It's official: France now has the hairiest government in recent memory. While previous government leaders have tended to grayness and baldness, President Nicolas Sarkozy has brought change on the follicular as well as the political front. It's not that Sarkozy, 52, has the thickest coif on the planet. Long gone are the lengthy hippy-era locks of his youth, replaced first by a curly little '70s nest and more recently by a more efficient and candidate-like Brillo wave. That said, by France's thin and pasted-back presidential standards (set during World War II), Sarkozy might as well be Samson himself.

His Prime Minister, Francois Fillon, 53, also has an acceptable little broom of hair. (No, he can't compare with the heroic salt-and-pepper-mane-in-the-breeze of his predecessor Dominique de Villepin, but who can?) Unfortunately, Fillon decided to trim down his traditionally side-parted flop into a schoolboy snip, circa 1954, upon being named to his new gig. But they are just the starting point in a government of 15 mostly next-generation ministers, many of whom came of age in the late 1960s.