A Royal for President of France?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14royal.html


May 14, 2006

La Femme

By JAMES TRAUB

"There's a reason that the leaders of France's Socialist Party are called
"elephants": They live forever. Among the elephants now vying to become the
party's candidate for president in next year's election are Laurent Fabius,
who served as prime minister 22 years ago, and Lionel Jospin, who served as
Socialist Party leader a quarter-century ago and suffered a defeat in the
last presidential election so devastating, both for himself and for the
party, that you would have thought prudence alone would dictate political
retirement. But in France, politics is a profession; once you arrive, you
stay.

No one has thought to call Ségolène Royal an elephant. For one thing, it
would be unbecoming, since she is a woman - and a woman who, when she works
her smile up into her eyes, bears a passing resemblance to Audrey Hepburn.
Royal is, remarkably enough, the first truly présidentiable woman in French
history. But what is most striking about her candidacy, which so far
consists of a highly orchestrated media seduction, is not the fact that she
is a woman but rather that she has positioned herself as a nonelephant,
indeed, almost an antielephant. She is, in effect, running against France's
political culture, which is to say against remoteness and abstraction,
ideological entrenchment and male domination itself. And that culture, which
is embodied by her own party, has struck back, ridiculing her as a soap
bubble borne aloft by a momentary gust of public infatuation.

Earlier this spring, I visited her in Poitiers, the seat of government for
the Poitou-Charentes region, south and west of Paris, of which she is the
elected president. France was in the midst of one of its periodic
re-enactments of the revolution, or at least of the Commune, with students
and union activists pouring into the streets to protest a law permitting
employers to hire and fire first-time employees without some of the myriad
protections generally afforded French workers. But Royal had little interest
in joining the fevered national debate over "social protections." Royal has
distinguished herself by focusing on the sort of issues - schools, child
rearing, the effects of popular culture - that have come to preoccupy many
American politicians but generally fall beneath the regard of the
bien-pensants of Paris and of the more deeply wrinkled of the elephants.
"Trivial things," as Royal put it to me, sarcastically. "Whereas for the
people, these are the most important topics."

To the obvious consternation of Fabius, Jospin and the other elephants of
the Socialist Party, polls have consistently shown Royal to be the most
popular figure in the opposition and possibly in the country. She is the
darling of the mass-circulation weeklies, appearing on the cover of four of
them in the first week of April, and on daytime television shows, a lowbrow
medium where the colleagues who mock her wouldn't be caught dead. She is the
only important political figure in France whom everyone refers to by first
name. And her popularity seems to rise as the image of politicians in France
collectively sinks. "The political class is becoming increasingly alien to
the people," says Alain Touraine, a grand old man of French social theory.
"When you vote for a woman, it's a symbol of, 'I want to get rid of you' -
because the system itself is completely male."

Even to call politics in France a profession puts the case too weakly; it's
more like a mandarinate. The French view the state - l'État, always
capitalized - with a reverence that can seem anachronistic in a world in
thrall to the marketplace. The national educational meritocracy funnels the
brightest boys and girls into the great preparatory institutions in Paris,
above all the Institut d'Études Politiques, known as Sciences Po, and the
École Nationale d'Administration, or ENA. Practically everyone in the upper
echelons of French politics attended Sciences Po and went on to become an
"Énarque."

Ségolène Royal is a rare insider-outsider who managed to get her ticket
punched at all the mandarin way stations without ever appearing to join, or
even to aspire to join, the old boys' club. She had to fight her way in; and
the fight has never left her. Royal was born in colonial Senegal, the
daughter and granddaughter of military officers. Her father, Jacques, was a
rigidly conservative martinet with a shaved head and a monocle. Life for the
eight Royal children, first in Dakar and then in Lorraine, in eastern
France, was joyless and harsh, according to accounts Royal has freely
offered. Whatever was not demanded was forbidden. Her brothers were beaten
for even tiny infractions; she and her three sisters had the advantage of
being ignored. "My father always made us feel," she later told one
interviewer, "that we, my sisters and I, were inferior beings." The story of
the monstrous father has imbued Royal's life with the improbable flavor of a
Grimm fairy tale, and when I asked about her childhood, she said, "Well, it
was a bit exaggerated." But in the next breath she explained that her early
years had shaped her "in terms of resistance and resilience."

