FRANCE:France's defeated socialist presidential candidate is making her political comeback with a tell-all book, writes Lara Marlowe.
That men will always let you down is the central theme of Ségolène Royal's book, My Most Beautiful Story Is You, published by Grasset this month.
The title is a variation on the French singer Barbara's famous song, My Most Beautiful Love Story Is You. The "you" Royal alludes to is the almost mystical relationship she believes she had with the 17 million people who voted for her in the presidential election. Their adoration gave her "moments of grace" and prevented her from feeling humiliated.
Royal staged her book's publication as a political comeback, but it feels more like a swansong. She'd assumed that, like François Mitterrand when he lost in 1974 and Lionel Jospin when he lost in 1995, she would automatically become leader of the Socialist Party.
"If she had managed the post-election phase well, she could have become the uncontested leader," her former partner and the outgoing socialist leader François Hollande says cruelly. "But she didn't have the necessary will to unite people."
A poll published this month by Le Nouvel Observateurmagazine shows that only 19 per cent of socialist voters want Royal to be the next leader of the party. A year ago, she won 60 per cent of the vote in the socialist primary. She hasn't set foot in party headquarters since her defeat last May. Yves Saint-Laurent's longtime partner, Pierre Bergé, has provided Royal with an office.
According to Royal, those responsible for her defeat are Hollande, with whom she spent 25 years and had four children, and the party "elephants"- Jospin, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius.
When Jospin published a book in September blaming Royal for the socialists' defeat, her persecution complex came to the fore. "Forgive them, for they know not what they do," she said, quoting Jesus Christ. "Reading these books," she added, "I think if I'd been Joan of Arc I would have already been burned at the stake."
Explaining Hollande's role in her defeat, Royal writes of herself in the third person. "During the campaign, the candidate said to herself: tomorrow will be the lucky day. He [François Hollande] will come back towards me, invest himself completely, understand that millions of people expect us to forget ourselves and think of them. And this day never came."
Hollande had left Royal for a Paris Matchjournalist. It was, she writes, abandonment. The candidate "found no shoulder to lean her head on, to let herself go, to weep when it was hard going".
If she is to win in 2012 (because she still sees herself at the Élysée Palace), Royal continues, "she will need the support of a whole party and a companion who is completely in love with the candidate".
Royal's book portrays the Socialist Party as a stable of little men with big egos. Former prime minister Michel Rocard (77) showed up at her campaign headquarters hours before the deadline for declaring candidacy. "You have to withdraw," Rocard ordered Royal.
"Make an appeal to me in public. I'll file my candidacy with the constitutional council, and the trick will have been done. If you don't take this chance, you'll be swept away. You won't even make it to the run-off."
Only two men find favour with Royal. Former minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement told her, "Our role is to follow you and support you." "Ah," sighs Royal. "If I'd had 20 Chevènements around me . . . or even 10!"
The other is the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who met her a dozen times for drinks during the campaign. "He repeated his favourite sentence to me: 'You are of extreme beauty!'"
Royal reveals that she offered François Bayrou, the centrist candidate who came in third in the first round, the prime minister's job if he would support her. But he too let her down. In one of her book's most memorable scenes, she goes to his Paris apartment building late at night to put finishing touches on their agreement, but he refuses to allow her to come upstairs, "like a lover who's afraid of failure".
Asked to comment on the interlude, Bayrou said, "My problem with Ségolène Royal was that I didn't agree with her programme. And I learned later that she didn't agree with it either." Referring to "the meeting that didn't take place" between his ex and Bayrou, Hollande said, "You always learn something from books." His criticism of Royal has been the most cutting: "There's no point wanting to hold others responsible.
"Depending on the role and the position you occupied, you have to look at what you could have done better."
Despite the bruising, Royal's ambition remains intact. "My determination to commit myself to what is called the renovation of the left is total, strong, passionate," she said in a debate sponsored by Le Mondenewspaper earlier this month. "One way or another, I'll be in the front line of this battle."