LETTER FROM PARIS: Royal Mistress
Harriss, Joseph A.
O NEED TO PLAY cherchezlafemme inFrance'sperfervid election season, with its 40-odd--many veryoddindeed--candidatesvyingforpresident of all Gaul. She has dominated political discourse here...
...Though of the sameUMPparty,ChirachatesSarkozyandhasmaneuveredagainsthim.Thoughitsoundslikepoliticalfiction, many here speculate that Chirac would rather be succeeded by France's first woman president, even if a Socialist,thangivewaytoamalerivaloftheright...
...At first Paris salons buzzed with the question whether Mademoiselle Segolene Royal, mistress to theSocialistPartyfirstsecretary,couldgettheparty's nomination as its candidate in next month's vote...
...Her mostmemorablecontributiontothequalityofFrench familylifewasmakingthemorning-afterpillavailable to teenage girls as minister of family affairs...
...Hostility to America is a given...
...One is Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right National Front leader who could divide the conservative vote...
...Joseph A. HarrissisaParis-basedAmericanjournalist whose latest book is About France...
...But she was out stumping the country, smiling her surgically improved smile eight days a week and addressing grassroots party faithful with vague, reassuring talks in small gatherings...
...THE ENERGETIC, PUGNACIOUS, pragmatic Sarkozy has indeed been making the right noises about freeing up France's rigid, job-killing labor market and shrinking the bloated state machinery that triestomicro-managetheeconomy.Astwiceminister oftheinteriorandthusthecountry'stopcop,heisalso toughonlawandorderissues,whichappealstovoters alarmedbygrowinggratuitousviolence--tensofthousands of cars were burned by rampaging youths in Francelastyear.GiventheurgencyofFrance'sneedsin those areas, a nonentity like Royal would have little chance in a rational political situation...
...Along the way, she became the live-in mistress of Francois Hollande, a Socialist Party apparatchiknow,conveniently,theparty'sleader.This all made them Paris's political fun couple of the left...
...With all this tickling the body politic, virtually everymagazineinthecountry'scornerkioskshashad the titillating lady on its glossy cover...
...Polls show that the Frenchman in the street who intends to vote for Segolene will do so not because he believes in her politics...
...After all, FrancehasnothadawomanleadersinceJoanofArc, and a French court had her burned at the stake...
...It is a "hyperpower" that is "tempted to use force" and must be curtailed by a stronger European Union...
...When she did, chatter turned to whether she could actually win in a macho Latin country...
...The main thing about her," says Le Figaro ironically, "is being a woman...
...He is, Mam'zel says, merely "a sort of French franchise of Bush and Co., an American neo-conservative with a French passport...
...You know, a frou-frou female of the opposite sex...
...Soallbetsareoff.AsaParisbankerfriendtoldme with visible apprehension, "The French are so starved for some kind of change, any kind, that they could just voteforSegolenebecauseshe'sdifferent.Anythingcan happen here...
...But no one familiar with the history of France since 1789 would accusetheFrenchofbeingpoliticallyrational.Andtwo jokersinthegamecouldalsoupsetpredictions...
...On the podium her voice drones in a minor key, making her sound more like a Mater Dolorosa than a Madonna...
...Clearly one of Mitterrand's favorites (thus the rumor, unlikely but never convincingly denied, about her paternity), Mademoiselle Royal held three junior ministerial portfolios during his 14-year reign...
...She has dominated political discourse here for months on the sole strength of her gender...
...Party heavyweights like Laurent Fabius, a forL E T T E RF R O MP A R I S RoyalMistress 4 4 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R M A R C H 2 0 0 7 Nby Joseph A. Harriss M A R C H 2 0 0 7 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 4 5 mer prime minister, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former finance minister, expected to make backroom deals on the nomination as usual...
...She even asked for theirviewsandcomplaints,inwhatshecallsparticipatorydemocracy.Thiswasnews!Anditwasbeingmade by--didIsaythisbefore?--awoman...
