President Hollande suffered a fresh blow to his troubled leadership of France yesterday when Valérie Trierweiler, his scorned companion, exacted revenge with a book depicting him as a cynical liar who hates the working class.
The former first lady, dropped by Mr Hollande in January after the revelation of his affair with an actress, admitted that she swallowed a handful of sleeping pills on learning of the relationship.
She claimed that he inundated her with pleas for her to return as the only love of his life — once sending 29 texts in a day and also texting her as he was receiving President Obama and President Putin in Normandy for the D-Day commemorations in June.
Her bitter book, Merci Pour Ce Moment [Thank you for this moment], which was prepared in secret and printed in Germany, hit Mr Hollande as a bolt from the blue after a week of political crisis in which his credibility sank to a record low.
Ms Trierweiler, 49, who admitted that she was both inordinately jealous and insecure, offered a lurid account of her discovery of Mr Hollande’s infidelity with Julie Gayet. The most damaging of the brief extracts, released yesterday, however, are those that depict the Socialist president as a heartless snob.
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The upper-middle-class president, who began his relationship with her in 2005 when he was Socialist leader and living with Ségolène Royal, liked to call Ms Trierweiler Cosette, after the young domestic drudge in Les Misérables.
Ms Trierweiler, née Massonneau, describes a Christmas dinner with her working-class parents, brothers, sisters and cousins in their council flat in Angers, on the Loire. The future president turned to her and joked: “They’re not a pretty sight, the Massonneau family.” The jibe shocked her because her family was “so typical of his voters”.
She wrote: “He stood for election as a man who does not like the rich. In reality, the president does not like the poor. He, the man of the left, calls them ‘les sans-dents’ [the toothless], very proud of his touch of humour.”
Ms Trierweiler’s attack on Mr Hollande was censored by the state television network last night. The main evening news on France2, equivalent to Britain’s BBC1, said that it had decided not to report on the book because it concerned the president’s private life.
The revelations threaten to blacken further Mr Hollande’s image among left-wing voters who believe that he has betrayed his 2012 campaign pledges to soak the rich.
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As he swung his newly purged government to pro-business policies last week, 54 per cent of his former voters told pollsters that he had failed them while 84 per cent of the public had no faith in his administration.
In extracts in Paris Match, Ms Trierweiler, a reporter and columnist on the magazine for 15 years, described Mr Hollande becoming distant and “dehumanised” after winning power in May 2012. He lied to her, she said, in December last year when she first questioned him about rumours that he was cheating. She asked him: “Swear to me on the head of my son that it’s false and I won’t talk about it any more.” Mr Hollande said the rumour was “rubbish”.
She described her shock on the night in January when Closer magazine revealed the affair. “Julie Gayet was top of the morning news... I cracked up. I could not bear hearing that. I rushed to the bathroom. I grabbed a little plastic bag with sleeping pills in it,” she wrote.
“François followed me. He tried to snatch the bag. I ran into the bedroom. He grabbed the bag and ripped it. Pills spread on the bed and the floor. I managed to recover some.
“I swallowed what I could. I wanted to sleep. I couldn’t go through the hours ahead. I felt the storm that was going to break on me and I did not have the strength to resist. I wanted to flee. I passed out,” she wrote.
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Ms Trierweiler was taken to hospital, where she spent a week officially resting before Mr Hollande announced in a brief communiqué that she was no longer part of his life. Reports of her taking pills came out in January but had not been confirmed.
Ms Trierweiler wrote of her shock when she discovered in the days that followed that Mr Hollande was continuing to lie to her about his liaison with Gayet. “At first his liaison with Julie Gayet had only been going on a month. And then we went to three months, then six, then nine. And at last, a year.”
Ms Trierweiler also wrote about her conflict with Ms Royal, the former presidential candidate and mother of the president’s four children, whom he appointed to a senior post this year.
Le Monde, which also published extracts, called the book an act of “public revenge... a 330-page reply to the 18 icy words with which the president announced by communiqué that he had taken his leave from his companion”.
The Élysée palace acknowledged yesterday that Mr Hollande had been surprised by the book’s publication but played down its significance. One aide said, however, that the president was “somewhat appalled”.