PARIS: Repentance for the sins of the past has come easily to President Jacques Chirac. He will be remembered as the first French leader to recognize the country's crimes against Jews in World War II and to commemorate formally its complicity in African slavery.
President-to-be Nicolas Sarkozy, by contrast, doesn't believe in saying he's sorry.
"I'm going to make the French proud of France again," Sarkozy announced after he was elected president Sunday. "I am going to bring an end to repentance, which is a form of self-hatred, and the battle of memories that feeds hatred of others."
But when Chirac pointedly asked Sarkozy to attend a ceremony remembering the victims of the French slave trade and celebrating the abolition of slavery, Sarkozy could not refuse.
Perhaps it was a last act of Chiracian vengeance, just six days before Sarkozy takes over. Chirac and Sarkozy do not like each other, even though Sarkozy served as a minister in Chirac's cabinet and Chirac endorsed him - reluctantly - for president.
The two men stood side by side in the Luxembourg Gardens on Thursday - their first time together since the election - for the ceremony.
They walked into the park together, Chirac's left hand resting a bit paternally on the right shoulder of the much-shorter Sarkozy. They listened to poetry read by two students and a song written and performed by Youssou N'Dour, Senegal's most famous singer. They made the rounds of the invitation-only crowd. Chirac inaugurated a sculpture representing the links of a broken chain.
Some of the invitees greeted Sarkozy's participation with skepticism.
"His presence was a surprise; he said he didn't want repentance, and today he's here," said Lilian Thuram, the Guadeloupe-born French soccer star, who sharply criticized Sarkozy during the campaign. He added, "Civil society requires work on our past."
Far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, who did not go to Thursday's ceremony, criticized Sarkozy for attending, saying it reflected "continuity with Chiracien universal repentance" and not the "rupture" Sarkozy had promised.
The issues of slavery and of France's colonial past have been particularly sensitive since an orgy of unrest in 2005 among mainly ethnic Arab and black African youths in the troubled suburbs of France. The country's failure to integrate its minorities and to give them educational and employment opportunities will be one of the most important issues facing the Sarkozy presidency.
Despite the faults of his twelve-year presidency, Chirac has been widely praised for trying to heal the wounds of history. Soon after he was elected president in 1995, he acknowledged that his country bore heavy responsibility for deporting tens of thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps during World War II.
He pushed for the successful modification of a divisive law passed in 2005 that called for a positive portrayal of France's colonial past in history textbooks.
After the unrest in the suburbs, he created a commemoration day for the end of the slave trade and called the examination of the past "one of the keys to our national cohesion."
Sarkozy promotes himself as a forward-looking leader with an eye on the future, for whom apologizing for events of the past is a sign of weakness.
"I want us to stop this systematic repentance," he said during the campaign in March, adding, "The colonial system was unjust but to say that all French who were in Algeria were exploiters is false."
In April, he was even more blunt, saying, "I am among those who thinks that France should not be ashamed of its history. It didn't commit genocide. It didn't invent the 'Final Solution.' It invented human rights. I want to say that during the war, all Frenchmen didn't support" Marshal Philippe Pétain, whose Vichy government collaborated with Nazi Germany after France's defeat in 1940.
Sarkozy is unrepentant about his personal decisions as well. After his election victory, his aides gave the impression he was off to a monastic retreat to contemplate the enormity of the decisions awaiting him.
Instead, he left in secret with his wife Cecilia and their 10-year-old son Louis as guests aboard the yacht of billionaire Vincent Bollore, a personal friend, corporate raider and media tycoon.
The yachting trip was both criticized and ridiculed by Sarkozy's political opponents as unseemly.
The French press likened Sarkozy's appetite for the fine life to that of Silvio Berlusconi, the much-maligned former Italian prime minister. Libération, a left-leaning daily in Paris, ran a front-page picture of the Sarkozys on the yacht with the headline, "Boat People."
Unlike other French leaders, Sarkozy flaunts his connection with the monied class and has criticized France's penchant for hiding wealth and ambition. "It seems that success has become so shameful in France that a young person who wants to succeed must leave," he wrote in his 2006 memoir, "Testimony."
"I have no intention of hiding. I have no intention of lying. I have no intention of apologizing," Sarkozy said on Wednesday as he jogged on a beach in Malta, adding, "I don't see where the controversy is."