France deserves a president without a private life that’s like a French farce
‘I scored’
France’s draconian attitude towards press coverage of the private lives of politicians has allowed them, quite simply, to believe that they can and will get away with the sort of thing that politicians operating in a more liberal press environment would regard as career suicide.
Can you imagine Barack Obama confidently cheating on his wife in the knowledge that the press won’t hound him or even report it, or David Cameron seeing an actress while posing in public with Mrs Cameron?
Yet that is what Francois Hollande has done. And not for the first time. When his 30-year relationship with the politician Segolene Royal (they have four children together, now grown up) ended after she lost the election to Nicolas Sarkozy, he immediately began going out in public, and living with, Valerie Trierweiler, a journalist who had been following the Socialist Party in that campaign. It was obvious to all that he had been seeing her before the end of his relationship with Royal.
Though France is thick with proper newspapers, it was not a newspaper, news-site or even one of the more serious news magazines which has now reported Hollande’s terribly clichéd ongoing affair with an actress, Julie Gayet (aged 41, lest you think her some kind of nymphet). It was a celebrity magazine called Closer.
The president’s reaction was not to deny the affair – clearly not because he is too honest, as he has had no problem lying to the women he lives with, but almost certainly because he felt he could not rely on the cooperation of Gayet, who might well have leaked the story herself after issuing some kind of ultimatum to him in a bid to replace Trierweiler as his official consort.
Nor did Hollande brazen it out and refuse to discuss the matter, which is the natural reaction if you are arguing that your privacy is just that.
Instead, he threatened the magazine not with libel action (for publishing untruths) but with action for breaching his right to privacy. And in so doing, he confirmed the news and more or less sounded the starting-pistol for the media frenzy to begin.
Valerie Trierweiler, who like almost everyone else discovered through that magazine article that the president is cheating on her – it’s bad enough finding out in private; imagine finding out along with the rest of the world – collapsed and was taken to hospital.
She has since been discharged, and her spokesman has told the French media, who asked what she plans to do, that what she needs right now is rest, and then she will decide.
The two have been together for a few years but never married. Hollande was with Royal for THIRTY years, but they never married either. Valerie Trierweiler made the negative news herself some time ago when she tweeted a message of support for Royal’s rival in the thick of the electoral campaign and was slammed for tackiness.
Hollande’s oldest son, who obviously doesn’t think much of his father’s companion, who also happens to be the woman who broke up his parents’ relationship, gave an interview in which he said: “I knew something would come from (Trierweiler) eventually, but I didn’t know it would be something this big.”
And Hollande himself was widely reported to have been “furious”. I would suspect that the seeds of his disloyalty towards Trierweiler, leading to his self-justification for cheating on her, were sown then.
The irony is that the people of France voted Hollande in partly because they had had it up to there with Nicolas Sarkozy, his problems with his wife Cecilia and the way she made it so obvious that she couldn’t stand him, followed by her running off with a man called Richard Attias while he immediately salved his ego by taking up with Carla Bruni and marrying her within months then having a baby – all of this while he was president of France.
Many of the newspaper reports now say that there is widespread disappointment at this latest development because Francois Hollande’s image was of ‘Mr Normal’. Strange how people assume that a tubby, dull-seeming man in spectacles is by definition harmless in this respect, when his personal life tells a quite different story.
How can a man who has four children with a woman he has been with for three decades (also a prominent politician), leaves her for a journalist who interviews him, then lives with the journalist for years, but marries neither of the two women even though his goal is the highest post in the land, be considered ‘normal’? There is clearly a problem there.
This is not a value judgement on marriage for ordinary people, who are free to do whatsoever they please, but quite frankly, when you’re president of France, should you not have a wife rather than a live-in girlfriend – and this especially if the live-in girlfriend comes after a 30-year non-marital relationship with four children.
Marriage wouldn’t have stopped Hollande seeing the actress – but it would have conferred some form of dignity and respectability, to say nothing of legal and social status, on Trierweiler in her current trauma. Put simply and starkly, exactly what is she in this situation?
