Lack of privilege explains appeal of 'Madonna of the opinion polls'

FRANCE: At her last rally, on the night before she was elected the Socialist Party's presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal said she was "savouring the miracle" and asked her audience to "give me this strength to embody hope . . ." She made a similar gesture when she announced her candidacy at the end of September, standing before an applauding crowd in a prayer-like trance, as if drawing power from their adoration.

Ms Royal's detractors accuse her of populism. "We shall climb the mountain until victory," she said yesterday. "For we are borne by a popular, generous, happy movement . . . a cause that is greater than us."

The link between the "Madonna of the opinion polls" and her followers is almost mystical - captured by the snide question sometimes heard on the campaign trail: "Does she cure leprosy too?"

Ms Royal says Joan of Arc, who long before her came from Lorraine, is her heroine. There is something crusade-like about the way she has politically slain the socialist party "elephants": Lionel Jospin, Jack Lang, Laurent Fabius, Dominique Strauss-Kahn - and, arguably, her partner of 25 years and the father of her four children, the party's leader, François Hollande. Traditionally, the party leader is the presidential candidate.

True to character, Ms Royal's victory speech yesterday was an eclectic mix of high-sounding generalities - the "self-service cafeteria of very left or very right-wing proposals" decried by the Communist Revolutionary League candidate Olivier Besancenot.

There were clear allusions to her own life. The presidential election was about "the possibility for each person to choose his own fate", she said. "Being a socialist means keeping a sense of revolt in one's heart." Ms Royal's unhappy childhood is already legend. A Royal fan at a polling station on Thursday reiterated the story of her cruel father, Lt Col Jacques Royal, who raised his eight children like army recruits: no heating in winter, the single-file march to church for Mass and vespers. The worst punishments were saved for the boys: a shaved head or hours locked in a dark cellar.

When Ms Royal's mother, Hélène, finally fled her abusive husband, on a bicycle in the snow, she is said to have slept on benches and done housework to survive. At the age of 19, Ms Royal helped her mother sue her father for child support.

These experiences have convinced may French people that far from belonging to a privileged elite like most of France's political class, Ms Royal has suffered and struggled as they do.

"Life taught me very early that my only hope of freedom was to succeed at school and have a profession," Ms Royal says. "In my family, the fate of the girls was to marry and devote themselves to their home. The only chance I had of escaping was to earn, through high marks, the right to go a little further at each stage."

Her right-wing rival Nicolas Sarkozy harps on France's failure to reward those who work hard, but Ms Royal appealed for a better life for "these youths who despair of finding work, these employees who are thrown out before retirement age, these families who cannot make ends meet, who cannot find decent housing . . ."

Jean Lacouture, the biographer of General Charles de Gaulle, says Ms Royal is the most Gaullienne of presidential candidates. There were Gaullien accents to her victory speech: "For we are of this country, France, which voted for the freedom of the world and where we drafted a constitution while thinking of the entire world," she said.

And if our historical and political bearings were not already confused enough, Ms Royal (inadvertently?) paraphrased John F Kennedy: "Pull together, Mobilise. Ask what you can do for our country."