’My generation does not need feminism’

Carla Bruni, who has lived a life far removed from most women's, believes that a woman's place is in the home with her children.

'My generation does not need feminism'

Carla Bruni, who has lived a life far removed from most women’s, believes that a woman’s place is in the home with her children.

The 44-year-old former model, who was France’s First Lady for four years until May, also declared that “we don’t need to be feminist in our generation”.

“There are pioneers who opened the breach,” she was quoted as saying in an interview for the January issue of Vogue magazine.

From wild child to homemaker: Carla Bruni said that she loved her family life and didn’t see herself as a feminist at all. File Pic/Getty Images

“I’m not at all an active feminist. On the contrary, I’m a bourgeois. I love family life, I love doing the same thing every day.”
“I’ve ended up becoming my mother in some respects, despite my eight years of analysis!” she said.

Ironically, months before becoming French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s third wife in 2008, the former supermodel and pop singer said “monogamy bores me” and described herself as a “tamer of men”.

Her past lovers include English rock stars Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, as well as a number of other famous politicians and businessmen.

Carla Bruni Sarkozy’s typically forthright declarations are unlikely to go down well with feminists or those from less privileged backgrounds.

Being born into a family of wealthy Italian industrialists, she dropped out of college to pursue a modelling career and quickly became one of the world’s highest-paid catwalk stars.
She owns at least two homes in France and has permanent domestic staff, drivers and other assistants.

Soon after becoming the First Lady, she turned into a devout conservative wife who shared her husband’s right-wing views on almost everything.

All of this coincides with Sarkozy being implicated in a number of fraud scandals, including one in which he is accused of illicitly accepting cash in contravention of electoral rules from Lilian Bettencourt, the l’Oreal heiress and France’s richest women.

When asked about the allegations, Bruni said, “I don’t feel like talking about all that, and I won’t do any more,” adding, “The adventure was fun, but now I want to go back to being an ordinary citizen like everybody else. I no longer feel the desire nor the obligation to answer questions about a world that has enriched me humanly, which opened my eyes and mind, but in the end is not mine.”

Sarkozy has denied’ taking a penny’ from Bettencourt, but was last week made an assisted witness in a case which could see him end up in a criminal trial.u00a0

Differing views
Bruni said that the only thing that she and her husband differ on is the legalisation of gay marriages. “I’m rather in favour of homosexual marriage and adoption, I’ve lots of friends — women and men — who are in this situation and I don't see anything unstable or perverse in it.”

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