Carla Bruni: 'I will do everything to protect this child'

Carla Bruni, French first lady, multimillionaire supermodel-turned-folk- singer, has found her pregnancy at 43 pretty boring. "Quite frankly, I can't stand it any more. I spend most of my time either sitting down or lying down. I can't drink or smoke any more. I'm in a hurry to get it over with." She thinks the public is pretty bored of it too. "It doesn't interest the French," she said somewhat paradoxically in one of her countless interviews about her bump shortly before she was expected to go into labour.

France is indeed already weary of the baby story and the numerous false alerts of the birth that circulate daily on the internet. The Belgian media wrongly announced the birth last week after misinterpreting a joke in a comedy sketch on French radio. Bruni also told a journalist friend she was sorry for the disruption caused to staff by the waiting media circus near the private clinic where she is due to give birth any day now.

Bruni has been satirised and mocked for doing more media in the final stages of pregnancy than ever before, while arguing, unconvincingly, that she wants to remain discreet about the baby. There have been carefully staged public appearances: in a designer dress meeting the public in the Elysée garden or handing out scholarships from her charity foundation, or in baggy jumper rushing out for a quick pizza with her husband, President Nicolas Sarkozy. Or briefing journalists that she is reading 17th-century French playwrights with her feet up, or that she feels "happy but fat". Even her public confession, heavily pregnant, that she was moved to marry Sarkozy by his incredible knowledge of the Latin names of flowers in the Elysée garden came across as part of a plan to restyle the brash and erratic Sarkozy as "Gardening Family Man" as he embarks on the hardest election battle of his life.

The Bruni-Sarkozys promise they have learned their lesson about putting their private life on show: their whirlwind courtship and marriage in 2008, three months after meeting, alienated French voters and sent Sarkozy's popularity plummeting. But the question remains whether the couple will be able to resist using this infant – the first baby born to a serving French president – as the next phase in an incredible personal-political soap opera.

Sarkozy, 56, is already the father of two adult sons and a teenager from two previous marriages. He is grandfather to a toddler. He knows the importance of looking young and virile in politics: burping a newborn could be useful for his public image in the build-up to a difficult re-election battle next year. Pollsters have speculated that the baby could give him a 5% bounce in approval ratings. This is important given that his popularity ratings are currently among the worst of any president, his role in the Libya intervention has done nothing to improve his dire standing with the French electorate, he is besieged by a raft of corruption investigations that have damaged his inner circle, and even some in his own rightwing party are speculating whether he is the best person to run for the right in the 2012 presidential election.

"I will do everything to protect this child," Bruni said recently. "I will never show pictures of this child, I will never expose this child. I think exposure to public life is a choice to be made by an adult." But some wonder if the couple might provide some long-lens photo opportunities – perhaps out in the park at Versailles, just as Sarkozy and Bruni did after their marriage. It's a dangerous game of how to seduce but not alienate his traditional rightwing voters.

The birth of Sarkozy's new dauphin already has the makings of a gripping new chapter in the saga of Sarkozy parenting and his and Bruni's attitude to their offspring. Sarkozy, who was once proud of inviting the public into his private life, has often put children on show. His first public date with Bruni was at Disneyland to watch Mickey's parade. They then staged romantic weekend breaks in Egypt and Jordan, deliberately stepping out in front of photographers with Aurélien, 10, her son from a previous relationship. All this despite France's tradition of fiercely protecting famous children's privacy. The picture that most shocked the public was Sarkozy in aviator shades carrying Aurélien on his shoulders, as the boy held his hands over his eyes as if traumatised by the press pack. Aurélien's father, the French philosopher Raphaël Enthoven, put his foot down, Bruni said she regretted the photos and had told Aurélien to shield his eyes herself.

Then there are Sarkozy's own issues around fatherhood. The president has built an entire political career around lamenting the injustices of his own parents' divorce and the early departure of his father, an eccentric and philandering minor Hungarian aristocrat and advertising guru. "The only thing I ever lacked was a father," Sarkozy once confessed bitterly on television.