We were sitting in the back seat of a chauffeured car one spring evening
after a few local events of the sort that she both enjoys doing and
encourages journalists to watch her doing. Royal, who is 52, was impeccably
turned out in a short cocoa-colored jacket and matching flared skirt. Her
manner was straightforward, with few of the girlish high notes that even
highly successful French women have a way of striking. At times she laughed;
but although in public she could hold a smile for an hour without faltering,
in conversation she did not bother with the instruments of beguilement. (Our
discussions were in French; she says that she understands English, but
cannot speak it.) I was struck by Royal's verbal economy: she didn't watch
her words so much as dole out as many as needed, and no more, which felt
almost like parsimony compared with the performative flourishes that make
French politics such a delightful parlor game.

Like so many miserable children, Royal was saved by school. I asked if
anyone had encouraged her studies.

"Yes, my teachers."

"Anyone in your family? Your mother?"

"No." Her mother came from a bourgeois background and read books and
newspapers. But girls were not to furrow their brows with too much learning,
she told me: "We were simply supposed to get married." Royal not only
escaped from her suffocating father, she also defined herself in opposition
to him. The dark fairy tale is central to her own narrative of resistance
and resilience. She has long told the story that one day her father simply
rode away on a bicycle and abandoned the family; in fact, her mother told a
biographer, it was she who at long last left her husband. But while Royal
repudiated her father's reactionary politics and machismo, she inherited his
rigor and perhaps also his icy clarity of purpose. "I see a goal, I organize
myself accordingly, I evaluate, I achieve it," she said. "It's very
military."

Like Bill Clinton, Royal is a true champion of the educational meritocracy.
She had never even heard of the grandes écoles, but when one of her sisters
mentioned a preparatory program for Sciences Po, she signed up. And soon
this hungry young provincial arrived in Paris, prepared to adapt and
conquer. She kept to herself, worked with the diligence and resolve of a
soldier's daughter and entered ENA in 1978. There she met her future
partner, a wry and amiable intellectual named François Hollande. Both were
recruited to work on François Mitterand's presidential campaign; when
Mitterand, in 1981, became France's first Socialist president in more than
30 years, both Royal and Hollande were inducted into Élysée Palace as policy
aides. In just such a manner does the Énarque convert intellectual capital
into political fuel.

Mitterand became if not quite Royal's mentor then certainly her role model.
According to Sophie Bouchet-Pedersen, then a colleague at Élysée and now one
of Royal's policy advisers, "She learned from Mitterand how to govern, how
politics must take primacy over technocracy; and then will - that in the
end, politics is a matter of will." Mitterand was said to dote on his young
aide, and she, in turn, identified with him. "He was from around here, in
Charente," she told me. "He wasn't from a very rich family. He must have
always had this inferiority complex of provincials who didn't sparkle in
society. But he climbed the hierarchy; and he always preserved a certain joy
and a popular touch." She, too, was a provincial upstart with the will to
sweep obstacles from her path; she could climb the hierarchy as the majestic
Monsieur le Président had done.

As Mitterand's first term was ending in 1988, Royal told party officials
that she wanted to run for the National Assembly, though she and Hollande,
who have never married, already had three children. She was given an
unpromising, traditionally conservative district in Poitou-Charentes. As
Royal has told the story, she dropped the kids off with Hollande's mother,
leapt onto the train just in time to register her candidacy and began
introducing herself in a region where she knew no one. And she won. Five
years later, when France turned to the right and a great many Socialists
were defeated, Royal improved her margin. She was named minister of the
environment in 1992, and when President Chirac of the right-leaning Union
for a Popular Movement Party was forced to share power with the Socialists
after 1997, she served as minister of education and then of family and
childhood.

These were "women's jobs," but Royal, who knew a good deal more about real
life than most of her colleagues, made a virtue of her second-tier status.
At the same time that President Bill Clinton was clearing political space
for the Democrats by advocating school uniforms and V-chips, Royal was
instituting such modest and homey reforms as requiring separate copies of
report cards to be sent to both parents, in order to ensure that fathers as
well as mothers were engaged in their children's education. She criticized
popular culture, advocated paternal as well as maternal leave, campaigned to
increase the punishment for pedophilia. Unlike virtually any other prominent
member of her party, she spoke not only of rights but also of
responsibilities - of parents, of teachers, of workers. She wrote books, as
an ambitious French politician is expected to do, though usually on what
might be construed as women's-magazine topics: "The Springtime of
Grandparents," "The Baby Channel-Surfers Are Fed Up" and a memoir, "One
Woman's Truth," in which she frankly recounted some of the hair-raising
tales of her upbringing.

