I was not a member of the RPR (Rassemblement pour la République) and who knows what possessed me to send a letter to "Monsieur Balladur", addressed by post to some office whose address I had somehow managed to find. I don't think I kept a copy of that letter and we'll have to rely on the efficiency of their archives to one day unearth what may not have already been pulped. I was deeply disappointed by the long-awaited response: an envelope duly addressed to my name and address, containing a stenciled letter, the kind sent out in thousands with identical text. Édouard Balladur hoped for several million voters: who knows how many he had lost simply because his campaign team had forgotten to have him personally sign each automatic response. We were in 1994-1995 and the Gaullist party was expected to succeed the PS (Socialist Party), which had been in power for fourteen years. Except that the leadership of founder Jacques Chirac was no longer as unquestionable and his "friend of thirty years" had tasted power after skillfully managing his "cohabitation" (1993-1995) with François Mitterrand. Édouard Balladur was first secretary general to the Presidency twelve years before being appointed to head a ministry of sovereignty, in a democracy where this choice is not just an arbitrary reward by "princely decree". And seven more years before his appointment to Matignon. For the "certain idea of France" dear to General de Gaulle, did Édouard Balladur have a better profile than Jacques Chirac? His "Conversations with François Mitterrand" suggest that the then still President of the Republic, at the end of his two seven-year terms, thought so. But was it for Balladur or against Chirac with whom "cohabitation" (1986-1988) was not the most "republican". From this "certain idea", (but of France or of himself?), we will remember this "I ask you to stop" when his supporters had interrupted his speech announcing his elimination in the first round of the presidential election, to boo Jacques Chirac. A striking lesson in political science: the polling favorite is not necessarily the favorite at the ballot box and "a representative sample" is precisely just a sample. The opinion of 1,000 people, by all possible and imaginable methods, cross-checks and projections, cannot describe the expression of 1,000,000 individuals. During my law studies, at a time—twenty years after May 1972—when publications and periodicals had become rare, I was a regular at the "B.U." (university library) where I discovered, among other things, old issues of "Le Monde" whose association with reading constitutional "classics" would shape in me a strange familiarity—that of the intimate stranger—with the "prince-president", the temptation of Bonapartist expedience, the "republican monarch". This French political life was readable and intelligible to me. There were texts, foremost among them the Constitution; there were customs and practices that everyone liked to believe were republican; there was a political class and an administrative order often imbued with the same values and who shared a similar conception of principles: non-negotiable. Transcending all of this, and even without saying it or claiming it through superfluous words, a genuine love of the "dear and old country". It was this "certain idea" thus structured, at least in its understanding at that time, that found an echo in the young man of a quarter century. Unfortunately, thirty years later, it is still not possible for the old man he has become to recognize himself in the politics of his own country. Nasolo-Valiavo Andriamihaja