September was the Cruellest Month

At the beginning of September comes the rentrée, as France returns to home, work and school after the summer holidays. For publishers, it’s the most important selling period of the year. This time there was the usual flurry of new books; some of them even worth reading. Popular authors clogged popular radio and television broadcasts, publishers published schedules of bookshop appearances of their stars, book-chat gossips gossiped about contenders for the big literary prizes. It was enjoyable, familiar, and predictable, even to the publicists’ ever-hopeful overuse of the word shock. Literary magazine Lire’s front cover pushed their choice for “the shock book of the rentrée”—Emmanuel Carrère’s  non-fiction/fiction about the beginning of Christianity. Instead, a quite different and unexpected text came out of nowhere, breaking sales records and pulverising the competition—all without a single author interview. The book exploded like a suicide bomber’s vest inside the French president’s bedroom and left the smoking ruins of the Élysée Palace looking like a bomb-flattened bordello on the road to Vichy (circa 1940).

When, on Tuesday September 2, François Hollande received advance warning of what was about to happen, he managed to smile. The moment has been captured on film. The documentary maker who had been following him about caught the scene on film—we will have to wait until 2015 to see for ourselves. It sounds like the moment President Bush was told of the attacks on the Twin Towers. Hollande’s dreadful moment was learning that a book by Valérie Trierweiler, on their life together, was to be published in two days time. He kept smiling. It wasn’t until almost midnight that his staff managed to obtain an advance copy. The next day he was reportedly in a “black rage” (no cameras this time) when he learned that the serious Left newspaper Le Monde was giving the book credibility by publishing an extract. Coming from Les Arènes, a small Paris publisher, Merci pour ce moment (Thanks for This Moment) took France, and its president, by surprise.

Trierweiler, a high-end-forties razor-wire-Madonna, had been the companion of François Hollande for nine years. For twenty months, after his election as president, she had been beside him in stiletto heels and designer chic as France’s first lady. She was seen as a tough lady; in her book she says she was called Hollande’s Rottweiler. In January 2014 a sexual scandal, his, ended in dismissal, hers. An English newspaper described her book as the “Rottweiler’s Revenge”. Her book demolishes boundaries between public and private in France: “I have suffered too much from lies to tell any in my turn.”

Trierweiler and Hollande (she a Paris Match journalist, he the General Secretary of the Socialist Party) had publicly revealed their relationship in 2007. Trierweiler, who had three children, divorced her husband (who also worked for Paris Match); Hollande left his partner Ségolène Royal (the Socialist Party candidate in the 2007 presidential election) and their four children. During that failed election campaign Royal and Hollande had appeared to be a happy unmarried family unit, and only after she lost was their break-up revealed. Political ambition, not children, had kept them together, in public.

Hollande decided 2012 would be his turn to run for president. His campaign for pre-selection as the Socialist Party candidate was helped when rival Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for rape in New York. Trierweiler claims that Hollande’s immediate reaction to the arrest was to calculate its effect on his campaign—which simply shows he sometimes has the right instincts. Chosen by his party, he defeated Nicolas Sarkozy, and his most noteworthy achievement since the election appears to be receiving the lowest approval rating of any president in the history of the Fifth Republic.

Merci pour ce moment called out to political junkies and gossip lovers. Without much information as to what was actually in the book, apart from promises of sex and politics, pre-publication orders quickly pushed it to first place on Amazon France book sales—thanks to the internet marketplace a book buyer in faraway Hobart could obtain a copy before sold-out Paris bookshops had restocked.

The huge first printing of 200,000 copies was done secretly in Germany. In just a few days over 140,000 copies had been sold and by the end of the month that had risen to 500,000 copies. Le Figaro calculated that the author’s royalties, even before the end of September, were in excess of 1.3 million euros. Scorned Trierweiler was suddenly wealthier than the president who had dumped her. The soberly jacketed 318-page revenge saga demolished the previous French publishing sales record held by E.L. James’s sadomasochistic romance Fifty Shades of Grey.

Just a few magazine covers offer a short history of what happened to Hollande’s reputation in a few days. Paris Match began with a gentle-sounding, colleague-protecting smokescreen, “My Life with François … Exclusive: her shock book reveals the story of their passion” (the photo of Trierweiler on the cover of this sell-out edition pushed the French marriage of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie into smaller print in the top right-hand corner). Gossip magazine Closer summed the book up in two words, “LA VENGEANCE”. News and politics weekly L’Express, who seem to have a thick file of Hollande-looking-miserable photos, chose a suitably dismal one. Their bold headline glittered above an image of the unhappy man like the poised blade of a guillotine—“Voyage to the end of HELL”; smaller headings locked in the tone of their coverage, “The president discredited … The man humiliated … The five-year term massacred”. Inside stories didn’t disappoint.

Reactions were polarised. On one hand Paris Match: “Wounded woman. Valérie speaks.” On the other, a scream of feminist anger in the Guardian (the WikiLeaks-leaking newspaper): “This score-settling memoir is a tragic and demeaning tale that shouldn’t have been told.” Some Left bookshops refused to stock the book because they objected to the “washing of dirty linen”, others grabbed the money. No doubt they would have been just as morally outraged (not) if the dirty washing had belonged to a right-wing politician.

Trierweiler’s Hollande is an egotistical, untrustworthy, scheming liar; her self-portrait is of a Uriah Heep ’umble, simple, down-to-earth, faithful, caring, family-devoted woman. At least one of those portraits may be news to her readers. The angry, account-settling narrative begins like a novel with Trierweiler’s attempted suicide after learning that Hollande has been cheating on her—just as she and he had done to her husband and Ségolène Royal.