Royal's crusades may actually have lowered her standing among her own
colleagues; the books vanished without a trace. What endured were Royal
herself and the strikingly new feminine persona she was delineating. She was
a leftist who stood up for old-fashioned values, a chic cosmopolitan who was
imbued with a respect for tradition and order. She was unmarried but
monogamous and, more important, a mother. She was photographed in bed with
the youngest of her four children, surrounded by both work and the clutter
of motherhood. Her femininity never faltered; neither did her air of
omnicompetence. There had literally never been anyone like her before. And
yet many French women recognized themselves, or an ideal self, in Ségolène.
Michèle Fitoussi, an editor at French Elle, remembers watching her at a
luncheon: "She discusses policy, and then the mobile phone rings and it's
her daughter, and she says, 'Yes, you have to go here and here.' It was like
women all over the country. We deal with all these things at once."

And Royal had the raw ambition of the parvenu. In 1997, when Jospin and
another stalwart were deadlocked in a struggle to lead the party, and thus
possibly to become prime minister, Royal, at the time a mere backbencher,
floated the possibility of challenging both. François Hollande persuaded her
to wait her turn, but Jospin, who became prime minister, apparently never
forgot the act of impertinence. Pascale Robert-Diard, who was then covering
the prime minister's office for Le Monde, says that she used to ask party
functionaries why they weren't sending Royal, who was so popular, out to the
hustings. "Because Jospin can't stand her," she was told. But Royal was
irrepressible. In 2004 she ran for president of Poitou-Charentes, a job
previously held by Jean-Pierre Raffarin, then serving as prime minister
under Chirac. And again, confounding expectations, she won. It seemed that
she had some talent for getting people to vote for her.

But that scarcely qualified her, in the eyes of the Socialist elite, to run
for the presidency. It was bad enough that she was a woman. But to be
president of the republic one must demonstrate gravitas, stoic endurance,
global reach, celestial grandeur. One should, if at all possible, as the
journalist (and Royal's biographer) Daniel Bernard wrote earlier this year,
quote "Huntington, Machiavelli, Baverez, Hegel, Jaurès, Sollers and Seneca."
In his book "Les Prétendants 2007," Alain Duhamel, supreme arbiter of the
French political scene, handicapped the candidates from all sides. Royal, in
contrast to figures like Laurent Fabius, who lumbered far behind her in the
polls, did not even make the cut. She wasn't serious. And in any case it
wasn't her turn. What about her partner, M. Hollande, who by then had become
leader of the party? Surely he took precedence.

It was, in fact, a bizarre and very touchy situation. Royal says that she
would not have run against her partner, and in fact waited until it became
clear that he would not be a candidate. She declared her own intentions last
September in an interview in Paris Match - itself a calculated affront to
Socialist high seriousness.

Worse yet, the article included winsome photographs of Royal with her
younger daughter. Party leaders were meeting in the Burgundian city of
Nevers when the article appeared; Royal's brazen display of comeliness, of
family and family values - in short, her ragingly successful politics of the
self - made the elephants go berserk. Laurent Fabius issued what must have
seemed a wicked jape aimed at both Royal and Hollande: "But who's going to
watch the kids?" Soon it was open season on the Socialist siren. "The
presidency is not a beauty contest," groused another party leader.

But Royal's strategy, as Daniel Bernard observed, consisted of betting that
the French were sick of the culture of the old guard and the narrowness and
sterility of its discourse. She has behaved with calculated insouciance.
Last fall, she skipped a commemorative event for Mitterand in order to fly
to Chile and campaign for Michelle Bachelet, a Socialist aspiring to be the
first woman to be president of that country. Royal was mocked for
grandstanding - the press jeered at her for wearing high heels - until
Bachelet won, and suddenly it was Royal who represented the feminized
Socialist future, her colleagues locked in the Mitterandist past.

