French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has a genius for turning conciliation into provocation and common sense into cause for resentment, outdid himself recently when he proposed that fifth-graders identify themselves with individual children killed in the Holocaust, in effect adopting the memory of the dead.

The most widely read French news and opinion weekly, Le Nouvel Observateur, devoted several articles to the controversy in Thursday’s edition, including a petition for the proposal to be withdrawn: "We decline to discuss the nobility of the intentions, the good will and the level of spirituality that gave rise to such a project," says the appeal. "But we already see the effects of it and they are catastrophic. They divide communities -- even, and perhaps more so, the Jewish community."

For anyone interested in questions of anti-Semitism, secularism and Sarkozy, it’s worth taking a close look at what the magazine has to say. (The links are to the articles in French.)

The main story, headlined “The Mistake,” tells us that Sarkozy put forth his proposal without consulting any of his key ministers, much less preparing public opinion. (The latest polls show that 85 percent of the French oppose the idea.) The report lays out “the story of a personal initiative that turned against the cause it was supposed to serve.”

Sarkozy announced his plan at the annual dinner of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), where he was seated next to Simone Veil, who is among other things a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a former cabinet minister and the honorary president of the Foundation for Remembrance of the Shoah. She held her tongue during his remarks, but not afterward. “It chilled my blood,” she said. “It’s inconceivable, unbearable, over-dramatized and above all unfair. We can’t inflict that on 10-year-olds; we can’t ask a child to identify with a dead child. This memory is too heavy to be borne.”

The Nouvel Obs goes on to analyze Sarkozy’s motives, some of which may be idealistic, and some brutally cynical. “For a long time the ex-minister of the interior has been thinking about the rising tide of racism and anti-Semitism, the growth of intolerance, the clashes among different segments of society in general and among young people in particular,” writes Carole Barjon in the lead article.

The interior minister is France's "top cop," and in that role Sarkozy fought effectively against harassment of French Jews. But he was not so successful with other minorities. In 2005 he faced (some would say incited) riots in public housing projects all over the country as the children of impoverished immigrants, many of them Muslims, vented their fiery rage. Sarkozy has become convinced that the evils of intolerance and anti-social violence have to be treated early, when schoolchildren are still willing and able to listen. By the time they are 14, in his opinion and that of sympathetic educators, it’s too late.

But such is the growing popular suspicion of President Sarkozy’s spin machine, which whirls faster than a Cuisinart, that even such worthy motives are called into question. “In these times of slipping polls, with his popularity at half mast, the president resorts as always to his hitherto famous techniques of diversion,” says the Nouvel Obs. His high-profile divorce followed by his recent marriage to aging super-model and sometime-songstress Carla Bruni raised questions about his personal judgment and discretion. An attempt to put Sarko's 21-year-old son forward for his old office as mayor of a posh Paris suburb poisoned the atmosphere more. (The young man is running, now, for a less important council seat.) “To make people forget the overexposure of his private life,” writes the Nouvel Obs, “he has to keep refocusing on ‘noble’ subjects.” In this case, remembrance of the Holocaust.

Thickening the blend of controversy, conspiracy and calculation – or miscalculation – is the way Sarkozy has played up the Christian identity of Europe and the religiosity of his regime, as Tracy McNicoll wrote recently in Newsweek International. This does not sit well with a population that has been taught reverence for secularism rather than the kind of contempt now shown for it in the United States. (See Lisa Miller's recent Newsweek column on that subject.)

Indeed, there is undisguised suspicion among the French that Sarkozy’s avowed admiration for things American has affected his judgment; that he only half grasps what he glimpses on the far side of the Atlantic. Thus he may have gotten the idea for indoctrinating elementary school children from a trip to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where the Nouvel Obs reports each visitor is given a badge with the name of a victim. The emotional impact on adults can be profound, but the effect on children could be traumatic.

The Nouvel Observateur’s editor in chief, Jean Daniel, minces no words in his column “The Gaffe and the Slap.” By denigrating the rigorous division between church and state, says Daniel, President Sarkozy “reopens the wounds that never healed” in a country that lived through centuries of savage religious intolerance. Secularism in France – “secular humanism” as it would be called in the United States – is based on a consensus about values, not on the dictates of the Almighty. “In any case,” says Daniel, “it’s not up to the president of the Republic to judge and to declare that we shall not find salvation outside the churches. In other words, we are not the United States.”

Dictating a guilt-based curriculum for fifth-graders, Daniel suggests, is not about reverence for the victims of the Shoah, or for any faith or culture. It is merely Sarkozy’s “latest gadget” to dramatize “his desire to make a break, to add something, to make himself stand out, to be ‘the first to’ [and] the ‘only one to dare.’”

The effect, as described by the Nouvel Observateur, is to trivialize the French presidency, the Republic and, not least, the Holocaust.

UPDATE: An AFP dispatch dated February 27 quotes Simone Veil, the Holocaust survivor and former minister cited above, saying that the proposed program has been scrapped. The government will explore other avenues to "encourage children in classrooms to look at, not other children in particular, but rather a given situation in a given city," she said.