...Principled Socialists, they begat four children while religiouslyshunningbourgeoismarriage...
...In her trademark white jacket--symbol of purity and the opposite of dark suits--the Socialist leader's 52-year-old concubine cultivates an air of maternal concern on the hustings...
...She evenmakesHillarylookstatesmanlike.(Royalwanted a leftist-ladies-together photo-op with Clinton, but Hillary's handlers took one look at her and nixed it...
...As Jacques Chirac's feckless current term approached its end, Royal flummoxed the Socialist Party hierarchy by quietly starting a bottom-up campaign...
...In a country where women got the vote only in 1945 and only 12 percent of the National Assembly are women, here wasafemmemakingpoliticalwaves.Too,inaland beset with rigid doctrines and ideologies, where suitswithelitisttrappingsmouthedeloquentspeeches full of past-tense subjunctives but did little about the nation's difficulties like high unemployment, an antiquated educational system, and burgeoning race and crimeproblems,sheartfullyprojectedfeelingthepain of real people in the hinterland...
...The media loved it...
...The real question for many was whethershemightbestillanotherillegitimatedaughter--onewasoutedshortlyafterhisdeath--ofherroving political idol, Francois Mitterrand...
...The basic, fundamental, underlying rea-son is that she is, well--how you say in Eengleesh?--a woman...
...Une femme, quoi...
...She promisesto"scarethecapitalists"withtheir"financialanarchy that destroys the planet's environment and crushes socialrights....Freemarketsmeandisorder...
...The other, perversely, is Jacques Chirac...
...HOW DID POLITICS IN THE LAND of Descartes, Diderot, and Danton, not to mention the Enlightenment, the society with a political class of intellectuals who can split the hairs on Karl Marx's beardfourdifferentways,cometothis...
...Voting une presidente into the Elysee Palace-which has seen many foolish things in its long history, including a president who died enjoying fellatio in his office, but never a presidential concubinage--instead ofunpresidentwouldcertainlybeachange.Still,Mademoiselle Royal is no solid Angela Merkel of Germany or Vaira Vike Freiberga, the steely president of Latvia, or even less a strong-willed Margaret Thatcher, who knew exactly where she wanted to lead Britain...
...But enough of politics...
...No matter...
...This at least is one promise of changethatvoterscanbesureshewillstickto...
...Later she burnished her political credentials by getting elected president of the Poitou-Charentes region in southwesternFrance,alargelyceremonialpostbutonethat keptherinthepoliticalswim...
...J O S E P HA .H A R R I S S HostilitytoAmericaisagiven.Itisa "hyperpower"thatis"temptedtouse force"andmustbecurtailedbya strongerEuropeanUnion...
...Itallbeganmodestlyenoughinthe1980swhenthe comely young woman rode Mitterrand's coattails into the National Assembly...
...No, that is mostly hidden somewhere in a cloud of smiling Delphic utterances...
...Although she is not above showing a generous expanse of thigh when the wind catches one of her flouncy skirts, her style is dishwater drab...
...Her vacuous speeches are laced here and there with the party's 19th-century Marxism...
...And oh, did I mention that the Socialist PartycandidateforpresidentofFranceisawoman...
...As one pollster puts it, "The French want to turn the page on the past...
...But voters hungry for a clean break with the past, frustrated with same-old, same-old of French society, go for it...
...No sooner has onedubbedMam'zelSegolene,orSegoassheisfamiliarly known, the Madonna of the Polls, than another topsthatbynaminghernolessthanthe"politicalrevelationoftheyear...
...And--lookma,nohands!--shehas done it with very little in the way of a program or vision for France's future...
...Not just to change governments, but to change eras...
...From there it is only a short step to tarring her conservative rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, as pro-American, especially since he had the nerve to visit Washington and shake George Bush's hand...
Vol. 40 • March 2007 • No. 2