Royal's legend has grown apace. Like Nicolas Sarkozy - minister of the
interior, abrasive leader of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement and a
likely presidential candidate - she would not toe the party line. "I will
guard my freedom of speech to the very end, come what may," she announced to
yet another magazine reporter. Like the current prime minister, Dominique de
Villepin, she harbored a sense of destiny: "I am ready," she told one and
all. And unlike the others, she listened. On her Web site, Désirs d'Avenir
(Wishes for the Future), she invited visitors to express their views rather
than offering pensées of her own. But she could spit nails if she needed to.
When I asked Royal whether her success had blunted the attack from the left,
she shot back: "It's getting worse, because they're afraid. They've invested
so many years themselves that they think my popularity is an imposture,
ephemeral, unwarranted, undeserved, dangerous - as if a democracy of opinion
is worth nothing."

It is the democracy of opinion that Royal is offering the French people. She
had, she told me, laid out her credo in the draft of the first chapter of a
book she has begun to write, also to be titled "Désirs d'Avenir." She sent
me the piece, which was called "The Democratic Disorder" and which barely
touches on France's place in the world, the consuming preoccupation of her
rivals' manifestoes. Royal writes instead about the relationship of
politicians to voters, arguing that diminishing turnout, the ominous
popularity of the far-right-wing National Front and even the repudiation
last year of the E.U. Constitution are all symptoms of a deep national
disaffection from, and disgust with, mainstream political culture. These
protest votes, or nonvotes, spring from citizens who are deeply pessimistic
about their prospects, who feel that France is adrift. She argues, in the
manner of centrist Democrats courting red-state voters, that the "nostalgia
for 'traditional values' " that many National Front voters cite is less a
harbinger of protofascism than a rejection of value-neutral politics. The
answer, she claims, is a new kind of politics, respectful of public opinion,
modest in its claims, transparent, accountable and, above all, "concrete"
rather than abstract. Her book, which is to appear in September, when the
Socialists draw up their official list of candidates, is unlikely to narrow
the gulf between Royal's popular following and her standing in the party's
inner councils.

By the time I arrived in Paris, in mid-March, Ségomania had been temporarily
supplanted by the nationwide furor over précarité, a word most usefully
translated as "insecurity." The French regard the protection of job security
as a fundamental obligation of the state. But France's unemployment rate,
which has not gone below 8 percent for years and now hovers around 10
percent, is usually ascribed to the reluctance of firms to hire new workers
whom it will find prohibitively burdensome and expensive to lay off. Young
people with only ordinary credentials, including a college degree, often
find it extremely difficult to break into the labor market; unemployment
among the young is estimated to be as high as 22 percent. The employment
system that has evolved in recent decades looks and feels very much like an
American university, where junior faculty members scramble desperately to
find a position, their passage upward blocked by the ponderous mass of
tenured faculty, secure for life.

It was the Union for a Popular Movement Party that opened the Pandora's box
of insecurity. Responding in part to the riots that tore apart the country's
suburbs the previous fall, Dominique de Villepin had introduced the "first
employment contract," known in French as the C.P.E., in the hope of
increasing employment opportunities for disadvantaged youth. Workers under
26 holding their first full-time jobs would have, in effect, a probationary
period of two years during which an employer could lay them off without
having to endure the elaborate judicial process to which employees can
otherwise resort. This was a rather timid and piecemeal approach to
labor-market reform, and for that reason it appeared to single out younger
workers for punishment rather than increasing opportunities for them. Worse
still, by presenting this immensely controversial measure as if he had
received it from a whirlwind atop Mount Sinai, thus precluding all debate,
the magisterial Villepin only confirmed the worst suspicions, which is to
say that the center-right government was in league with "the bosses" to keep
workers in a state of serfdom. And when students and union members
predictably took to the streets, the Socialists just as predictably endorsed
the call to virtually shut down the country until the law was withdrawn -
which President Chirac ultimately agreed to do, in a humiliating rebuff to
Villepin.

It was as quintessentially French a melodrama as, say, the battle over Terri
Schiavo's fate was an American one. Revolution is the only form of political
activity in France that feels fully legitimate; so even the deeply
conservative demand for security takes the form of insurrection. And the
French still speak of "the bosses" as a class of bloodsuckers. As Alain
Touraine observes: "The main French idea is that there is an absolute
contradiction between social good and economic interests. Where else do you
hear this, besides maybe Belarus?" The historic destiny of the left is to
use the power of the state to protect the people from the ravages of the
marketplace; the loneliness of the endeavor only increases its nobility. As
Nicolas Domenach, a political commentator and an editor of the cheeky,
leftish magazine Marianne, put it to me: "One could be arrogant, that is to
say French, and say that someone must guard against the omnipotence of
liberalism. But I would argue that France is not the exception but rather
the avant-garde. If we talk again a year from now, you will see
counterliberal movements across Europe."