She has gone from being the president’s live-in girlfriend to being the president’s cheated-on girlfriend who has moved out. It’s not even adultery really, is it, though it is the most spectacular betrayal.
Perhaps not being married to him can be considered an advantage here: there is no marriage that is bigger than the two of them to be considered, and she needn’t feel she has an obligation to at least try to forgive him. But it should have occurred to her that this was likely to happen.
It never fails to fascinate me how women who form relationships with married/committed men, especially if they have children and are living in a family situation, always think that it’s a matter of getting him to leave her (and his family) and then the game is won.
They actually believe that his cheating was an exceptional situation directly related to his misery with his wife/companion, rather than a fundamental personality flaw which will be repeated even if only several years down the line. He will never do to them, they think, what he did to his wife/companion.
Get real, ladies – the man who cheats on the mother of his children will have even less problem cheating on you. It’s a hell of a lot more difficult to prise a man away from his family then it is to prise him away from the woman who comes next. And having a baby yourself will by definition and track record not render you immune: if he’s done it once he’ll do it again, and the second time round is so much easier.
It may happen years and years down the line, but it will generally happen, except in very rare instances (I do know a couple). This is not because what goes around comes around for the woman, but because something that happens because of a personality flaw in the man will happen again – and also because at some deep and perverse level, men never quite forgive the woman who broke up their family and prefer to project the blame onto their ‘partner in crime’ when it suits them to do so.
A man like this will only stop destroying one home to form another when he realises that age is catching up and it’s time to park himself in the garage. Then he will either settle down with whoever he happens to be in a relationship with at the time, or he will end up alone because he can’t bear the thought of starting all over again.
As for France, those privacy laws really need to go, and a liberal attitude towards a politician’s marital situation should not blind people to the reality of what that politician’s personal choices say about his character.
France (and the rest of the world) only discovered at his funeral that Francois Mitterand had been leading a virtually bigamous life for decades, with his wife being aware of his long-term mistress, and his daughter with that long-term mistress growing to adulthood in a ménage situation that was never reported in the press.
The news only broke when reporters enquired as to the identity of the unknown older and younger woman mourning at his graveside alongside his wife.
That’s a ridiculous situation. If you are asking people to put you in public office, you can’t tell them they have no right to be told how you live.
And if Hollande was sick of Valerie Trierweiler, he should have told her so and asked her to move out. After all, they aren’t married. Isn’t that the point? But either way, that affair with an actress was never going to be a good idea. Even France draws the line.
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You can’t really feel sorry for Trierviller.
She was a married mother of three living with her second husband when she shacked up with father-of-four Hollande who was still living with Royale and their four children.
With such messy lives, it’s a wonder Hollande has the mind to run a country.
He doesn’t.
The French are victims of circumstance as Hollande was nowhere near being the Socialists’ main choice.
Hollande has for many years been mocked by the Les Guignols (a much improved, hilarious and irreverent version of the British ‘Spitting Image’).* The public has bestowed him the nickname Flanby (a creme caramel make).
There are also to be taken into account:
http://fr.news.yahoo.com/julie-gayet-hollande-r%C3%B4le-s%C3%A9gol%C3%A8ne-royal-rencontre-200000165.html
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/11/26/segolene-royal-french-president-francois-hollandes-former-partner-fuming-over-adultery-websites-use-of-her-image-as-cheated-woman/
* (cyber and media harassment exist in France too)
French media have picked up on the fact that all this story shows a president who is very unhappy in his personal life which will bleed into his political decisions.
Isn’t it just great to live in such liberal times, where anything goes. And we are all expected to clap!
Just look at the German president Joachim Gauck, a former Protestant priest from former East Germany. While still married to his wife, who lives in Hamburg, he moved into Bellevue Palace in Berlin with his shack-up honey, making her the “first lady” – when legally, she is not.
