The sight of the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, jogging — often wearing his favorite NYPD T-shirt — has fired up a storm in a teacup in France recently. Sarkozy's running is an un-French, right-wing conspiracy, according to Paris' left-wing newspaper Liberation.

　　On the primary state television channel, France 2, Alain Finkielkraut, a leading French intellectual, recently demanded that Sarkozy give up his "undignified" exercise. He implied that exposing the boss's naked knees is something that never would have occurred in the time of Mitterrand, much less Louis XIV.