Valerie Trierweiler has sealed the France President’s fate

The downfall of French president François Hollande seems inevitable following stunning claims from his spurned girlfriend, Valérie Trieweiler.

For someone who has never held an official political position, Valérie Trierweiler, spurned ex-First Girlfriend of France, may have just played the most important move in the coming downfall of François Hollande with Merci pour ce moment (Thank You For This Moment), her surprise, tell-all book chronicling her seven years at his side.

The French president already held the record for most unpopular leader of the Republic since polling was invented. The chaotic love life of this never-married Woody Allen type, improbably acting out a George Clooney part, had until now largely remained a matter for knowing giggles rather than all-out rejection: Hollande’s zigzagging fiscal policies and awkward political triangulations in the snakepit of his first red-green coalition Cabinet harmed him much more – as did the French economy’s persistent doldrums, rising unemployment, zero growth and overall malaise.

But Trierweiler, in the best piece of writing of her career (she’s a former political journalist with Paris Match) has changed the nature of the game. Her Hollande comes across as mean, cold, ungenerous, given to offensive macho put-downs and snobbish contempt, a serial liar in love and in politics, self-satisfied and media-obsessed.

“He campaigned as the enemy of the rich, but the truth is that he despises the poor,” she writes, recalling their single visit with her working-class family at their council house, in which Hollande looked “bored to tears – he would rather have dined with his sophisticated Parisian friends than with us”. The President shows a nasty streak with his joke that “all those Massonneaus [her maiden name] aren’t very pretty, are they?” In a further damning revelation, she says he calls the poor “the toothless” and is “very satisfied’’ with his own witticism.

It is this, far more than the complicated lies Hollande constructs to simultaneously run several relationships – with Trierweiler; with her predecessor Ségolène Royal, his partner of 29 years and the mother of his four children; with the actress Julie Gayet, the perfectly typecast luvvie supporter with the Jessica Rabbit curves and loaned couture habit – that has the true potential to harm him. Predictably, it’s the line every other minister in the Cabinet, not to mention friendly columnists in the Left-wing press, have been denying in spitting outrage: “it stinks”; “despicable”; “completely made-up”; “destroys whatever credibility she hoped to retain”. From Marine Le Pen to the elegant senator Chantal Jouanno, words of contempt rain down on the author, who, by speaking her mind, “dishonours France and herself” and “bathes in a cesspit”.

A shrewd French-American broadcaster, Harold Hyman, once remarked that the angrier he made French interviewees, the surer he was that his questions had hit home, and this would seem to apply to reactions to Trierweiler’s opus. An indifferent book reviewer ­in recent years (she was shunted to the Culture pages of Paris Match against her wishes) and certainly no Paxo in her prior career as a television interviewer, Trierweiler here has the clarity of sincerity, and a drive sparked by genuine outrage. “Of course François visited Julie Gayet’s parents in their château – that was more to his taste than our council house or my parents’ secondhand camping trailer.” Like many a woman in love before her, she tried to brush away her partner’s jibes when they were together, only to recall every single one of them after they parted and she was in front of her computer screen.

Over the centuries, the French have been proud of their leaders’ womanising ways. The Protestant-born Henry IV, who converted back to Catholicism for the throne and brought the 16th-century religious wars to an end, was glorified by Royalists and Republicans alike for it, as well as for his famous boast that “for years I thought 'it’ was made of bone”. Louis XIV’s and Louis XV’s mistresses from La Montespan to La Pompadour have a revered place in French history – the Elysée Palace was built for Madame de Pompadour – while those such as Louis XVI (beheaded) or Napoleon III (sent into exile) did not help their cause with their conjugal virtue.

Of the Fifth Republic presidents, only George Pompidou never strayed from his happy marriage (with Claude, a contemporary art lover to whom the nation never warmed). As president, Charles de Gaulle led a blameless marital life; in his Free French days, he had been somewhat more approachable. But you have to do things with a degree of panache, and here François Hollande is cruelly lacking. Lying would be all right; being caught in clumsy lies becomes problematic.

At the beginning of her book, Trierweiler says that having suffered from the lies told about her during her time in public life, she isn’t about to indulge in any of her own; and this, too, sounds entirely believable.

Her account of having been deluged with text messages from Hollande begging her to come back to him during the six months following her public “dismissal” – “He was the one caught out; I was the one being fired,” she writes – provides yet more proof that the President cannot commit to anything, a relationship or a break-up, so how can the voters possibly believe that last week’s Cabinet reshuffle and economic Right-turn means he has finally decided on a clear political line?

You will be hard-pressed to find a French politician openly admitting that the personal is political, and that private behaviour holds the key to public conduct. But the voters express themselves on Twitter, a medium Mr Hollande and several members of his Cabinet excoriate; they immediately created a hashtag for “toothless” (#sansdents), which started trending even before the book’s release.

Telling anecdotes about the President’s macho side have been seized upon and will not help him with women voters. These include his unfeeling comments to Valérie just before a State dinner, that “it does take you a long time to look that beautiful, but then, that’s the only thing that’s expected of you”.

And she will have caused Hollande incalculable damage with her claim that he instructed her to be given high doses of tranquilisers, shortly after they had split, in order to keep her in hospital and out of his way.

Not for nothing did Trierweiler live in the Elysée fishbowl for a year and a half: when she finally decided to write her book, at the beginning of the summer, she disconnected from the internet, and never sent anything by email. The manuscript was secretly printed in Germany by an independent publishing house, and Hollande only learnt of its existence last Tuesday.

According to several accounts, the President frantically dispatched aides all over France to try to get hold of a copy before publication date, without success – just as he failed to get hold of the fateful issue of Closer magazine with those infamous scooter-riding pictures last Christmas, outside Julie Gayet’s apartment, which started the whole debacle.

On her own, the ex-First Girlfriend has managed complete secrecy and a coup — something her one-time lover has never succeeded to achieve in the two and a half years he’s been President. (The Telegraph)