His girlfriend, Valérie Trierweiler, a 47-year-old former political journalist and television talk-show host, knows how to dress for the cameras. Trierweiler agreed to help Hollande pick out a suit and tie, but added pointedly: "Don't expect me just to be doing this from now on."
It is an anecdote that neatly encapsulates France's new first lady. Beneath the exquisite exterior – the immaculately coiffed hair, the subtle make-up, the open-necked shirts with precisely the right number of buttons left undone – there lies a steely resolve to be much more than just a presidential consort. "She's a person who has always lived by herself, for herself," explains Alix Bouilhaguet, who co-authored La Frondeuse (The Troublemaker), a recent biography of Trierweiler. "[She] is incapable of living in the shadow of a partner – even when her partner is the president."
For those of us on this side of the Channel who have become used to seeing party leaders wheel out their wives for a simpering pre-conference kiss, Trierweiler's refusal to play the role of pliant wife is refreshing. But in France, it has done her no favours: a recent poll forVSD magazine found that 67% of French people had a negative view of her.
France can still be a profoundly sexist society where women are expected to fit neatly into certain pigeonholes. Trierweiler, who is neither an unapologetic career-woman nor a devoted wifelet who has forsaken her own ambitions for the sake of her man (and, by extension, the country) poses an impossible conundrum for the electorate. To them, her actions can seem confusing and contradictory. On one hand, she is a strong, assertive woman who made her way up through the ranks from modest beginnings. On the other, she is capable of outbursts of jealousy and neediness, played out on the national stage to the embarrassment of her partner and his voters. No one knows quite what to make of her.
Partly, Trierweiler is a victim of her own uncertain status. She and Hollande remain unmarried and he is on record as saying he believes marriage is a "bourgeois" institution. As such, she has no official standing as first lady and yet she has been forced to give up her job as a political journalist for Paris Match so as to avoid accusations of bias. Instead, she writes the odd book review for the magazine, insisting that she must continue to support her children (three teenage boys from her second marriage to fellow journalist and academic Denis Trierweiler). But the editor has announced he will not be renewing her contract at the end of the year. Recently, she has been talking of wanting to take up "humanitarian" work – that fail-safe option for spouses of powerful men who need to be kept occupied.
Throughout it all, she continues to have her own office in the Elysée Palace and five personal assistants – the cause of much grumbling in the press at a time of cutbacks. The former first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy recently urged the couple to marry in order to make things "simpler".
But the French electorate has also been taken aback by allegations published in La Frondeuse that Trierweiler was reportedly sleeping with a married conservative minister, Patrick Devedjian, while she was having a relationship with Hollande. At the time, Hollande was still living with Ségolène Royal, the mother of his four children and a senior Socialist politician in her own right. Trierweiler is suing the authors over the so-called "ménage a six". Still, the rumours remain. And although extra-marital dalliances are viewed tolerantly by the Parisian chattering classes, there is an underlying sense – unfair, perhaps – that Trierweiler relies on her feminine wiles to get ahead.
by Elizabeth Day, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Olivier Douliery-Pool/Rex Features
