Only four people knew that Valérie Trierweiler, the former first lady of France, was writing a memoir: her literary agent, two employees from the publishing house and Trierweiler herself. The secrecy was such that Trierweiler had to conduct the whole operation as though starring in her own Cold War espionage drama.
She wrote everything on a computer not connected to the internet, saving chunks of the manuscript on a USB stick, which would be collected from her Paris apartment by her agent, who would take it to the publishers in instalments. They would read it on computers with no internet connection, anxious that no one from the president’s office would find out what they were doing and try to stop them. Not a single sheet of paper was ever printed out. The document was saved under a pseudonym. Trierweiler called herself John Milton, after the 17th-century author of “Paradise Lost”.
The comparison was not without relevance. Trierweiler felt she had lost something profound — not exactly a paradise, but a brutal blow to her happiness nonetheless. For the best part of a decade she had been in what she thought was a loving relationship with François Hollande, a man she had fallen for when she was a political journalist and he a junior Socialist politician. When they met in the 1990s they were both married to other people — he to Ségolène Royal, a young minister who would become a rising star in the Socialist party; she to Denis Trierweiler, an editor on Paris Match, the magazine where she worked. They had seven children between them. It wasn’t an easy situation. They dismantled their lives to be together. Their intimacy, so Trierweiler thought, had been strengthened by what they had been through to achieve it.
“My story, it was a love story, that’s what I believe above all,” she says now. “He was not the president [when I fell in love with him]. No one thought he would be. It was the man that I loved.”
Trierweiler saw Hollande’s potential for high office, even when those around him were dismissive of his chances. She campaigned for him, standing by his side as he pressed the flesh and built up support. When he was elected president in May 2012, it was the culmination of a joint dream. Trierweiler gave up her job to avoid accusations of bias, moving to become Paris Match’s literary critic.
And then, in January this year, 18 months after the election, it emerged the president had been having an affair with the actor Julie Gayet. He had been photographed arriving at Gayet’s apartment on a moped, his face obscured by a crash helmet. A security guard is said to have brought the couple fresh croissants in the mornings. The pictures were splashed across the press. A humiliated Trierweiler was publicly ditched by Hollande in a terse 18-word statement announcing that he was “putting an end” to their “shared life”. It was, she says when we meet, “a betrayal and, on top of that, a public humiliation”.
As payback for his cavalier treatment of her, Trierweiler started writing. To begin with, she says, it was a form of therapy. Then, the more it poured out of her, the more she began to realise it could be a book.
And what a book it is. I have never read anything quite like “Merci pour ce moment” (Thank You for This Moment). It is 300-odd pages of deliciously backhanded barbs, sentimental hand-wringing and vicious putdowns, seasoned with large dollops of self-justification. Trierweiler is forever dashing into bathrooms and collapsing while Hollande is an unfeeling prig who either ignores her or tells her to stop being so melodramatic. Several pages are devoted to Trierweiler’s humanitarian work, where she describes herself bringing light and meaning into the lives of countless destitute individuals and disabled children. Hollande, meanwhile, is shown mocking the poor, insulting Trierweiler’s working-class family, struggling with his weight and swearing on her son’s life that he was not having an affair with Gayet. Once they had broken up, Trierweiler writes that he bombarded her with loving texts when he should have been concentrating on meetings with Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama.
“He writes that he will win me back,” she recounts in the book, “as if I was an election.”
Reading “Thank You for This Moment” is like reliving the time you drunkenly sent a series of vitriolic texts to your university boyfriend who dumped you for someone he met while backpacking through Thailand. It makes you squirm. And, at the same time, it is totally compelling.
Needless to say, it has sold by the bucketload in France, shifting more than 600,000 copies in two months. It is out now in English translation. Since its publication, Trierweiler has been accused of everything from anti-feminism to bringing the presidency into disrepute. She has been pilloried as the scorned woman and the vindictive harpy. Worse still, some French critics sniffed at her grammar.
We meet in the sitting room of a plush boutique hotel in Paris. She seems anxious, a touch guarded. Her laugh seems a nervous tic.
One senses that while she does not particularly like raking over the details of her heartbreak to a journalist she has only just met, it is simultaneously the only thing she can talk about. The book, she says, arose not out of a need for revenge but was rather “a cry from the heart”. The writing of it was “vital ... It was not my objective to destroy François Hollande. It was to reconstruct me.”
But as a “woman of the left”, hasn’t she caused untold harm to both the Socialist party and the image of the president by airing her dirty laundry in public? “No, I don’t think so. If you look at what happened before the publication of the book, the election results were disastrous ... The [presidential] approval ratings, were exactly the same — in fact they were lower before the book, and now they’re a bit better. The French are fairly tolerant about people’s private lives. They are pretty intelligent. What they care about is living standards ... 10 per cent of people in France live below the poverty line. Those are the numbers that count, not whether I said he [Hollande] could tell a lie.”
She is magnificently unrepentant, describing her breakup with Hollande as “not only losing the man you love, but losing your public role and losing your own self-esteem”.
