As I ploughed through Merci Pour Ce Moment, the French former first lady Valérie Trierweiler's merciless demolition of François Hollande, I experienced several changes of emotion.
These included moments of sympathy for her; if only half of it is true, Hollande was a rotten partner. Her modest origins have instilled sounder values. He was contemptuous of her life and work, interested only in his power and her responsibilities as consort.
Yet she was a loose cannon, constantly liable to embarrass and damage him. She was insanely jealous long before there was cause to be. For a journalist, she was spectacularly naive about, and lacking in understanding of, the inevitable impact on their lives of his overwhelming new challenges as president. And, again for a journalist, she was irrational about the nature of media interest.
The book gives rare insight into the personality, massive warts and all, of a serving president. Perhaps even a woman scorned ought to have waited until he was no longer president, but he arguably brought that inconvenience on himself.
For my latest column in The Connexion, a monthly newspaper for English speakers in France, I considered what the affair tells us of France's high-minded but two-faced attitude towards rights to privacy. Here, more or less, it is ...
Valérie Trierweiler’s intimate account of her decline and fall as François Hollande’s first lady gives a new twist to France’s curious relationship with privacy.
The French are quick to lecture others on their attachment to the right of all, even the rich and powerful, to private lives.
Yet Trierweiler’s tear-drenched, mud-slinging book, Merci Pour Ce Moment, is only the latest example of the selective, not to say hypocritical, approach of some personalities and their apologists. It is an approach spectacularly at odds with assertions that France gets right what wicked Anglo-Saxons so intrusively get wrong.
British tabloid editors often mock celebrities who “invade their own privacy”. They criticise them for striking lucrative deals with the likes of Hello! magazine while howling in outrage at interest from less favoured sections of the media. The editors’ complaint is self-serving: talking to an obsequious glossy or compliant television interviewer does not make a humbug of someone who objects to photographers and reporters crawling through the garden or searching the rubbish bins.
But can anyone seriously blame Closer, that most invasive of French gossip rags, for reportedly taking Trierweiler to court to reclaim costs incurred when she successfully accused it of invading her privacy? Here, after all, is a woman who has for many years earned a living writing for Paris-Match. This is not the world’s most restrained publication; two recently departed ministers, Arnaud Montebourg and Aurélie Filippetti, are suing over an innocuous report on their supposed romantic break in California.
In her book, Trierweiler thrusts this dagger into the heart of the man she loved: “He presented himself as the man who dislikes the rich. In reality, the president doesn’t like the poor. This man of the Left talks in private of the ‘sans dents’ [toothless], proud of his streak of humour.”
Confronted by this slur, we might expect Hollande to stick to his mantra that private lives are private. Instead, he pours his heart out to Le Nouvel Observateur: “I took this attack on the poor, the destitute, as a blow against my entire life. In all my functions, I have thought only to help, to represent those who suffer.”
Nor does Trierweiler leave it there. Amid all her revelations about a relationship at breaking point, there is the implication that the president treated her abominably, not just cheating and lying but insulting her working-class family and leaving her unattended after she swallowed far too many sleeping pills.
Around my lunch table in the Var, two of the three French people present dismiss it all, saying they wouldn’t care a hoot what Mr Hollande did at home (or when visiting an actress’s home) if only he could get the economy right. The third, my wife, argued that voters cannot trust a man deceitful towards those he professes to love. Maybe she has spent too many years in the UK.
The French media strikes me as duller that the British equivalent, but a lot more decent. Yet there has been a push against barriers of the sort that kept François Mitterrand’s double life from public knowledge.
Nicolas Sarkozy had something to do with it. He was keen enough to present himself and Cécilia as the golden couple, for avid public consumption, while electorally prudent to do so. When he became less keen, the press challenged him – though Cécilia’s successor, Carla Bruni, no shrinking violet, has proved surprisingly protective of family privacy.
Whatever we feel about it, we know more about presidents and their love lives than ever we did. And make of this what you will: in this land that cherishes privacy, Trierweiler’s book is selling like hot cakes.
* Both book featured, and others in English, are available via the Salut! Amazon link. Start at http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/2352043859/salusund-21 and navigate from there.
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