Montreal's Desmarais family famously prefers to avoid media attention. But staying clear of the spotlight was a little harder than usual on Sept. 2, with the announcement that Suez and Gaz de France would merge.

With a market value of 90 billion euros, the new GDF Suez will be the world's third-largest energy company, after Russia's Gazprom and the nuclear giant Electricité de France. The largest private shareholder is Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, a Brussels holding company. GBL's president is the Belgian billionaire Albert Frère, and he shares all his profits 50-50 with his business associate and friend of 30 years' standing, Power Corporation of Canada patriarch Paul Desmarais, Sr.

All of which left observers with a familiar impression: that the Desmarais family remains unusually skilled at mixing business and politics to advantage. What is new is that Canada having exhausted its fascinations for the billionaire clan, France has become a new focus. Its business -- and its politics.

The Suez-GDF merger would not have happened without the direct intervention of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. As Suez president Gérard Mestrallet said at the news conference announcing the merger: "The involvement of the president of the republic, his determination, his industrial vision, his desire for fairness were decisive for the completion of this project." If anything, that was a genteel understatement. It was Sarkozy's public goading and private arm-twisting that persuaded Mestrallet to sell off most of Suez's environmental subsidiary. When Mestrallet finally caved to pressure from shareholders -- including Frère and Desmarais -- the megamerger quickly followed.

It has been that kind of year for Sarkozy, Frère and the Desmarais family. Paul Sr. keeps a suite at the Ritz when he is in Paris; Paul Jr., whose apartment is on Avenue Montaigne, near the Canadian embassy and a handful of the capital's finest Michelin-starred restaurants, is actually listed in the Paris telephone directory. They have made their relationship with Sarkozy a bit of a project over the past few years. The payoff came this election year.

At the end of 2004, Sarkozy became leader of the new centre-right UMP party. His presidential ambitions were an open secret. He spent several weeks in Quebec over the Christmas holidays. But while he paid a courtesy call to Premier Jean Charest, his host was Desmarais Sr., at Sagard, the family's opulent retreat in the Charlevoix region.

They have kept in touch. On May 6, the night Sarkozy was elected, the elder Desmarais was part of the dinner party at Le Fouquet's, an elegant restaurant on the Champs Elysées. According to persistent rumour in the capital, Desmarais picked up the cheque that night.

Still, it would be worth pointing out that there are many rich competitors for the new president of the republic's affections. Sarkozy likes to have billionaires about, and that night at Le Fouquet's there were a lot of them. Frère flew in on a private jet from Marrakesh. Between courses, Le Monde has reported, industrialist Vincent Bolloré persuaded the president-elect's wife Cécilia that the couple should vacation on his yacht off Malta.

The list of billionaire friends of Sarkozy goes on. Telecom titan Martin Bouygues was a witness at the Sarkozy wedding. Most of the country's media barons are notoriously tight with the new president, which helps explain how Sarkozy's deputy campaign director, Laurent Solly, is already the new boss at TF1, France's leading TV network.

So it is impossible to draw a straight line between the Desmarais' demonstrated fondness for Sarkozy and any of his policies as president. The Sarkozy Rolodex is simply too thick with contacts for that. But Power Corp. has a long history of squiring future leaders. Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin all had long histories with the company before becoming Canada's prime minister. Stephen Harper is the first Canadian leader in nearly a quarter-century with no real ties to the Desmarais clan. But the family's shift to French power is no great leap -- especially for a company undergoing a long generational transition in its corporate governance.

The family business is evolving in ways that will make it necessary for Paul Jr. to spend more time in France. His Sagard I and II venture-capital funds, worth a combined total of 1.6 billion euros, will make him the guardian of young, growing companies that will need constant attention. So Canada will be seeing a little less of the Desmarais, and France a lot more. With billions from their recent sale of the Bertelsmann media giant, the family has capital to play with. And the board they are playing on just got bigger.

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