23 JUNE 2007, Page 14

With Sego's love split, France is going tabloid

Celia Walden says that the very calculated way in which Segolene Royal announced her break-up with her partner of 29 years was worthy of Diana This week, shortly after the defeated Socialist candidate Segolene Royal declared that her relationship with Francois Hollande was over, a lone insider's voice made itself heard above the sympathetic murmurs, giving credence to a growing sense of unease felt not just by the Socialist party, but by the general public too: 'I've had enough of political life, the political life of my party, centring around the private life of a couple.' The statement would sound disingenuous in bloodthirsty Britain, but this was no attack on the French press. How could it be? Even in the heat of the May elections, with a cast of characters to make any soap opera look anaemic, newspapers refused to investigate (or even comment on) the private lives of the presidential candidates. This is not through prudishness, or even the strict privacy laws which have been in place since 1970. It turns on a culture that is at once restrained and permissive when it comes to the sex lives of public figures. Gallic husbands tend to cheat; most wives are aware of that fact — where's the story?

It was Sarkozy, still only a presidential candidate, who was the first to debunk the conventions of French journalism by thrusting his marital woes with the issue-ridden Cecilia into the limelight, using them to humanise himself in the eyes of the public. It worked beautifully. The usually highminded French voters caught a whiff of something new and after getting a bit closer for a second sniff decided it wasn't so bad. Sarkozy further encouraged hesitant media interest with a succession of Hello!-style features in Paris Match (whose owner, Arnaud Lagardere, Sarko once called 'his brother') and by writing a book sentimentalising the (actually rather vicious) revenge game he and Cecilia were using to spice up their marriage. Before long, at the G8 summit in Germany, like any vulgar British or American rag, stroppy headlines were demanding 'On est Cecilia?', while the President went about the less interesting business of tackling global warming or eliminating Third World debt.

Not to be left out, 53-year-old Royal decided the timing was right this week to announce her split with her partner of 29 years, the father of her four children and current political rival, Francois Hollande. 'I have asked Francois to leave our home, to pursue his love interest, which is now laid out in books and newspapers, and I wish him love and happiness.' The words were French, so why did that sentence sound so foreign to the Gallic ear? Because in those few words Royal, like Sarkozy before her, had succeeded in coating plain fact with flavour-enhancing Anglo-Saxon tabloid drama. Like the language of Hollywood celebrities, or of our very own Diana (There were three of us in this marriage'), the words had been carefully chosen to make Royal the victim. There is nothing neutral in the use of the expression 'love interest', and her own loss of dignity is emphasised in the (surely exaggerated) idea of Hollande's indiscretions being 'laid out in books and newspapers', when the truth is that they were obliquely, and sporadically, referred to in the press. Sego has clearly never been at the receiving end of a News of the World kiss'n'tell. Finally, Royal seems to address her former partner directly, wishing him 'love and happiness' in a tone which is more befitting of a Celine Dion ballad than a political statement. In an unprecedented move, France's biggest mid-market daily, Le Parisien-Aujourd'hui, led on 'La Rupture', relegating all election coverage to the inside.

Whether one believes that prominent politicians should respond to rumours of marital disharmony or not, no one can blame the public for their subsequent interest in the breakdown of the left-wing golden couple's unmarried relationship. While Royal's persona has encouraged this all along, her eerily flawless physique is also responsible for earning her a celebrity status never before seen in French politics, with designers desperate to dress her, and women all over the world being fed tips on how to emulate her Parisian style. Yes, Sego may look better than Madame Chirac or Madame Mitterrand ever did, but she failed to inherit their poise in the cheating husband department, behaving more like her equally ambitious American counterpart, Hillary Clinton, did post-Lewinsky, where her odd needling remarks shattered all pretence of dignity. In Royal's case the needling may be done through a new book published this week, Behind the Scenes of Defeat, written by Christine Courcol and Thierry Masure, which has been sanctioned by Royal and contains details of the split.

Hearing of this latest development, two journalists from Le Monde, Raphaelle Bacquet and Ariane Chemin — currently being sued for breach of privacy after writing a bestseller which describes how Royal threw herself into politics precisely because of an earlier 'conjugal crisis' (a crisis which quickly took on 'a political nature') — demanded that she withdraw the suit, insisting the MP has only confirmed what they had written. Royal, you see, was unwisely garrulous in an interview with France Inter on Monday, confessing that, 'Like all couples we had difficulties. I decided to put them aside during the presidential and then parliamentary election campaigns.' An odd admission from a woman who a few months ago coyly told journalists that she and Francois 'may get married'.

French behaviour is changing. As the country's sophisticated worldliness diminishes and their vulgar appetites are quickened by this new breed of celebrity-politician ready to provide sensational personal details without being asked, their palates will become accustomed to ever new 'revelations'. And while no newspaper would have sought to identify Hollande's new 'love interest' this time last year, the very inclusion of a third party in Royal's statement is bound to act as bait. Not to mention the inevitable updates on the status of Sego's own private life.

There used to be something called reyception francaise — that French life and politics defy all normal categories. It is all looking much less exceptional now.