Closer magazine published photos of Hollande visiting his mistress, actress Julie Gayet, and turned him into a joke. They showed an overweight man in black leather clothes with an oversized face-hiding biker’s helmet being carried on the back of a smart police motor scooter to visit his mistress. He looked like an overripe babushka doll. There was also a photo of one of his security policemen delivering the breakfasting couple a bag of croissants—Trierweiler is particularly scathing about “Croissant Man”.

Before Closer published the photos, Hollande denied, to Trierweiler, the truth in the spreading rumours of his relationship. Then, only hours before the publication of the photos, he admitted they were true: but then lied about the duration of the affair. That morning, in the privacy of their apartment in the Élysée Palace, while France was laughing, they were fighting. Trierweiler proposed, but Hollande rejected, playing the Clinton strategy of public confession and sorrowful partner offering forgiveness. Her book denies the colourful gossip that she sent a priceless Élysée vase flying in the direction of the un-helmeted presidential head but does reveal a struggle over a plastic bag of sleeping pills which tore as they fought. She grabbed and swallowed what she could. In the confusion which followed, which Trierweiler imperfectly recalls, it seems she agreed on hospitalisation and the story switches from Élysée Palace to a tranquilised hospital patient in a public-health night-shirt. Hollande’s visits were few, and fifteen days and many drugs later he dictated an eighteen-word statement for Agence France-Presse announcing the end of their relationship. She refused to make it a joint communication.

Valérie Trierweiler brought a sense of personal illegitimacy to the Élysée—from the beginning she felt an outsider. She was not a wife, nor a political collaborator accepted by his Socialist Party colleagues. After his election she tried to be both First Lady and a working journalist. Internet insults, such as being France’s “First Prostitute”, wounded her deeply. When Protestant Henri of Navarre converted to Catholicism in order to take the French crown he is supposed to have said, “Paris is well worth a mass”. The modern couple, Hollande and Trierweiler, may not have thought France was well worth a wedding, but neither did they give the impression of possessing an unforced affectionate relationship.

Seen from another country she seemed a fine candidate for First Lady. Capable, if necessary, of hosting a televised tour of the Élysée, or talking on France Culture of the books on the presidential night table, or adopting a suitable charity for a photogenic disability. But politics, no. Though she had been a successful political reporter and commentator and wished to be involved in political decisions, she demonstrated a lack of political common sense. Her political ineptitude in the Tweet Affair sullied the earlier stage of Hollande’s presidency. When Ségolène Royal was standing in a local election in June 2012 President Hollande supported his ex-partner and political supporter. Quite unnecessarily, Trierweiler created a political and family scandal when she tweeted her support for Royal’s opponent. In the pages devoted to this debacle Trierweiler evades personal responsibility for an action that undermined her partner’s authority, deeply offended her de facto step-children, and embarrassed her own children. The conclusion to her account of a stupid act draws from the familiar well of feminist excuse making: “by this tweet, I touched the supreme symbol: the mother, the untouchable. I am a mother, I also, but not of the President’s children.” Royal is presently Minister for Ecology.

When her book was published, Trierweiler was in Madagascar working on a special report for Paris Match. She made no public comment until Hollande gave a press conference, only the fourth he has given as president. As he was speaking she retweeted a photo her young son had put online showing a dish he had cooked at school that day: roast duck with turnips. A canard can be a lying newspaper report or false rumour, and lame ducks are not unknown.

What Trierweiler suffered from the public infidelity of Hollande and his curt dismissal were devastating wounds for which he is responsible, but when she broadens her attacks they seem small-minded divorce-court scratches. She doesn’t get the big picture, she doesn’t get the small picture, she only sees her own picture. Taking a moral ruler to the book, and dividing political and personal, socialist Hollande has angrily responded to his ex-companion’s claim that he does not like the poor and has joked of them as the “toothless”—sans dents. It may be an indication of his loss of support, even on the Left, that this damaging phrase was chosen for inclusion in Le Monde’s book extract—especially hurtful as it is the President’s favourite newspaper. The expression immediately became a widely used media joke.

Hollande’s awful September began horribly, and ended horribly.

On the second-last Sunday of the month Nicolas Sarkozy announced his return to politics, seemingly setting in motion the 2017 presidential election campaign.

On the same day a French tourist was kidnapped by Muslim terrorists in Algeria.

Throughout the week a strike at Air France dragged on and on even as Hollande announced the deployment of French military aircraft to Iraq.

On Wednesday terrorists beheaded the French tourist, and posted the video online.

On Thursday Hollande delivered a serious and statesmanlike speech at the United Nations.

On Friday Closer magazine had a mocking front-page composite photo of a smug Hollande and a smiling Gayet with a teasing and over-familiar headline, “No, Julie hasn’t left him”. The accompanying story had them walking hand in hand inside the Élysée where they shared a “pique-nique” in the gardens on September 14—the specific date suggested the magazine’s writers knew what they were talking about.

On Sunday the Right swung majority power away from the Left in elections for the Senate—for the very first time the far-Right National Front won two Senate seats. Political life had just become much more difficult for the president, and should he resign (as many wish) or tumble from the back of a scooter, presidential powers would be taken up by a right-wing Senate leader until a new election.

On the same day Brigitte Bardot turned eighty.