Not only are we to clap and condone what our President (I am German) is doing, because after all, we are tolerant and liberal people, we also have to pay for her fake ladyship through our taxes.
I have no sympathy for all the Trierweilers around. They are not victims.
Yes Katrin, ideally you are right but there’s such a thing called love – and love can be blind, deaf and ignorant sometimes.
[Daphne – True, but it is most unlikely that Trierweiler loves or loved Hollande. She is nowhere near young enough to have ‘fallen in love’ and the relationship has neither the time-length nor the scope for the development of any other kind of love. So let’s not romanticise things here. Her decision to leave her second husband and children after meeting him on the campaign trail has all the hallmarks of a strategic move. She is now in shock because her gamble didn’t pay off. She left one life for what she thought would be an infinitely more amusing one, and now has neither.]
It is obvious that she was hungry for success.
Women/girls have turned their thoughts into thinking sex makes life easy for them, and they can become famous by using it. Instead of working hard to become stronger, they want an easy life that gives them access to power – how pathetic.
You shouldn’t get anything for nothing and unfortunately, the wimps that follow Labour are allowing this to happen, and France is a worse place because of this.
My message here for this woman and those trying in her footsteps is that society is made up of men, women and children, and their families. They must take responsibility themselves and not rely on a lover, partner – whatever – as a safety net.
Rely on others, and you’re risking that one day it will all come crumbling down. You can’t wrap your life around a person – find something that you’re really good at and make the best out of it. That’s all it takes, really. The relationship, when and if it comes, is a bonus.
Sex makes life easy for men too.
No, making the best out of something you’re good at isn’t all there is to it. Because more often than not, you will depend on someone else’s decision – a job interview, an application for a vacancy, a headhunting process, a recommendation. It’s not like we haven’t been there before. Attractive people pull more jobs just like they pull more sexual partners.
I know very little about journalists and journalism.
Even less about the ethics that regulate the profession.
I find your contribution very interesting and intriguing and, on the whole, I agree with most of what you say.
I am not sure that you are perfectly correct when you refer to the situation in the UK.
John Major was in a sexual relationship with Edwina Currie (this according to her memoirs) for many years, yet hardly anything ever surfaced in the British press.
I know he dumped her unceremoniously when he became PM. However he had been having it off with her for at least a decade while he was occupying, in succession, two of the four great offices of state.
So, there you go.
However.
[Daphne – That’s not at all a comparable situation, Anthony. The press didn’t report it because they didn’t know, and not because they knew and held back because of privacy issues, as in France. There are no such concerns in Britain, but rather the opposite, with certain newspapers scouring the ground for scandals. News of the Major-Currie affair, which was long over by then, was disclosed by Currie herself in her published diaries, serialised in The Sunday Times, in 2002.
Nobody would have had grounds for suspicion at the time. The affair took place between 1984 and 1988, when Currie was a backbencher and Major a party whip. They would have met all the time even if they were not having an affair, so nobody seeing them together would have thought anything of it. And nobody would have been interested anyway – which is why nobody was looking. He ended the affair when he was promoted to the cabinet, so when journalists did look, they had nothing to find. The amazing thing is that now we discover he survived all those years as prime minister in fear of being found out. His wife had known for years, so that wasn’t a problem, and Currie, by her own admission, really did love him and so had no interest in going public. She mentioned it in her diaries, she said, because she was so hurt at not even being a footnote or in the index of his memoirs, and because when he became prime minister she was effectively pushed out of politics.
It is the sort of story the British press would have killed for, when Major was prime minister, had they even imagined it possible. ]
Where’s that video of Hollande endorsing Joseph Muscat during the last election campaign?
Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wf5MBuZ2Go
As expected, it is on YouTube. Here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wf5MBuZ2Go
Mr. Normal said that the choice of 9 March 2013 was important for Malta and for all of Europe. He said that Muscat would help pull the Eurozone out of recession and unemployment (which he said the Conservatives had brought about – where was he living?) through economic growth. He said Muscat’s victory will be a boost for all European people. He said he needs Joseph Muscat. With him, in the European Council. And Europe needs Malta, he said.
