris that was, literally, black. Its white stone buildings hadn’t been cleaned of street soot since the war. This, like the ration card issued to Bouvier for sugar and coffee, is the sort of detail that sketches an entire mode of life, scrimping and shadowed. Kaplan is a master at delivering such details and at selecting just the right aspect of everyday experience to illuminate an important point she wants to make.

In the section on Sontag, Kaplan notes, “There’s rarely a published account of Parisian intellectual life in the 1950s — French or American — that doesn’t involve hotel rooms.” Sontag, who, unlike Bouvier and Davis, spoke only “elementary” French during her 1957 sojourn to Paris, inhabited a “social world that was essentially American,” a hotel world. For the ambitious young critic, her months in Paris were primarily a period of introspective and erotic exploration; with a husband and child back in America, she submerged herself in an affair with a woman, Harriet Sohmers, who some thought to be the real-life model for the character Jean Seberg played in “Breathless.”

For Bouvier, to the manor born and raised but essentially broke due to the profligacy of her father, France offered a chance to steep herself in the European art and culture she adored. As part of a program run by Smith College, she stayed with a comtesse in the respectable 16th arrondissement, but only because the comtesse (who’d been in the Resistance and done time in a German labor camp), had to take in boarders to make ends meet. The shortage, in this shabby genteel milieu, of both bath tubs and baths, and especially the very basic nature of French toilets, delivered the “most intense” culture shock that Bouvier and her wholesome cohort experienced. The unheated houses of their host families ran a close second. Their Paris was uncomfortable, but replete with the exotic riches of the past.

Davis, on the other hand, arrived in 1963, a fluent French speaker and precocious academic intellectual expected to achieve great things as a philosopher by her mentor at Brandeis, Herbert Marcuse. She’d been imprinted with what Kaplan calls “the mythical power that France held for black Americans” as a realm where a full portion of freedom and dignity, inaccessible in America, could at last be enjoyed. Raised in segregated Birmingham, Ala. — in a neighborhood so plagued by racist bombers it was dubbed “Dynamite Hill” — Davis and her sister had once entered a white shoe store speaking French and pretending to be from Martinique. Instead of being shown to the back entrance for “colored” customers, they were treated “like dignitaries” in the front of the shop. French, for Davis, was the language of liberty, an escape hatch to another, better life.

As Kaplan recounts in an insightful passage on the role of newspapers in the education of American students overseas, Davis had no sooner arrived in France than she picked up a copy of the Herald Tribune to read of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in her hometown. This act of domestic terrorism killed four 14-year-old girls, two of whom were Davis’ friends. Kaplan compares the American and French coverage of the event, all of which Davis must have studied avidly, to illustrate how each society was far more likely to acknowledge the prevalence of racism away from home. In Paris, Davis receive more respectful treatment than she got in the U.S., but all around her she saw Algerians targeted for abuse much like that she’d endured back home.

Kaplan devotes a section of each of the book’s three parts to “The Return,” the story of each woman’s later life in America and the role France and French culture played in it. There’s Jackie Kennedy’s expert negotiation of the politics of the visual, redecorating the White House, and herself, in a manner that satisfied her taste for French design without appearing unpatriotic. (Her husband did complain of “too Frenchy” official dinners, with menus that “nobody could read or understand.”) Sontag became the most visible American intellectual to champion the French “New Novel” to stateside readers. And Davis, when tried in 1970 for conspiring in a courtroom kidnapping and shoot-out in California, became a symbol of the battle for social justice to many French people, tens of thousands of whom marched to protest her imprisonment. French schoolchildren and secretaries sent her letters of support.

Some books are well-written on a sentence-by-sentence basis; you leaf back through the pages to find you’ve underscored choice lines. “Dreaming of French” is the sort of book where you (well, I) draw vertical lines next to entire paragraphs. Kaplan produces some exquisite lines, yes, but she is positively incandescent on the level of thoughts and observations. Of Sontag, she notes the obsessive list-making and sees the outsider, the girl from the provinces schooling herself on the societies she longed to infiltrate: “Throughout her life, she would enter a new world by recording its manners, its important people, creating her own grammar in the form of lists.” The big lectures and rote learning methods of the Sorbonne, she describes as “the part of French education that was as ritualistic as Catholic mass.” In Davis’ childhood efforts to teach herself French, she sees that, “for such a person, a counterlife of dreams and imaginary travel was an absolute necessity.”

Although Davis may have needed it most, all three of these women cherished an imaginary French counterlife as girls. Tracing the effect of an unlived fantasy on a person’s actual life is a delicate operation, but then so is accounting for the influence of that first immersion in a foreign country. Kaplan writes of her subjects that “the deep history of their transformation involved smells and tastes and visions — fleeting sensual experiences not easy to capture in a conventional life story.” An eccentric landlady or the first sampling of couscous can make an indelible impression on a sensibility cast wide open by travel, an impression that can in turn color ideas and feelings for decades to come. No, it’s not easy to capture such things, but Kaplan proves that it can be done.