Yet this sense of moral superiority, and the reflexive horror at the
unleashed energies of the marketplace, have plainly been losing force as
France's per capita wealth falls behind that of countries like Ireland and
Britain. Editorials in the center-left Le Monde lambasted Villepin for his
high-handed manner but acknowledged the need to reform labor markets.
Scholars and journalists routinely speak of a crisis, or a paralysis,
gripping the country. Gérard Grunberg, a leading scholar at Sciences Po,
told me: "There is no liberal tradition on either the left or the right;
there isn't even a place for a social-liberal party, because it would imply
an acceptance of labor-market flexibility. It would imply that the state
isn't the sole guarantor of the collective interest, which is entrenched in
French culture. It is the state that embodies and guarantees the collective
interests; the rest is selfish individualism." And this antimarket,
antiglobalist posture, Grunberg argues, "resounds among the people, because
the people are afraid."

The Socialist Party, perhaps wisely, harvested the growing public outrage
over the C.P.E. without offering any alternative of its own. As party head,
François Hollande led the attack on Villepin and the ruling party. Ségolène
Royal kept mum, as she has done on almost all major subjects. But she was
tempted to separate herself from the herd. In early February, just as the
debate over the labor law was heating up, she was quoted as saying: "I think
Tony Blair has been caricatured in France. It does not bother me to claim
adherence to some of his ideas." She even praised his policy of promoting
employment among the youth through increased flexibility. This was
sacrilege: flexibilité is the fighting word of French employers, and thus
the symbolic opposite of précarité. Royal, trying to cover her tracks,
explained that she had in fact used the word "souplesse" - suppleness - and
that of course she, too, abhorred flexibilité. But she had opened herself to
charges of apostasy. Laurent Fabius, addressing a crowd of 1,200 supporters,
declared that the Socialist Party would not succeed by "cultivating
I-don't-know-what politically ambiguous position" - a reference meant to be
lost on no one.

In fact, Royal seems innocent of any taint of economic liberalism. She
regards Villepin's peremptory imposition of the new law as a sign of a
systematic failure to listen to ordinary people; but she does not view the
national suspicion of market forces as a comparable source of paralysis. I
was surprised, I said during our interview, that someone whose entire life
constituted a triumph over adversity would join the campaign to insure
against précarité. It was early afternoon, and Royal had ushered me into her
large, sunny office, whose elegantly rusticized furnishings - a veined leaf
pattern repeated in leather and cast iron - offered a cosmopolitan nod at
provincial motifs. Politicians, in my experience, generally like to crowd
into your space, but Royal took up her post behind her big glass desk, while
I sat a distance off, a placement that lent itself more to the issuing of
dictums than to the politics of proximity. Royal countered my observation
with a familiar refrain: "The problem is that everybody isn't subject to
insecurity. Do you see businessmen being fired for incompetence? The young
see politicians, who also have a stable and secure job, being civil
servants, lecturing others on insecurity. So the young graduate will say,
'In the name of what am I going to sign an insecure contract?' "

Then the conversation took an odd turn. Royal asked me, with the air of
someone pulling out a trump card, "Are you in an insecure situation?"
Actually, I explained, as a contract writer for this magazine, I have little
security.

Royal wasn't going to be put off the scent that easily. "Yes, but how many
years does your contract last?"

"I sign a new one every year."

Now she was frankly incredulous. "You could be fired every year?" For all
her own experience, Royal apparently viewed précarité as a kind of
socioeconomic stigma rather than the price you might choose to pay for
freedom. Or maybe you could say that for her, as for the left generally -
and not only in France - market liberalism and globalization have the status
merely of fact, which is categorically inferior to a right. This is no less
so if the fact appears to obviate the right. "The global economy shouldn't
be supported by wage earners," Royal insisted. "They have to be able to
build a future, like any human being." Royal is not actually opposed to
labor-market reform; she advocates the model the Danes call flex-security,
in which the state guarantees lifelong training, job placement and
unemployment insurance, so that workers can easily move among jobs. But
since she is also on record as advocating giant public-works projects, she
may be more devoted to the job insurance than the market-sensitive side of
this approach.

