As an act of revenge it would be hard to beat the kiss-and-tell book that Valérie Trierweiler has just inflicted on François Hollande. The scorned former première dame has deployed her journalist’s skill to shred the remnants of the president’s authority. She depicts the hapless socialist as a cynical liar who has betrayed a gullible electorate in the same way that he duped her with Julie Gayet, an actress. It is a rollicking tale of passion and treachery in the palace, a mix of Molière and boulevard comedy.
Yet if you are one of the eight million French people who get their news from the TV channel France 2 you would be in the dark. On Wednesday night, after France had spent the day talking of little else, the equivalent of BBC One relegated the Trierweiler bombshell to a tiny item at the end of the half-hour bulletin.
Ms Trierweiler had aired “intimate, even indecent details” about the president’s life, so the network had decided not to touch her book, which “does not elevate political life and even less its author”, viewers heard. France 2 had leapt back to the 1960s when Charles de Gaulle’s ORTF broadcaster used to send news script to the Elysée Palace for vetting.
Ms Trierweiler’s revenge dominated the news on the commercial outlets, but the France 2 editors decided that it was unfitting to acquaint the people with tittle-tattle involving unseemly conduct by its elected royalty. In the age of Twitter and 24-hour news, this is an astonishing anachronism. It reminds me of the old Soviet Union when the news would be full of heroic harvesters and no mention of an Aeroflot aircraft crash on the outskirts of Moscow.
The French media have shed many old taboos in the three decades since they declined to acquaint the country with President Mitterrand’s extra-conjugal household. This year’s exposure by a gossip magazine of Mr Hollande’s scooter-borne dalliance would have been unthinkable a decade ago. But the patronising reflex to cover up dies hard, especially with the public broadcast networks. It protects not just the presidency but the whole governing class, ensuring that it remains less accountable than in most of the rest of western Europe.
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The first step to ending this unhealthy deference to power would be to abandon the system of monarchy that France elects every five years. Out of the palace, the political bosses would become ordinary mortals answerable to parliament and hence more directly to the people.