But family history has a habit of repeating itself. In their recent book, Off: What Sarkozy Should Never Have Told Us, the journalists Nicolas Domenach and Maurice Szafran recall how, on a plane sitting next to his second wife, Cécilia, Sarkozy confided: "Because my father never looked after us, I try to give our children everything that wasn't given to us, to be present, attentive." Cécilia balked and said: "No comment." Later she would tell another journalist that Sarkozy was "a man who loves no one, not even his children". At his investiture ceremony, Sarkozy presented himself as model of the blended family: second wife, step-children, half-siblings. It was theatre for the cameras; the family was falling apart and he was soon to divorce.

Sarkozy's eldest sons, Pierre, 26, and Jean, 25, from his first marriage, have been the subject of their own media controversies. Sarkozy, as hardline interior minister, publicly decried French rap and sued some acts over their lyrics. Pierre is now a rap producer who goes under the name Mosey and who one rapper friend described as "wishing he'd been born black".

Jean Sarkozy, a blond version of his father, has followed him into politics in Sarkozy's old fiefdom of Paris's rich western suburbs. After accusations of nepotism and a new "Sarkozy royal family" he had to step back from a controversial appointment to head of the public body running La Défense, Europe's biggest purpose-built business district. Some suggested his political career was a conscious or unconscious attempt to impress his father, who left his mother when the boy was young.

With Cécilia, Sarkozy had one son, Louis, now 14, who found himself thrown into the centre of the couple's public split, reconciliation and divorce. The young bespectacled, blazer-wearing Louis is the clearest example of Sarkozy's love of posing his children before the cameras. The president has always seen himself as a JFK figure, with his photogenic offspring playing at his feet as he solves the world's crises. "You liked Jackie Kennedy, you're going to adore Cécilia Sarkozy," he said after his election. "Working with my children around me, that's what I love," he told journalists. Many were shocked when Sarkozy used a UN speech in New York at the end of 2009 to double up as an access visit to Louis, who lived with Cécilia and her new husband, international events producer Richard Attias, in Manhattan. Louis was photographed sitting in the UN auditorium watching his father's speech and was then taken to a meeting with a surprised Angela Merkel, who tried to make him feel at home while being photographed looking slightly awkward.

After his divorce, Sarkozy let the photographer Bettina Rhiems into the Elysée to show himself as a loving single dad – soon to be remarried. The controversial staged pictures showed Sarkozy in running gear, popping in to check out Louis's Lego constructions in what looks like a meeting room. Another picture showed father and son sitting on the bed in Louis's bedroom, while a palace aide appeared to be doing the hard work of fixing Lego in the background. Sarkozy loved to introduce Louis to famous people, from Thierry Henry to Barack Obama.

One WikiLeaks cable revealed a Kennedy-style family moment, when Sarkozy, while interior minister, hosted the US ambassador for a meeting. Sarkozy called outside to nine-year-old Louis to come in and shake the ambassador's hand. Louis arrived with a small dog at his feet and a large rabbit in his arms, "which led to the unforgettable sight of Sarkozy, bent over, chasing the dog through the ante-room to his office as the dog chased the rabbit, and Louis filled the room with gleeful laughter", the embassy reported back to Washington.

Louis has reportedly just started at a military academy boarding school in the US.

"I always send a postcard wherever I go," Sarkozy told the Le Monde journalist Philippe Ridet one night after the election while commiserating about the life of a divorced father. Sarkozy's eldest sons told the press of his chauffeur-driven visits: at least he took detours to keep them in the car for longer.

Part of Bruni's narrative in her recent pregnancy interviews has been to describe herself as the woman who at last made a miserable divorced Sarkozy happy. But the arrival of a new child has seen Sarkozy's father suddenly return to centre stage. It was Pal Sarkozy, 82, who has now reinvented himself as a painter, who broke the Elysée's early silence and announced Bruni was pregnant in the German tabloid Bild. Pal, who once said his son talked about himself too much and was prone to rages, then also announced the alleged birth date, which came and went last week.

Sarkozy himself talks about the baby but likes to keep a bit of mystery. With reporters on a recent trip to Armenia, he laughed off the vast number of rumours. "The other day someone asked me: 'Is it really a boy to be called Leopold?' But why Leopold? In homage to the king of the Belgians?"

He said: "Carla and I don't want to know the sex of the baby or choose the name. It will be our last child, we want a surprise."