Some of Royal's supporters take the optimistic view that her empiricism, her
disdain for ideological litmus tests, will ultimately lead her away from the
party's hermetic dogma. One of her most celebrated and least likely
advocates, Daniel Cohn-Bendit - Danny the Red, when he manned the barricades
of 1968 - suggests just this possibility. Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the Green
Party and a rebel to the last, has outraged compatriots old and new by
describing himself as a liberal. Cohn-Bendit admits that he has no reason to
believe that Royal shares his views, but he also feels, as did so many of
the people I spoke to, that French politics has reached a dead end. "You
have to create a situation where you're ready to debate your proposition,"
Cohn-Bendit contends, "where you say, 'We together will decide to take this
risk, because there is no easy solution.' " Royal has, he says, the inner
freedom to take this route. What's more, he says, "To think of a president
with four children and not married - it's a revolution!"

Seated beside Royal as she was driven back to Poitiers after an annual
awards dinner at a sports club, I mentioned that we hadn't yet discussed
some of the major issues she would face as president. What about terrorism?
And Iraq? Royal responded with a surprising question of her own: "Would you
ask this of a man?"

"Of course I would."

"If you were interviewing Laurent Fabius, you would never ask him, 'Can you
lay out your planetary vision in 15 minutes?' "

I pointed out that she was, after all, hoping to be president of France.
Royal said that it wasn't the right moment; she would present her vision
when she was ready. I pressed her. "You're saying it's too early?"

Apparently I had asked once too often. Her smile vanished, and she said: "I
refuse to be infantilized by being asked questions which imply that I know
nothing, that I'm the result of a media bubble. I haven't heard Fabius or
Sarkozy explain their vision of the world and of interplanetary coherence."

Royal's reaction felt so hyperbolic as to be either a cynical ploy - which I
doubted - or evidence that her astonishing record of success had barely
touched her inner sense of beleaguerment, of victimization. This, too, has
become part of the Ségolène legend. Two weeks after our conversation, "Les
Guignols," a popular television show that satirizes France's leading
political and cultural figures, had a sketch featuring a puppet Ségolène. An
interviewer asks, "Are you truly a Socialist candidate?" and Royal, her
smile never faltering, shoots back, "You would never ask such a question of
a man." At lunch, the waiter suggests "an excellent sole," and she retorts,
"You only recommend fish because I'm a woman, and you assume I have to watch
what I eat." And when she comes home to François, complaining about the
obstacles she must clear as a female politician, her partner, ensconced in
his reading chair, soothingly says, "Ah, Ségolène." She cuts him off: "Would
you call me Ségolène if I were a man?"

She never did discuss her planetary views. The French do, in fact, expect
their president to cut an impressive figure at global meetings, and this
weakness, if it is a weakness, will be mercilessly exploited by her rivals
in the party, not to speak of those in the Union for a Popular Movement
Party. Has she thought seriously about international affairs, or European
integration or the questions of identity and immigration that now beset
France and all of Europe? The paper trail is almost nonexistent. Daniel
Bernard, her biographer, says that he canvassed her colleagues both from
Élysée Palace and from Jospin's cabinet to learn what she thought about the
issues of the day; none had any idea. These days she often gives the
impression that "having views" is itself an expression of political
arrogance. She, by contrast, will tap the wisdom of the ordinary voter. "The
citizens are refined, cultivated and very political," she informed an
interviewer who had accused her of abandoning political debate itself. "I
believe in the legitimacy of their participation." Yes, but then what? She's
still listening, she says. In fact, her advisers say that she won't stake
out any positions before June, when the party platform, which she is helping
to shape, will be published. In the meantime, she fires off one round after
another of thunderous blanks, vowing to deliver "just order" and "real
equality" and "sustainable security." It's all rather abstract for the
candidate of concreteness.

