The French do not consider any more that the public interest stops at the bedroom door
By S.P. | PARIS
THERE is probably no such thing as a good time for a head of state to have his complicated private life splashed across the front pages. But the allegations about François Hollande’s liaison with Julie Gayet, a French actress, have emerged at a particularly awkward moment for the French president. Closer, a celebrity magazine, published photos alleging a romantic link just four days before he was due, on January 14th, to hold one of his twice-yearly press conferences at the Elysée Palace, this one to showcase his new economic policy. Now, the French media are talking about little else.
The allegations were made on January 10th in a seven-page report. It shows a figure in a crash helmet on the back of a scooter, driven by a security guard, arriving at a Parisian apartment building where Ms Gayet has also just turned up; the same figure then leaves the building the next morning. Mr Hollande did not deny the allegations, stating in a declaration only that he “profoundly deplored the breach of respect of private life”. Over the weekend it emerged that his partner Valérie Trierweiler (pictured with Mr Hollande), a journalist at Paris-Match, a weekly magazine, and who is referred to by the Elysée as the First Lady, has been hospitalised for exhaustion since the allegations emerged.
The French used to consider that the public interest stopped at the bedroom door. Various previous presidents had affairs; one, François Mitterrand, kept a mistress and a daughter for years at the taxpayer’s expense with media self-censorship guarding the information from the public for years. Unlike in Britain or America, few in France argue that a leader’s political judgment is called into question by his breaking marriage vows. And France has strict privacy laws that have protected public figures from the sort of tabloid scrutiny their British and American peers receive. Indeed, the French themselves seem to have greeted this latest allegation with a collective Gallic shrug. According to a poll for Journal du Dimanche, a Sunday newspaper, fully 77% of the French think that it is a private matter of no public consequence.
Yet France has also changed. When Nicolas Sarkozy, a former centre-right president, burst on to the political scene ahead of the 2007 presidential election, he deliberately borrowed the American-style campaign technique of posing with his family, even including his son in a political video. His divorce, while in office, from Cécilia Sarkozy, and subsequent remarriage to Carla Bruni, a model-turned-singer, was widely covered. Indeed, Mr Sarkozy used a similar grand press conference to the one Mr Hollande will hold tomorrow to announce—with excruciatingly boyish enthusiasm—that his relationship with Ms Bruni was becoming “serious”. The once-clear line between French public and private lives began to blur.
The same went for the 2011 case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former IMF managing director and then potential French presidential candidate, who was arrested in New York on a sexual-assault charge that was later dropped. The French may have been indignant at the American media treatment of Mr Strauss-Kahn. But they were just as fascinated by the details of the case, as they have been by a separate and ongoing French investigation allegedly linking Mr Strauss-Kahn to a prostitution ring in the northern city of Lille. After the report of Mr Hollande’s liaison surfaced, Franck Louvrier, Mr Sarkozy’s former presidential communications director, tweeted: “Politicians’ private lives no longer exist”.
In Mr Hollande’s case, the matter is particularly complicated. The allegation is not of an extra-marital “affair”, since Mr Hollande is not married to Ms Trierweiler (he was not married either to Ségolène Royal, his previous partner, mother of their four children, and a one-time Socialist presidential candidate). Indeed the French elected their first Socialist president since Mitterrand knowing full well that the pair had campaigned together as a couple. Yet if the French seem fairly unbothered by Mr Hollande’s romantic choices, they do seem to be uncomfortable with the fact that Ms Trierweiler has been given the role of First Lady, complete with staff, despite an ambiguous role. She continues to write for Paris-Match, as a book reviewer. She once tweeted support for a candidate who was running for parliament against Ms Royal.
Mr Hollande doubtless hopes that he will manage to deal swiftly with questions concerning the liaison, before moving on to give details of his new economic policy, and a promised “pact of responsibility” to encourage businesses to create jobs. Yet, as Mr Sarkozy discovered with his comment about Ms Bruni, the French press is no longer a stranger to voyeurism, and whatever comments Mr Hollande does offer on his romantic life are likely to be the ones that make the headlines. These allegations will not damage Mr Hollande in the way that they would have a British or American leader. But for a president whose popularity has already dropped to record lows, they will certainly do nothing to lift either his authority or his credibility.
