There are two wrong ways to assess what has occurred in France in the last few weeks, after a photo was published showing a not-so-glorious helmeted president escaping the Elysee Palace, on the rear seat of a scooter, to pay a courtesy visit at night to a new girlfriend.
A first one is to play it the Anglo-Saxon way — show an offended (although hypocritically puritanical) face and conclude that the French Fifth Republic has simply passed away. Indeed, when remembering General De Gaulle’s attitude restoring the country’s respectability and strength 50 years ago, one can hardly believe that President Francois Hollande plays in the same constitutional yard. Who would furthermore go on trusting a leader who puts at stake his reputation for another love affair, plays a ‘vaudeville’ character as some predecessors did in previous regimes and eventually, who just inversed the proper order of what his priorities should have been. Where have loyalty, a sense of sacrifice and transcendence which made De Gaulle so famous gone?
Yet, even since De Gaulle left, French politics have been able to cope with situations, which, if not totally similar, were anyhow rather distant from De Gaulle’s principles — considering former presidents Valery Giscard and Jacques Chirac’s love affairs with actresses. And the regime is still there.
Another wrong vision is to believe that a ‘normal’ president may simply behave in his private life as any other ‘normal’ man would do. If men betray their spouses, why is Hollande not entitled to do the same? In any event, it should not catch the attention more than that. President Hollande had an important message to forward to the French people during his last press conference, the so-called U-turn of his economic policy (favouring offer over demand, decreasing taxes, freeing job creations — even though it all remains to be acted upon) and one should concentrate on it. The French should thus forgive temporary misbehaviour and focus on what is of essence in the specific case, the new ‘pact of responsibility’ proposed to them by Hollande.
However, this reasoning does not make us feel comfortable either, for at least two reasons.
The first one is that Hollande’s attitude is also reflective of a policy, which is showing increasing hostility to the family structure. There was possibly not too much to expect from a man who never considered appropriate, marrying a lady with whom he had four children. But there has been much more since then. Looking at what his government has achieved in the space for the last 18 months: the gay ‘wedding’, the easing of fiscal advantages for families, the softening of the abortion and euthanasia laws, the easing of the divorce legal rules, the soon-to-be ‘GPA’ (having babies for third-part accounts), the ‘gender revolution’ (differences between boys and girls should be wiped-out at school so that ideally, one decides by itself what ‘he’ or ‘she’ wants to be ...), one can hardly believe all these choices are not the results of a well-planned policy aiming at destroying family as a cornerstone value upon which the French nation is based.
But there is also another reason for not being satisfied with the so-called ‘private life’ approach: Shouldn’t it be admitted that whoever pretends to lead a country must adopt an as much indisputable exemplarity as possible? In other words, doesn’t being a leader convey the need to abide by virtues, since cheating his family likely means cheating others?
It is why that the ‘private’ life of a statesman always becomes ‘public’ pretty quickly. And would that only be because everybody speaks about it? A public life requires a certain level of virtue. As French writer Charles Peguy wrote a century ago, a public man is temporarily the living symbol of something which supersedes and overflows him; he must remain faithful to the symbol because he accepted to represent it and his fellow citizens have modelled their vision of the state to his own behaviour.
Several well-known virtues are essential for great statesmen: Integrity, courage, perspicacity, vision, empathy ... One should definitely assume that a healthy moral spirit is also one of them. Any nation deserves it.
In the end, it seems few cared that Hollande tarnished his image and are actually, even more than happy that his former companion has now left the Elysee palace, where she enjoyed the means of a staff remunerated on tax-payers’ money for somehow hazardous missions. On the other hand, maybe it was his personal situation which was also addressed in Rome week before last, on the occasion of an encounter with Pope Francis, aimed at warming-up the relationship between Hollande and French Catholics (the result was not achieved as renewed national demonstrations scheduled for tomorrow against Hollande’s family policy will show despite the Paris Police Commissioner’ shabby and pathetic efforts to prevent them). Yet, one may doubt it and in a certain way, also regret it since the two men are actually sharing a common feature: Neither one of them is married.
Luc Debieuvre is a French essayist and a lecturer at IRIS (Institut de Relations Internationales et Strategiques) and the FACO Law University of Paris.
