Sarkozy to mag editor: ‘I should smash your face in’

President Nicolas Sarkozy once threatened to "smash the face" of a French magazine editor who wrote an article advising the President: "Do not introduce your new wife to your sons, Barack Obama or any handsome men."

Franz-Olivier Giesbert, editor of Le Point, gave the advice as one of "24 tips" to Sarkozy ahead of his marriage to Carla Bruni in February 2008.

Now, in a book called M. Le President, Giesbert has given a full account of Sarkozy's furious reaction in a 40-minute phone call from the Elysee Palace a few weeks before the wedding.

As soon the pleasantries were out of the way, Sarkozy apparently blurted out: "This article is filth and I should smash your face in."

Giesbert: "Are you threatening me?"

Sarkozy: "You deserve it. I don't know what's holding me back."

Giesbert: "There's no reason for you and Carla to feel insulted."

Sarkozy: "I'm sure you'd blow your top if I wrote that your wife was a whore that everyone had slept with and even wanted to have sex with your children."

Giesbert: "Never did our magazine suggest Carla was a whore."

Only Carla Bruni's intervention brought the increasingly ugly conversation to an end.

Giesbert recounts how she took the phone from her husband-to-be and said: "Forgive him. But Nicolas is so in love, you understand. He cannot bear that people write this kind of thing about me."

This was not before Sarkozy had told Giesbert: "You'll see what I'm going to do to you."

This was potentially serious for Giesbert because Sarkozy is good friends with Francois Pinault, the billionaire retail king who owns Le Point. Clearly, Sarko was intending to have him fired.

In the event, Pinault stuck by his editor - just as he did when Giesbert called Pinault's old friend Jacques Chirac a sex-obsessed "ogre" in a previous book. ·