Monday, September 22, 2014
I devoured Valerie Trierweiler's book, Merci Pour Ce Moment in less than a day. It is unlike any other political memoir I have ever read in its singularity. It was published --and republished-- while its main subject, the President of France, is still in office. The only other book I can recall with similar timing, is historian Eric Goldman's The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, which criticized LBJ's politics, particularly concerning Vietnam.
Trierweiler's book is of a different order, it is a memoir written within months of her dismissal from François Hollande's life, public and private In the book she limns the personality of a thoroughly political animal, detailing his duplicities. This is nothing new: Any book about a man who arrives at the summit of political power must of necessity either criticize, or defend policies associated with the personality-in-chief. Scholars labor over facts to make a coherent narrative of a term in office, former intimates tell stories the press overlooked or never found out, the more revelations, the better the book sells. Trierweiler's book surpasses any political memoir ever written with publication in mind because her story is about how the political and the personal became inextricable and the consequences of it for her.
Trierweiler has been criticized without let-up since the book was published, although she was hardly the darling of the press once her relationship with François Hollande was published. When she was "first girlfriend", she was criticized for being manipulative; when she published her book, she was excoriated for piercing the veil between the private and public life of a politician. However, years ago François Hollande and the former candidate for the French presidency by whom he has four children, Ségolene Royal, melded their private life with the public one: Ségolene Royal invited French television cameras into the hospital room where she and her new offspring were recovering after the birth. Hollande and Royal also invited cameras to film the Royal-Hollande ménage at home. None of this had been done in French politics before.
Trierweiler is frank about her illusions about François Hollande --and the disillusion that came with his accession to power. The two --she a respected political journalist from a family with little, her father a double amputee, her mother a cashier; he the son of a doctor, a specialist in ear, nose and throat diseases, her mother a social worker, the family well-off-- crossed paths over twenty years before drawing closer when Hollande became the head of the Socialist Party and she was assigned that beat.
Trierweiler was married, the mother of three when the closer proximity to Hollande began to feed the rumor mill. Hollande had never married Royal, whose defeat in 2007 paved the way for her equally ambitious partner to seek the Socialist nomination in 2012. By 2007, what had begun as privileged relationship that served both Trierweiler and Hollande's purposes --she wanted "scoops", he wanted to be written about favorably as a presidential candidate-- had taken a more volatile turn.
Trierweiler writes she knew of the rumors, but as she knew them to be false, laughed them off --and continued to see Hollande privately for intimate dinners to talk politics. She knew she was strongly attracted, but she knew she had a happy marriage and home life to lose. Rationalizing that she was only trying to get the inside track on stories, she let herself get close not only to François Hollande, but to his circle.
Cole Porter once said, "Nothing propinks like propinquity." Indeed, the spark between Trierweiler and Hollande burned, Trierweiler, according to her account, not quite realizing that the relationship had become very serious for Hollande. When --instinctively sensing the relationship was on dangerous ground-- she avoided Hollande, an aide tracked her down to tell her Hollande --in love with her-- was miserable. She capitulated to his demands shortly after --consummating their passion in April in Limoges all the while Royal was campaigning for the French presidency. Royal lost the election in May 2007; in June 2007, Hollande and Royal announced they were separating.
Revealing that their first physical intimacy took place in Limoges --le baiser de Limoges, she calls it --is inadvertently ironic, although I am sure Trierweiler did not intend it to be. One of the words for firing someone in French is "limoger". Which was her fate, to be fired from Hollande's political and personal life in January 2014.
The book is a kind of apologia pro vita sua, and the story of Trierweiler's re-invention, which is in progress. She writes with immediacy: Trierweiler plunges into her affair with Hollande, despite the cost to her family life; she plunges too, into the campaign for Hollande's election, writing stories favorable to his candidacy in Paris Match until November 2007 when its public disclosure requires Trierweiler to take a leave from the magazine.
With the assumption of power in May 2012, Hollande becomes distant and visibly dissatisfied with Trierweiler. The president's political aides keep her at a distance, and she is required to see his secretary to see him. His falling popularity makes him privately taciturn and caustic and disinclined to take the counsel he once sought from Trierweiler. There are rumors he is seeing Julie Gayet, a young actress, clandestinely, but Trierweiler chalks them up to the rumor mill. Only when Closer publishes a photo of the French head of state wearing a motorcycle helmet entering the apartment building where Gayet lives; and of Hollande's driver bringing croissants into the building the next morning, does Hollande admit something of the affair.
There is no going back at this point for either of them, although Hollande seeks to have his cake and eat it, too: he forces Trierweiler out of his life by giving her the silent treatment, provoking an overdose of sleeping pills and Trierweiler's nervous collaspse. Trierweiler says that the collapse at learning of Hollande's deception was exacerbated by the administration of the maximum dose of antidepressants. She says this was a clinical decision in keeping with Hollande's desire to keep her sedated until he could figure out how to extricate himself from his self-created media storm. Eventually Trierweiler returns to the apartment on rue Couchy she shared with Hollande and tries to put the pieces back together. She gave up all journalistic assignments but one at Hollande's request, and now, bereft of lover, realizes all she has lost: she is on her own financially and emotionally.
Hollande, nevertheless (certainly sensing Trierweiler is capable of publishing catastrophic disclosures) wants to keep her on a leash. He tries to do so by tweeting her daily, frequently. He sends her flowers, compliments her, says positive things about her charitable activities --activities, she bitterly reminds us, he never cared to interest himself in when she was Premier Dame de France.
What is unique about Trierweiler's book is that while Hollande's faults are those of many political men, few of them have an adversary as close to them as Trierweiler was --or as articulate. Having spent some time in New York City politics in particular, I can write with confidence that Hollande's faults -his self-centeredness, his infidelities, his calculation-- are not unique to the species. However, by writing and publishing a book about her life with the man while he remains in office, she etches deeply. Trierweiler's portrait of François Hollande may not be indelible, but it is trenchant.
A little anecdote about Hollande's inauguration --that would have been just trivia had Trierweiler not tamped on it--suggests the ruthlessness of the man: To distinguish his inauguration from that of his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, who had his children of both marriages present at the swearing-in ceremony at the Elysée-- Hollande forbids his children from attending. Their pleas do not change his mind, the swearing-in is limited to a very few.
Up until Dominique Strauss-Kahn met Nissafatou Diallo in a room at the Meridian Hotel in New York, the French press did not pursue stories about the private lives of politicians. The French in general --and the press, in particular-- were critical of the American press for doing so. Now that Valerie Trierweiler's memoir has pulled down the walls of the temple, things will never be the same: the personal life, at least in the case of François Hollande, is political. And if anyone denies that, Hollande's designation of Ségolene Royal as Minister for Ecology is undeniably a melding of the personal and political. It reminds me of the elevation of the king's mistress to positions of power and influence at court. But obviously, that thought never crossed François Hollande's mind.
Royal has become one of Hollande's chief supports since Trierweiler's book sparked a media firestorm, with Hollande's popularity at a nadir and calls for his resignation openly voiced. Hollande has announced he will stay the course. Meanwhile, sales of Trierweiler's book are breaking all records. The die is cast --if not for Hollande --at least not immediately--, certainly for Trierweiler, whose professional and personal future is anyone's guess. Hollande may one day look back on the end of his liaison with Trierweiler and say, as Napoleon did of Josephine, "I loved her, but I did not respect her."
In Hollande's case, at least, that may have been a fatal mistake.
No comments:
Post a Comment