After learning that he had been having an affair, Trierweiler took a large quantity of sleeping pills. This was reported in the media as a suicide attempt. “It was not a suicide attempt,” she says. “It was an attempt to escape. What I wanted was not to have to live the next few hours. It wasn’t that I no longer wanted to live.”
She was later hospitalised and claims she was put on “astronomical doses” of tranquillisers following “instructions from on high” to ensure she didn’t make a scene.
Power, she writes, had acted “like an acid” on their relationship. Trierweiler found herself excluded from meetings as soon as Hollande took office and was no longer expected to have an opinion on policy. Her role was suddenly to stay silent, where before she felt she had made helpful contributions to his campaign. Their relationship had always relied on a certain exclusive intimacy. Now she was being pushed out by a possessive coterie of advisers.
When Hollande’s popularity ratings plummeted, she says he became difficult to live with — closed-off, angry and resentful.
Looking back, she insists she has no sadness about embarking on the relationship : “We had moments of happiness which I don’t forget. I would have preferred it if he had never been president,” she says.
When Hollande became president, Trierweiler became the immediate target of negative attention. The couple were not married, and there were grumblings that, with no official status as first lady, she should not be spending money on her five personal assistants and the running of an independent office in the Elysée.
Her public image was aloof and cold. She was portrayed as meddlesome and pushy, with an undue influence on both Hollande’s policies and his wardrobe. When, a month after his election, she sent out a tweet expressing her support for the dissident Socialist candidate Olivier Falorni, who was standing for public office in La Rochelle against Hollande’s ex-wife, there was a public outcry. Royal lost the election. Trierweiler was seen as a vengeful second wife, staking out her territory. She later apologised.
When I ask if she has any regrets, this is the only incident she cites. Her supposed haughtiness, she claims, stems simply from a lack of confidence. She dismisses the other criticisms as being motivated by rank sexism. “It’s difficult to be a woman. It’s very, very difficult to be a woman in politics — I am not one, but I have seen it. It’s a milieu that is very macho. But at least female politicians have the legitimacy of election. For me, the complicated bit was to sign up to a role where I had nothing to say any more. I no longer had any legitimacy. I had been a political journalist for 20 years and I still had that critical eye but [as first lady] I was no longer allowed to express an opinion. The most difficult thing was to do nothing, to be the trophy wife. I found myself the only woman in France who no longer had the right to work, to speak or to not be married.”
Trierweiler was reluctant to give up her career simply because her boyfriend had been elected president. She started reviewing books for the magazine but even that attracted public opprobrium. She is still exasperated by this, commenting that no one had a problem when Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, kept her singing career going throughout her husband’s term in office (though, in fact, they did).
“In the name of what must a woman abandon her job?” she asks with a rhetorical flourish, letting the question float unanswered.
Bruni-Sarkozy is one of a handful of former first ladies who sent Trierweiler supportive messages about the book. She remembers talking to Bruni-Sarkozy at the handover of the presidency and noticing her predecessor had tears in her eyes as she spoke. “She suffered during her time at the Elysée [the official residence of the French president],” Trierweiler says.
Trierweiler, too, disliked living in the Elysée, surrounded by “snobby” advisers who “feel themselves very superior” and to whom “betrayal is seen as a virtue”.
“In France, the problem is that nothing is defined [about the role of first lady],” she says. She is highly critical of how the wives of state leaders are portrayed in the media: “There is this constant myth that the woman is pushing the man to make decisions, that she’s meddling. It’s always that myth of the woman who is too involved. That’s sexist also. What man would accept to play the role that a woman plays? To smile, to stay silent, to walk several steps behind his wife? Not one man would do it. Mr Merkel does not do it.”
She raises some important issues but her points are undermined by the book’s score-settling tone. Her championing of women’s rights too sits uneasily with some, who point out that she struck up a relationship with Hollande when he was still married to Segolène Royal, the mother of his four children. In the book, Trierweiler describes infidelity as “an infernal cycle”. Does she now feel any guilt towards Royal?
“Yes and no .... The culpability is not just mine, it must be his too. I was married as well.”
And what does she think of Julie Gayet, who supplanted Trierweiler’s role as “the other woman”?
She gives me an icy glare. “I’ve never met her,” she replies coolly. “I don’t know her.”
Trierweiler says she has become “more feminist” since her bruising experience in the Elysée. And yet critics say her memoir does a disservice to women. Kim Willsher, writing in the Guardian, asked: “Why become the living, breathing embodiment of the sexist old adage about hell and a scorned woman’s fury?”
I broach this with Trierweiler and she seizes on the notion. “These people want to say that the dignified woman is the woman who shuts up,” she replies. “Is that how we serve the cause of women? I don’t think so. Is it OK to be mistreated by a man without saying anything? No.”
Our time is up. I turn the recorder off. Trierweiler’s shoulders relax. She reaches for a paper napkin and I realise that she is crying. It is not a showy cry, designed to elicit sympathy. It is a display of unexpected fragility. Whatever else Valérie Trierweiler has been portrayed as — vengeful harpy, ambitious meddler, undignified ex — she is also a woman who has had her heart broken. People deal with heartbreak in different ways. Trierweiler chose to write a book about it. Maybe it was necessary therapy but I’m not yet convinced she’s closed the final chapter.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
