Bedroom farce paralysing France

Paris: It started off like a French farce. Will it end up like a Greek tragedy? France’s “First Girlfriend”, Valerie Trierweiler, may well cause the political downfall of the man she fought so bitterly to catch — and still can’t get a marriage commitment from.

Five months after he was elected, Francois Hollande’s popularity figures are the lowest of any French president since Charles de Gaulle signed the 1962 treaty acknowledging the independence of Algeria after a bloody anti-colonialist war. The general consensus is that Trierweiler is one of the chief reasons why the Fifth Republic’s seventh president is seen as henpecked, inefficient and vacillating — in short, not in charge.

“The five women who make his life hell” was last week’s headline on news magazine L’Express.

First on the list were the president’s partners, past and present: Segolene Royal, the former presidential contender and mother of Hollande’s four children; and Valerie, the Paris-Match journalist who won Hollande from Royal.

The other three were former Socialist leader Martine Aubry, Green leader Cecile Duflot, and Angela Merkel: they would never have been qualified by gender if Hollande’s chaotic private life wasn’t the first subject of gossip and conjecture these days.

New biography

In this toxic environment came the revelations in La Frondeuse (The Troublemaker), a new biography published last Thursday by journalists Alix Bouilhaguet and Christophe Jakubyszyn, that while she was busy prying Hollande away from the home he’d been making with Royal for more than two decades, the (still-married) Trierweiler was three-timing — or should it be four-timing? — him with Patrick Devedjian, a former Sarkozyste cabinet minister.

The book also recounts how, around the same time, a spitting-mad Segolene accused Hollande of cheating on her with Anne Hidalgo, an elegant brunette Socialist politician, now Deputy Mayor of Paris, and expected to run for City Hall herself in 2015.

If, by this stage, you’re getting confused, let’s take a deep breath and plough on.

Hollande and Royal meet while students at ENA, the top government school that in France guarantees you a network and a career Oxbridge graduates can only dream of.

They became one of France’s Left-wing power couples, seemingly unmarried because it was so un-bourgeois, so much, well, cooler.

Assigned to cover them for Paris-Match was a young and elegant political reporter, Trierweiler, herself twice-married. When, in 1992, Royal, then minister for social affairs, invited the press to the maternity clinic where she’d just had her daughter Flora, it was Trierweiler who covered the birth, in breathless prose.

The fact that a woman minister would admit the public to such a personal event was treated as a feminist breakthrough.

Hollande and Trierweiler didn’t get together then; but in La Frondeuse it is alleged that they had linked up by 1997, far earlier than the official version which dates it back to 2005.

Making a name

Meanwhile, Trierweiler was making a name for herself in the old style of French women political journalists: getting inside information with, let’s say, allure and poise. If this sounds distasteful, that is because it is. And for this (happily receding) journalistic tradition, we have to thank one of France’s great magazine editors, the late Francoise Giroud — later Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s minister for women’s rights — who, when she headed L’Express in the Sixties and Seventies, sent out a large number of personable female reporters to “charm” the largely male political class and get good stories.

Giroud, herself a hugely gifted writer, but also the mistress of the flamboyant politician and L’Express proprietor Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, would teach her young reporters how to dress and give them social deportment tips. All of her alumni were talented in their own right; most of them later became top executives in television news or newspapers.

Still, acceptance and access was given to them because of their youth and looks rather than their competence — and most of them had quite public affairs with (married) top politicians.

Starting out in the 1980s, I still remember how every politician I was sent to interview seemed to assume that I would be available if they cared enough to ask: after a couple of weeks, I asked my then employers to transfer me to the foreign desk. Nothing untoward had happened, but I hated every single minute it. Getting shot at in southern Lebanon was blissfully uncomplicated by comparison.

Valerie Trierweiler is, in many ways, an old-fashioned girl. “She is insecure, jittery, unable to make a choice,” wrote the authors of La Frondeuse. “She wants it all, a career and the job of First Lady — the press pass and the office at the Elysee Palace.”

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2012