PARIS — When Nicolas Sarkozy’s father, an exiled Hungarian aristocrat, told his schoolboy son to lower his ambitions, he could not have guessed it would trigger a determination to succeed that would culminate last night in winning France’s highest office.

Unimpressed with young Nicolas’s mediocre results, his father disparagingly predicted: “With the name you carry and the results you obtain, you will never succeed in France.”

Mr. Sarkozy received a stinging reminder of those words during the campaign when far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen claimed he was “not French enough” to run for president.

Such barbs dissolved when the victory cheers rang out at campaign headquarters, as the French marveled at the journey this extraordinarily energetic, quixotic, and driven right-winger has undergone.

“I have changed,” Mr. Sarkozy declared at the start of his campaign after being chosen to run for the Union for a Popular Movement.

“Throughout this campaign, I have set out to meet the French with my story, with what I have learned in life, with my memories, with my emotions,” Mr. Sarkozy said on his final rally in Montpellier last week. “I went out with a will to change things. I went out with my childhood dreams that have never left me.”

Mr. Sarkozy’s Oedipal tussle has been at the heart of that transformation. Pal Sarkozy, a flamboyant advertising designer who owned several houses, two yachts, and collected paintings from Picasso and Matisse, abandoned the 4-year-old Nicolas and his two brothers, Francois and Guillaume, with their mother.

Nicolas developed a hatred of the man who refused to provide help for his family. When his mother, Andrée — a French woman of Greek-Jewish origin — took legal action, Pal won the case after convincing the judge he owned almost nothing. He drove away in a limousine.

The outcome taught young Nicolas a lesson: “The fear of tomorrow, unless it paralyzes you, pushes you to work more than others. To get out of that fear, you need to sweep away the obstacles and keep at it,” he told a biographer.

After the May 1968 student uprising, Mr. Sarkozy veered right and pledged allegiance to the rising Gaullist star, Jacques Chirac.

Unlike most of the ruling class, Mr. Sarkozy did not go to the École Nationale d’Administration, but trained as a lawyer. In politics, his ascent was swift — at 19, he joined Mr. Chirac’s Rally for the Republic. He was a deputy at 34 and a minister at 38.

Mr. Sarkozy married his first wife, the Corsican-born Marie-Dominique Culioli, in 1982. They have two sons, Pierre, born in 1985, and Jean, born in 1987. The two were separated for several years before divorcing in 1996.

Standing at just 5 feet 5 inches, his political career has been punctuated by a series of fraught relationships with male mentors, often ending in betrayal. The first came in 1983, when the 28-year old Nicolas became mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, France’s richest suburb, where his mother and brother Guillaume still live.

After the former mayor died suddenly, Nicolas’s superior, a former interior minister, Charles Pasqua — a witness at his first marriage — was set to take his place. But when Mr. Pasqua fell ill and was hospitalized, Nicolas persuaded his colleagues to elect him instead. “I screwed them all,” he is reported to have declared and kept the post for 19 years.

His best-known betrayal came 12 years later, when he chose to step down as Jacques Chirac’s campaign manager and back his rival, Edouard Balladur, in the 1995 presidential election. At the time, he was very close to Mr. Chirac’s daughter, Claude, whose mother, Bernadette, described him as the perfect son-in-law. When Mr. Sarkozy dropped the Chirac clan, Bernadette is said to have cried: “And to think he saw us in our nightshirts.”

He went on to snatch Mr. Chirac’s UMP party in 2004 and turn it into a powerful electoral machine. Mr. Chirac, nicknamed le tueur (the killer) because of his ruthlessness, long held a grudge against his former protégé and tried to thwart his presidential bid. But, perhaps in recognition of the younger man’s dogged ability to survive, finally gave his blessing before the first round of voting. Even Bernadette made peace with him.

As Francois Fillon, Mr. Sarkozy’s chief political adviser and probable prime minister, said their relationship “is a knot of complicity and incomprehension, admiration, and exasperation. The two men are very different. While Jacques Chirac is enigmatic and secretive, Nicolas Sarkozy is direct and predictable.”

The upside of Mr. Sarkozy’s confrontational style is his bravery, which he proved while mayor of Neuilly: in 1993, he walked unarmed into a classroom to negotiate the release of dozens of children taken hostage by a man wearing an explosive belt. “My back was soaked, I could hear the sweat trickling down it: It was fear, fear of doing a bad job,” he said afterward.

It is this “man of action” status that has won him popularity. But his pledge to hose down high-immigrant suburban estates to flush out criminals, whom he described as “rabble,” also earned him the enmity of many in the banlieues, who say his words stoked the 2005 riots.

While the result showed that a clear majority believes his virile brand of politics is needed to pull France away from decline, a large minority sees him as a dangerous authoritarian with brutal, divisive methods that threaten the social fabric.

The left based much of its campaign on a negative call for Tout Sauf Sarkozy (Anything But Sarkozy), with one magazine describing him as “in some manner mad, and fragile.” A few weeks ago, a former minister, Azouz Begag, alleged that Mr. Sarkozy called him on his mobile saying, “You’re an arsehole, an unfaithful bastard. I’m going to smash your face in,” after a disagreement over the handling of the 2005 riots.

Indeed, the second round of this election has been primarily a referendum on Mr. Sarkozy the man. One of the architects of the softer “Sarko” has been his wife of 11 years, Cecilia, 49, who has been conspicuously absent from much of the campaign. The pair met at Cecilia’s first wedding — Mr. Sarkozy fell in love with her while presiding over the civil ceremony as mayor of Neuilly.

She was the inspiration behind the “I have changed” speech and his interest in women’s issues. In 2005, the couple split up for several months. Complaining that she was tired of being treated “like a piece of furniture,” Mrs. Sarkozy left with their son Louis for an events organizer in New York.

The pair got back together last year but there are rumors that they are again having problems. While she accompanied him for the first round vote, only her daughters were present yesterday.

Many French like the idea of a man of action but also expect their president to remain above the fray. They will find out on May 17, when he moves into the Elysée Palace, if he can be both.