Just when we thought that President Nicolas Sarkozy could not appear any more preposterous, he proves us all wrong. Last week’s big story from France is how, for a photo-opportunity at a motor vehicle technology plant, the Elysée’s media advisers arranged that none of the technicians posing on the platform with Sarkozy was taller than his 5ft 5in.
All 20 of them supposedly admitted to a Belgian television reporter that they were among the smallest of the company’s workforce of 1,400, selected and bussed in on that basis. The French media fell as ravening wolves on the Belgian television story, to the fury of the Elysée, which denounced the report as “totally absurd and grotesque”. This was a marvellous non-denial denial: the whole point of the story was its absurdity and grotesqueness.
It is possible that the provision of the little folk was not done at the request of the president’s men, but simply arranged by the firm itself out of deference to the president’s known height anxiety. It would have noted Sarkozy’s habit of wearing shoes with 2in platform heels and the fact that he stood on a footstool when he delivered a speech on a Normandy beach standing next to Gordon Brown (5ft 11in) and Barack Obama (6ft 2in); and that at a later photo shoot, Sarkozy stood on tiptoe when snapped with Obama and the statuesque first lady.
It seems strange that the French president cannot see that what is truly humiliating is not his height but his ludicrous manoeuvres to try to disguise it. Yet perhaps it is not so strange. We men have — and I generalise expansively here — an abiding obsession with our height, almost the equivalent in psychological intensity to women’s obsession with their weight. Thus, just as women are most discomfited by other women who are thinner than themselves, so men are most ill at ease with other men of greater height.
Speak for yourself, you might say; and so I will. I have no particular reason to think about this matter, being a bog-standard 5ft 10in. Yet I am intuitively certain that my desire to have been taller is absolutely standard among men of my height, just as women who are of normal, healthy build will still wish that they were thinner. They can do something about that, of course, which we men cannot in respect of our futile aspiration; but in a way this makes it much more difficult for women, as they feel perennially responsible for any failure to reach the desired target weight.
In a different way, however, matters are worse for the not-tall man than they are for the not-skinny woman. Men — and again I generalise scandalously — are not in reality over-bothered about finding a mate who is fashionably thin; indeed, the sight of an average Vogue model without her clothes on would make most of us make a mental note to give more generously to Oxfam this Christmas. Yet we men are not deluding ourselves in believing that women do find the idea of tall men much more attractive.
If you don’t believe this, look at the lonely hearts advertisements placed by women seeking men (which I have, solely for reasons of research): it is clear that above-average height is seen as an ideal male attribute by a high percentage of women. This, perhaps, is why the male advertiser is notorious for exaggerating his height (in the hope that he will get more replies and then use his GSOH to distract dates from noticing that he is 5ft 9in, rather than “tall”).
Yet whereas the female obsession with slimness may be a phenomenon purely of the western world and this particular moment in history, the preference for tall men transcends time and cultures: anthropologists tell us that whether you visit the Trobriand islanders of the Pacific or the Mehinaku people of the central Brazilian forests, you will discover that height is prized above all other physical attributes in men.
The definitive male lament about this was written some years ago by the brilliant American journalist Jonathan Rauch, himself a man of relatively few inches (perhaps wisely, he wrote the piece anonymously for The Economist). The article gave accounts of various experiments which seemed to prove definitively that taller men were not just more attractive to women, but were also seen as more employable recruits by companies, regardless of the sex of the interviewer.
Rauch went on to cite research into a sample of 6,000 male Britons, whose progress was monitored from birth to early adulthood: “Short teenaged boys made less money when they became young adults than their taller peers, even after other attributes, such as scores on ability tests or parents’ social status, were factored out ... another survey found that those who were 6ft 2in or taller received starting salaries 12% higher than those under 6ft.”
Nevertheless, when my father (5ft 8in) was a financial journalist, he discovered the companies he examined seemed to perform in inverse relationship to their chief executives’ height: in other words, the smaller the boss, the better were the company’s prospects. He called this “Lawson’s law” and recommended his readers to invest accordingly.
This observation is not paradoxical when set against the results of the surveys cited by Rauch, but absolutely what you would expect. If it is the case that the very short man is subject to discrimination and constantly underestimated, then it follows that for such a person to get to the top requires more effort — and ability — than it would for someone of average height, let alone the “ideal executive” height of 6ft 2in.
Taller men, of course, will dismiss such an argument out of hand; they prefer to talk of the “little man” complex, a shorthand description for an aggressive and ferocious desire for success motivated by a lack of inches and the memories of playground humiliation. This has been attributed in the past to dictators such as Stalin (5ft 5in), Franco (5ft 4in) and Mussolini (5ft 6in).
Like Sarkozy, these historic grotesques tried to disguise their lack of inches with footwear of cunning construction. In their case it was even more unnecessary (if psychologically understandable) since the aura of power fills a room much more tangibly than mere verticality. There is something peculiarly intimidating in the very short man of power (and I have met one or two): their energy seems almost unnaturally compressed into such a small bundle, ready to explode volcanically at any minute.
These men tend not to be thin. Think of Sir Philip Green or Silvio Berlusconi. They may be short but they occupy a significant amount of cubic feet. I have some fellow feeling in this, since I weigh more than 15 stone, obese in the modern medical jargon yet peculiarly reassuring when on a public platform: just before going on air in a television debate not so long ago, I noticed the people seated on either side of me were very thin — and at that precise moment I felt a great surge of confidence. They seemed so ... insignificant.
Armed with this insight, Sarkozy should stop sending off to Stand Taller for its “internal build-up” shoes (delivered in plain packaging) and definitely stop all that frenetic jogging — which apart from anything else is inherently un-presidential. Instead he should concentrate on bulking up — and what culinary culture could offer finer materials for such an endeavour than the French?
It’s possible that his wife, the former model Carla Bruni, might object to his gaining a fuller, more imposing figure. Yet if she truly cares about her husband’s peace of mind — and the dignity of France — she will sack his personal trainer and pile the presidential plate high. It’s the only way he’ll put on inches.
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Dominic Lawson writes a weekly column for the Sunday Times and also contributes book reviews and interviews. He won many awards as a newspaper and magazine editor and in his spare time wrote an acclaimed book about Grandmaster chess, The Inner Game.
Columns urging greater openness in family courts win Paul Foot Award
The Editor of the TLS writes on books, people and politics
Mary Beard of Cambridge and the TLS on culture ancient and modern
Sun wasn't one of them...
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