As for the museum, his associates insist it will be a serious, independent institution airing all views, not a political tool.

Detractors just aren’t buying it.

“Bling-Bling history” is how Nicolas Offenstadt, a young history professor at the Sorbonne, described it. He fumed the other afternoon over a pot of tea in a genteel Left Bank cafe.

“Sarkozy said this was a museum to give French people a stronger sense of identity,” he continued, “that history is the cement that binds together French people. Whose history? ‘Soul’ is not a subject for scientists and historians. It is a moral and political concept.”