Do you think he knew already about Muscat’s intention to use Henley & Something to sell European passports as a measure for growth?
As far as I know, France hasn’t started selling EU citizenship as yet.
Why were the French so outraged by Sarkozy’s relationship with Carla Bruni and so annoyed with Bruni’s hunger for power?
Because Sarkozy’s notorious hunger for power rubbed it off.
‘Why were the French so outraged by Sarkozy’s relationship with Carla Bruni’
Envy?
Oh and I suppose Hollande does not have a “notorious hunger for power”, because, you know, he didn’t really want the Presidency. Jesus, you socialists.
HPB
But you know well that one’s image is that created by the media.
Are you blaming the media now, instead of yourself?
Sarkozy and his sons’, especially Jean, unsurpassed hunger for power (ie more than other French politicians’ family) has been well documented in the media. In France, Sarkozy is also widely considered the ‘king of BS’, the whore who took on Front National policies and injected them to more center-leaning politics. A bit of a Gallic Joseph Muscat.
Since when have the French media been the impartial yardstick by which to judge French leaders?
Sarkozy got stick in all the media including the right wing.
And Hollande gets none.
You’re so tiring.
Very topical.
Your readers may not see the link, but this is highly relevant to Malta too. They go on about your “attakki fahxija” on people’s private lives. What is on trial is not the private life, but the false advertising, as it were.
Selling yourself as Mr Family Values while you cheat on your wife. Or as Mr Working Class when you’re a millionaire. Or as Mr Normal when you’re sleeping with celebrities.
Anyone particular in mind?
Hollande himself. OK, so he never married any of his women, but I can’t find a word for the mother of your four children with whom you’ve lived for thirty years.
Or as a Mr. True Nationalist, when you are a power-hungry Labourite at heart.
Or Mr. Centre Of the World, when you really are a small person from a tiny village located somewhere on a speck of an island that barely shows up on most maps.
Or Mr. Exiled Martyr, banished to the pits of the earth, whilst in reality you are swanning all over the world in private planes on the sly.
Must have missed it. Did Malta legalize pot?
Can I have your email address, please? Can’t seem to trace it.
[Daphne – dcgalizia@gmail.com]
http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2014-01-13/news/berlusconi-thinking-of-using-malta-to-get-mep-seat-italian-media-3663626240/
La Repubblica this morning carried an article outlining why he can’t. But that’s Giannini on a Monday morning.
There seems to be more to it than a simple affair. Segolene Royal might have been invovled and a mafia gangster owns the pad.
http://fr.news.yahoo.com/julie-gayet-hollande-r%C3%B4le-s%C3%A9gol%C3%A8ne-royal-rencontre-200000165.html
I may sound prudish, but, to my view of things, a man who can definitely not steer his own private life without so many bumps can hardly be expected to steer the ship of state on a straight course.
My example may be a bit dated but quite relevant, I believe.
Did JFK not have numerous extra marital affairs with many noted women one of whom was Marilyn Monroe?
The press knew about it but decided to be ultra discreet about the relationships.
Some time ago I read a long article about the Kennedys but its source escapes me right now, where it was stated that even Jacqueline Kennedy knew about it, and how within the Kennedy clan, the practice was tolerated though not necessarily encouraged and prospective wives of Joseph Kennedy’s sons were adequately ‘educated’ about the family’s tolerance and were expected to look the other way when such indiscretions occurred.
[Daphne – It was a different time for press reportage. If you wish to go back even further in time, there’s the British sovereign and his affair with an American divorcee – which the press did not report on either despite it not being secret at all.]
You miss the point entirely. All powerful men sleep around. All of them. Including the Maltese.
