Beneath the twinkling chandeliers of Cardiff Castle’s banqueting hall last
week, François Hollande wore the pale, sweaty look of a man in big trouble.
Back home, the economy was collapsing, the public was in revolt, the
government in despair, but as the 60-year-old French president spluttered
over his supper, everyone knew these were the least of his problems.
The big one was the women.
In particular, his vengeful ex-girlfriend, Valérie Trierweiler, the
high-heeled hellcat whose memoir of their time together has plunged the
surreally unpopular president into the biggest crisis anyone at the Elysée
Palace can recall.
Merci pour ce moment portrays Hollande as cold, cowardly, indecisive, out of
his depth and, most damagingly, a snob who cringes at having to mix with the
likes of Valérie’s working-class family.
Much of France seems astonished that a woman – even one nursing an epic grudge
– would exact such retribution. If so, it hadn’t reckoned with 49-year-old
Valérie.
Mme Trierweiler, the twice-married daughter of an ice-rink attendant, is the
kind of political consort only France could have produced. Tempestuous,
flirtatious and wildly ambitious, when she clattered, on the president’s
arm, up the staircase of the Elysée two years ago, it was the finishing
sprint of a remarkable ascent. The look of triumph suggested she would not
easily be shifted, but her time at the top ended in humiliating fashion with
paparazzi photographs of the portly president sneaking into the apartment of
blonde actress Julie Gayet.
Having prised François away from his previous love, the Socialist pin-up
Ségolène Royal, Valérie wasn’t about to give him up easily. After Hollande
confessed to the affair, she reportedly threw a £2 million vase at him
before being rushed to hospital. Valérie amplifies this account by claiming
she was then drugged – apparently on the Elysée’s orders – to keep her quiet.
There was never much chance of that. Once she realised her term as First Lady
was over, she soon marshalled her weapons-grade version of events into
print. A former glossy magazine writer, she knew which levers to pull.
To one end or another, she had been pulling them for decades. Born in Angers,
the fifth of six children, she realised at an early age that small-town life
was to be escaped from. She won a place at the Sorbonne, then moved into
journalism. In a biography, she is described as “an incendiary beauty”
cutting a swathe through magazine-land “in short skirts and stilettos”.
Her first marriage to a childhood sweetheart was short, followed by a second
to Denis Trierweiler, an executive at Paris Match, with whom she had three
children. It was Denis who steered her into politics, and it was while
profiling Ségolène – then the more prominent half of the Socialist Party’s
double bill – that she met Hollande.
Valérie says that she found him witty, charming and irresistible. If so, she
saw a side of François most of his compatriots have somehow missed. A
wobbly-chopped apparatchik, with the looks of a provincial shop assistant,
the president makes an implausible Romeo. Steeped in the laborious civility
of the French lower-middle classes, he spurns the swirl and dazzle of
fashionable Paris society, and his favourite evening in is watching Les
Hommes de l’ombre – the French answer to The West Wing.
When he became president two years ago, it was largely because the hot,
pre-election favourite, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was arrested after sexually
assaulting a chambermaid in New York.
Alors, thought the French, François might be boring, but at least the palace
cleaning staff will be safe. Anyway, Valérie would be on hand to keep things
in order. But it hasn’t worked out. Hollande was recently voted the “world’s
worst politician” and ratings in France have fallen below those of the
terror group Isil.
Yet as Valérie sells out bookstores, what does she do next? Even as it devours
the juicy morsels of her story, France can’t disguise a certain disdain for
the manner of her score-settling, and there is a sense that she will find
life harder from here.
In a country that takes its politics and sex seriously, the latest round of
Hollande follies raises many questions. The big one swirling around the
president’s head at the Nato summit last week was: how does he do it?
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(via Telegraph)
