Dominique de Villepin has recently published a novel narrated by a tree, and Jacques Chirac’s memoirs have made him hugely popular – but then, in France, the unpublished politician is an unusual species
WHEN Dominique de Villepin stepped down as prime minister of France in 2007, he yearned for a change of direction, a project that would lead him away from the stagecraft of political life and towards the “furthest elsewhere”. As he recounts in the foreword to his latest novel, a friend had just the idea. “Why don’t you tell the story of a tree?” he suggested.
Villepin was taken by the thought, and the result of his change of direction, published last November, is Le Dernier Témoin(The Last Witness), a post-apocalyptic novel narrated by the sole survivor of a great cataclysm: a talking tree. Surveying an ash-grey landscape ("There was no more night. There was no more day"), the eloquently brooding hero-tree muses on the ruinous trajectory of human history and on the nature of existence just as what remains of the light is about to be put out.
Apart from some reviews in the literary press, a handful of interviews with its author and a few uncharitable jokes about an allegorical connection between the novel's theme and Villepin's career, Le Dernier Témoinhas aroused fairly little comment in France. A glance along the shelves of any bookshop in the country might explain why.
FRENCH POLITICIANSare astonishingly prolific writers. While their counterparts in Ireland and elsewhere generally wait until they retire to publish, and mostly confine themselves to one genre – memoir – writing a book, preferably many, is a rite of passage for anyone with political ambitions in France. Even the smallest bookshop usually has a section devoted to the musings of les hommesor les femmes politiques, and in recent months the shelves have been creaking under the weight of their literary output.
Just this week, the socialist former prime minister Lionel Jospin and the current minister for immigration, Éric Besson, have released new titles, while the most keenly awaited of a glut of recent works was the first volume of former president Jacques Chirac's memoirs, Chaque Pas Doit Être un But(Every Step Must Be a Goal). Since it went on sale in November, sales of Chirac's tome have exceeded all expectations (350,000 copies were sold before Christmas) and have helped make him the most popular politician in France, according to the polls.
A great many politicians' books are no more than extended manifestos, in which every second detail of a life story is invoked only to imply some appealing quality or other or to burnish the author's leadership credentials. "From as far back as I can remember, I've always wanted to act," begins Nicolas Sarkozy's Témoignage(Testimony), published before the 2007 presidential election.
Others use the medium to settle old scores (some of the most memorable passages in Chirac’s latest book centre on his antipathy towards his predecessor, Valéry Giscard-d’Estaing).
For younger politicians, or those hoping to soften a tough public persona, meanwhile, there's a sub-genre of folksier works, often framed as a way of confiding in readers while bypassing those caricaturists in the media. In Ségolène Royal's Ma Plus Belle Histoire, C'est Vous(My Most Beautiful Story Is You), written by the socialist candidate after her defeat to Sarkozy in 2007, she retained the "dialogue with the people" theme of her campaign while revealing her bitterness towards François Hollande, the party leader and father of their four children. (Incidentally, Hollande has just published his own latest book.)
WORKING POLITICIANSwriting books is not a uniquely French custom, of course. In Ireland, Labour's Michael D Higgins has published collections of poetry and essays, and his party colleague Liz McManus, current European Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn and Fine Gael's Alan Shatter all have novels to their names. Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin last year produced a historical monograph.
But in France, the politician who is not a published poet, essayist, novelist, biographer or memoirist is an unusual species. Former president François Mitterrand wrote about 25 books, while his predecessor, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, has written a dozen, the most recent of which is a romantic novel deemed by most critics to be transparently modelled on himself and the late Princess Diana.
What explains such prodigious literary output? First, the blurring of lines between men of action and men of letters, between the pen and the sword, has been a strong tradition since the French revolution.
Many are the French writers who went on to become politicians, and vice versa. Georges Clemenceau, prime minister during the first World War, wrote an opera, while the giant of France's 20th century, Charles de Gaulle, was a talented and prolific writer whose bons motsstill turn up in everyday political discussion.
The tradition undoubtedly has something to do with the respect afforded to thinkers in French life, and the prestige attached to the printed word. Intellectuals are cherished by the French mainstream, and are routinely invited on to radio and television to expound on the issues of the day.
Moreover, mastery of the French language has always been important to the French political elite, and has often been worn as a badge of national identity. “France is this bizarre country where if the writers are often failed men of action, the men of action are always failed writers,” the celebrity-philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy once wrote.
THERE MAY BEa slightly grubbier explanation as well, for this is one tradition that the market appears to be sustaining. French readers clearly have an appetite for reading what their elected representatives have to say, knowing well that while working politicians will try hard to leave few hostages to fortune, even the most cautiously crafted book can tell voters quite a lot about a candidate before election day.
While it’s true that many politicians’ works have a print-run of fewer than 10,000 copies, the most talked-about titles can dominate the bestseller lists and sell in their hundreds of thousands. That means writing, whether from the trenches of a political campaign or from the ash-grey plains of the furthest elsewhere, is not just good politics but sound business as well.