[Daphne – Not quite, H. P. The most powerful man in Malta since independence is the prime minister, and the only ones who slept around were Mintoff and Borg Olivier – and Borg Olivier only had the one mistress and it wasn’t a secret at all. Nobody can accuse Fenech Adami and Gonzi of sleeping around or even wanting to. Alfred Sant had a woman whose flat he used to visit occasionally, but he was and still is single, so it is irrelevant and does not qualify as cheating, and one woman is hardly sleeping around anyway. I really don’t think Muscat sleeps around, and I don’t imagine Busuttil is either, even though he’s free to do so. In Malta it’s men with new money that’s gone to their head who sleep around, and/or those who in my (observational) experience led constrained or marginal social/dating lives when they were younger and now want to make up for lost time, sleeping with the ‘girls’ who were unavailable to them at 20. ]
What is not on is calling yourself “an ordinary man” and then sleeping with a famous actress (not a nymphet, age-wise, but firm as they come) in a luxury apartment in the best district in town, while officially living with another woman who isn’t even your wife after leaving the mother of your children who wasn’t your wife either, undercover, escorted by your presidential security detail.
Did I hear you say champagne socialists? No. It’s Laburisti Xampanja.
I said powerful men, not politicians. That includes businessmen, intellectuals, members of the clergy, artists and academics.
[Daphne – How are they powerful, H.P.? Power to do what, exactly? I think you’re confusing power with status. If you’re talking about power over women underlings, then yes, I’ll agree with you. That is the classic situation most open to two-way sexual exploitation.]
My definition of power is job security, steady and substantial income, status, decision-making authority and connections.
Just to give two examples, Joseph Calleja is powerful, and Peter Serracino Inglott was powerful too. Neither of them is a politician, and neither of them has or had women underlings.
[Daphne – That’s not power. That’s prominence. And in one case, fame.]
Come to think of it, I could have mentioned my favourite character: Franco Debono. He becomes Law Commissioner, sees his income increase substantially, gets a chauffeured car, staff and perks, and suddenly his pulling power shoots through the roof.
[Daphne – Oh come off it, H. P. Who exactly is he pulling? He has a long-term girlfriend who he has been literally dating for a decade like groundhog day. And then there’s that other woman who probably can’t see beyond the position. He’s hardly pulling more than your average bank clerk, is he, and is probably pulling less.]
Presumably, being remotely good looking, or at least not looking like a bald over-sized baby, is one necessary requirement before you could possibly even dream of having mistresses.
[Daphne – It isn’t. Some women will sleep with anything as long as it is useful to their purposes, has money or status. They are aided in this by biology, which renders it completely unnecessary for a woman to be attracted to a man in order to copulate with him. She can do so even if she finds him physically repellant and has to struggle against cringing.]
@ DCG
I believe we have a word for that kind of woman.
[Daphne – Not really, no. Prostitutes are up front about it and it’s a clear-cut business transaction.]
Baxxter, you’re really having an “off” day, aren’t you?
Make that an ‘off’ life.
This will make Hollande more human and likeable to his electorate. In a country where having a mistress / partner is not only ‘ok’ but quite frankly ‘the norm’ (and even more so in politics) – you can bet your bottom dollar that in the next poll, his approval rating will increase.
No comment is expressed on the ethical / rational and moral side of the story.
[Daphne – It is no more ‘OK’ to cheat on your wife/concubine in France than it is anywhere else. Everybody involved gets as upset as they would anywhere else, and observers are equally scathing.]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbigS7_VSrk
Have a look at this, jack.
Perhaps Joseph Muscat will now make Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando president.
Just to be like France.
Three women? Wow. I also understand that Hollande threatened to seek action for having his right to privacy breached.
His friend Joseph must send him the trophy, pair of orange trousers and the Anti-Cyberharassment Alliance address.
Back to Malta: I saw a popular singer by the death-bed of a married Labour Party candidate/businessman at Saint Luke’s Hospital. He was in a “VIP room” surrounded by his grown-up children, his wife and his mistress.
What a mess.