François Hollande is the most unpopular president France has ever had. He has scared off the rich and alienated the poor. Until last week, though, it was generally assumed that for all his incompetence and gormlessness he was quite a good bloke.
Then up sprang “La Rottweiler”. Valérie Trierweiler, the scorned former first girlfriend, has written a book (Thank You for this Moment) portraying “President Normal” as a nasty, two-faced hypocrite, a social-climbing champagne Socialist who cares for nothing other than himself. He once claimed that he did not like the rich, but the truth, claims Trierweiler, is that he dislikes the poor — “the toothless”, he calls them.
Thanks to vengeful Val, some are wondering how much longer Hollande, who publicly dumped her after he was caught having an affair with the actress Julie Gayet, can survive in power. Here is what you need to know about the allegations in the book that le tout Paris is reading (it sold more copies than Fifty Shades of Grey on its first day in the shops).
He ignored her first suicide attempt
Trierweiler accuses Hollande of leaving her comatose on their sofa when she swallowed sleeping pills last December. She writes: “I can’t speak but I can hear. My act was a cry for help. But all I get is his silence. He doesn’t address a single word to me, doesn’t even call my name. He touches me on the forehead and leaves. I’m alone. No doctor comes to see me . . . nobody.”
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What happened in the 24 hours after his affair WITH GAYET was revealed
He went into a self-pitying spin and she reached for the pills . . . again. She writes how he seemed “more dejected than me”. What are we going to do? he asked her. “He’s dazed.”
The next morning, listening to the news on the radio, she cracks and rushes into the bathroom, reaching for her bag of sleeping pills.
“He snatches the bag, which tears. Pills sprinkle over the bed and floor. I manage to pick up several. I swallow as many as I can. I want to sleep. I don’t want to live through the coming hours.” Later, he publicly dumps her in an 18-word statement.
He’s an unbelievable snob . . .
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She recalls how rude he was to her modest family, calling them “not a pretty” sight after one gathering.
She writes: “His scornful expression haunts me now that I am no longer under his spell.”
. . . and a terrible social climber
He couldn’t wait to meet Gayet’s rich family, with their 17th-century chateau set in magnificent grounds. “Now there’s a family right up François’s street: a surgeon grandfather, an antique-collecting mother, a renowned doctor father.”
He told the most hurtful lie of all
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Hollande had told her in private how much he wanted to have a child with her. But then he took it back — publicly. “I read in a book about him that he had confided to the author that he had never felt the desire to have a child with me. I was mortified. He defended himself [when she confronted him]: ‘I did not want to go into intimate details.’ Another lie, one of the most hurtful.”
It’s a scary place, that Elysée Palace
She describes the home of the French president in the centre of Paris as being like a “beehive” and the “heart of power”, but essentially it is a lonely and scary place in which to live. “The private apartments are like a silent bubble, cut off from all the agitation, that nobody dares to enter. I’ve sometimes felt very lonely there.”
His lies gave her eczema and ruined her figure
She blames him for putting her in a permanent state of anxiety with his lies. “I began to put on the kilos, I got eczema on my face. I often had a stiff neck. My stress was visible, I felt as though I’d aged several years in a few months.”
He had a weird idea of what it means to be a ‘couple’
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At his mother’s memorial service a few years previously she had felt unloved when, arriving at the church, he told her: “Family is there, on the left, you go on the other side.”
She did not rate his sartorial style
When they started living together, she said he was “capable of buying his shirts and shoes in the hypermarket”. So she binned them or gave them to charity “even the threadbare, black velvet suit that he loved so much — and his leather jackets”. Three years later, after he had lost 35lb, Hollande got another Val makeover and out went all his clothes once more.
“But he could wear them again today after putting all that weight back on.” Ouch.
He had an acid tongue
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Just before a state dinner, he asked her: “Does it take you a long time to make yourself beautiful?”
“Yes, a bit.”
“At the same time, we’re not asking anything else of you.”
He took zero interest in her work life
She used to present a television programme called Itineraries. One day he asked “What is Itineraries?”
“I am stupefied. The man of my life doesn’t even know the name of the programme I present on television.”
Their first ‘coupling’ was in 2005 in a hotel in Limoges
She writes that on that night he did not wish only to conquer her but that he also “wanted me to love him”.
“When I said ‘I love you’ too, he wanted me to love only him, to love him like I had loved no man before. Which I did.”
He thought he could win her back ‘like an election’
She says he continued to harass her by text and told her that he thought only of her. “He begs to see me” and told her that Julie — “that girl” — was “nothing”. He even proposed to her for the third time.