agree to disagree
Cécilia Attias and Louis Sarkozy
(Plon, 288 pages, 2019)
Cécilia Attias and Louis Sarkozy, French by birth and New Yorkers by adoption since 2008, understand what it means to live in and out of the public eye; she as the ex-wife of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and he as their son. In an epistolary exchange between mother and son, the two set out to discover each other anew. With no holds barred, they discuss today’s hot topics, from education to religion, feminism to climate change. Though their opinions may differ, both share a love of debate and a respect for disagreement. In Agree to Disagree, Attias and Sarkozy remind us that dialoguing in good faith is needed now more than ever in the increasingly connected, yet contentious, times in which we live.
The authors begin by revisiting Louis’ unconventional educational pathway. Now twenty-two, Louis evokes his early youth as a president’s son under the constant supervision of bodyguards, often former members of the French armed forces. They became his best friends, which in part explains his unusual insistence at age fourteen to enter the strict Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. He describes his four years there, and how eager he was to be treated like everyone else and escape his father’s shadow. Abandoning his dream of joining the United States Marine Corps, he went on to study philosophy and history at New York University, where the views he professed were, he recalls, not always well received by his fellow students. Louis deplores the growing reticence and inability to debate that he finds so pervasive today.
Cécilia, for her part, speaks not only from her experience as a mother and a wife but also as a woman with a political acumen of her own. In 2007, she played a significant role in the final negotiations with Muammar Gaddafi regarding the release of five Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor who were wrongly convicted and imprisoned in Libya.
Weaving personal anecdotes, intimate portraits, and confidences, the authors freely debate the #MeToo movement, atheism, the evolution of family structures, the Notre Dame fire, veganism, and cannabis legalization. No topic is exempt from their curiosity and their commitment to listen and consider what the other has to say. Their perspectives are enriched by the familiarity they share with French and American political realities and culture. Each expresses their doubts and questions their legitimacy to write such a book—she because of her limited expertise, he by virtue of his youth. But they both take up the challenge, willing to communicate over their generational divide, and eager to explore the therapeutic gift of writing. As Louis reminds us, this book does not have the ambition to profess truths. Rather, it hopes to inspire others to appreciate the need for genuine dialogue, and to demonstrate the pleasure of debate that people no longer seem to desire.
Cécilia Attias is the president of the Cécilia Attias Foundation for Women (founded in 2008) and vice president of public affairs at Richard Attias and Associates. She has already published a best-seller in France, Une Envie de Vérité (Flammarion, 2013; J’ai lu, 2014). She was married to the former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy.
After studying at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and achieving a bachelor’s degree in history and philosophy from New York University, Louis Sarkozy has begun a professional career in the private sector.