Comic strip portrays Sarkozy as a power-crazed Napoleon figure

Nicolas Sarkozy has defended the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed as a "necessary evil". But today, the French Interior Minister's own sense of humour will itself be tested with the publication of a comic strip album lampooning his ferocious ambition to become President.

The 150 irreverent pages of La face Karchee de Sarkozy portray the diminutive 51-year-old politician as constantly stooped like a jockey, eagle-eyed and gritting his teeth as he targets his sole aim: power. The story writer Philippe Cohen said: "What's striking about Sarkozy is that his keenness to attain power seems to be coupled with a kind of nonchalance about holding it.

"The present state of the Interior Ministry is a case in point. The ministry is being run by a senior civil servant while Sarkozy busies himself with the presidential campaign."

The publishers, Fayard, present the book as a new genre called the "investigative cartoon". It includes a bibliographical section listing the sources used by M. Cohen, Richard Malka, the dialogue writer, and Riss, the book's illustrator.

The title, a French play on words which translates roughly as "The Hidden Face of Sarkozy Stripped Clean", is drawn from an outburst by the Interior Minister last year when he went on to a troubled housing estate and vowed to clean it up with a Kärcher power hose. Karchée is a play on the water pressure gun and cachée means hidden.

M. Sarkozy, whose ill-hidden drive to succeed is the frequent target of satirical videos on the internet, is portrayed in the book as a Napoleonic figure with ambitions of empire. In reality, his middle-class upbringing was privileged but not to the same degree as that of his political peers. He studied law; then attended elite universities, such as the ENA, the Ecole Nationale d'Administration.

"The image that Sarkozy has sold most successfully - that of being anti-establishment - is one of the biggest shams of all," said Cohen. "Sarkozy has worked the system from the inside, starting as Chirac's lackey, then betraying him and finally ploughing his own furrow."

The cartoon opens in the year 2098 with a Sorbonne student presenting his doctoral thesis on "le Sarkozysm" - an ideology founded on the catchphrase "I screwed the lot of them" which it is claimed he said in 1983 when, at the age of 28, he outmanoeuvred conservative veterans to become mayor of the smart Parisian suburb of Neuilly. The story ends immediately before the result is known of the 2007 presidential election.

"Sarkozy has been greatly inspired by Blair. He has learnt about spin and that is new in French politics. His advisers are told to coproduce the news agenda, to feed the journalists every day," said M. Cohen.

"Sarkozy went to see George Bush a few weeks ago and was ridiculed for going to great lengths to be photographed with the US President. On the flight back he was told that the silly picture (it was said that Sarkozy stood on a stool) had not gone down well. Also, some riot police had been injured in a clash on an estate near Paris.

"Sarkozy got off the plane and launched a furious attack on French justice. At least two newspapers did double-page spreads on the state of the justice system, thus trumping those who followed up on the silly photograph and the injured riot police. That is Sarkozysm through and through,'' he said.