But then, maybe what the French want is not a new set of views but, as Royal
plainspokenly puts it on her Web site, "another way of doing politics." And
it's easy to recognize her political talents. At the sports-club dinner, she
handed out every award, chatted with every bashful volleyball player and
stayed until the bitter end, while her chief of staff anxiously fiddled with
his BlackBerry. She showered her lovely smile on one and all. Afterward, in
the car, I said that her political style was very American. "Oh, yes?" she
said absently, thumbing through a pile of papers. "Is that a compliment?" I
said that I had meant it as one. I asked if she admired American
politicians.

"That I know of? No, not personally. But I'm going to meet Hillary Clinton
in June."

In fact, the two briefly met in 1998, though it seems not to have left much
of an impression on the Frenchwoman. They would, at least if they have a
language in common, easily recognize themselves in each other. They are both
tough-minded women, cultural icons known by first name only. They inspire
deep loyalty and deep mistrust. And they want to be president. A few years
from now, it could be Hillary and Ségolène sharing a joke at the G-8
conference. Whom are they laughing at? The old boys, of course."

/

James Traub, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine on the
possibility of a Democratic victory in this year's midterm elections.

Why do you spoil this group with political stuff morrow ???

"Gregory Morrow" a écrit
dans le message de news:
t...


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14royal.html


May 14, 2006

La Femme

By JAMES TRAUB

"There's a reason that the leaders of France's Socialist Party are called
"elephants": They live forever. Among the elephants now vying to become
the
party's candidate for president in next year's election are Laurent
Fabius,
who served as prime minister 22 years ago, and Lionel Jospin, who served
as
Socialist Party leader a quarter-century ago and suffered a defeat in the
last presidential election so devastating, both for himself and for the
party, that you would have thought prudence alone would dictate political
retirement. But in France, politics is a profession; once you arrive, you
stay.

No one has thought to call Ségolène Royal an elephant. For one thing, it
would be unbecoming, since she is a woman - and a woman who, when she
works
her smile up into her eyes, bears a passing resemblance to Audrey Hepburn.
Royal is, remarkably enough, the first truly présidentiable woman in
French
history. But what is most striking about her candidacy, which so far
consists of a highly orchestrated media seduction, is not the fact that
she
is a woman but rather that she has positioned herself as a nonelephant,
indeed, almost an antielephant. She is, in effect, running against
France's
political culture, which is to say against remoteness and abstraction,
ideological entrenchment and male domination itself. And that culture,
which
is embodied by her own party, has struck back, ridiculing her as a soap
bubble borne aloft by a momentary gust of public infatuation.

Earlier this spring, I visited her in Poitiers, the seat of government for
the Poitou-Charentes region, south and west of Paris, of which she is the
elected president. France was in the midst of one of its periodic
re-enactments of the revolution, or at least of the Commune, with students
and union activists pouring into the streets to protest a law permitting
employers to hire and fire first-time employees without some of the myriad
protections generally afforded French workers. But Royal had little
interest
in joining the fevered national debate over "social protections." Royal
has
distinguished herself by focusing on the sort of issues - schools, child
rearing, the effects of popular culture - that have come to preoccupy many
American politicians but generally fall beneath the regard of the
bien-pensants of Paris and of the more deeply wrinkled of the elephants.
"Trivial things," as Royal put it to me, sarcastically. "Whereas for the
people, these are the most important topics."

To the obvious consternation of Fabius, Jospin and the other elephants of
the Socialist Party, polls have consistently shown Royal to be the most
popular figure in the opposition and possibly in the country. She is the
darling of the mass-circulation weeklies, appearing on the cover of four
of
them in the first week of April, and on daytime television shows, a
lowbrow
medium where the colleagues who mock her wouldn't be caught dead. She is
the
only important political figure in France whom everyone refers to by first
name. And her popularity seems to rise as the image of politicians in
France
collectively sinks. "The political class is becoming increasingly alien to
the people," says Alain Touraine, a grand old man of French social theory.
"When you vote for a woman, it's a symbol of, 'I want to get rid of you' -
because the system itself is completely male."

Even to call politics in France a profession puts the case too weakly;
it's
more like a mandarinate. The French view the state - l'État, always
capitalized - with a reverence that can seem anachronistic in a world in
thrall to the marketplace. The national educational meritocracy funnels
the
brightest boys and girls into the great preparatory institutions in Paris,
above all the Institut d'Études Politiques, known as Sciences Po, and the
École Nationale d'Administration, or ENA. Practically everyone in the
upper
echelons of French politics attended Sciences Po and went on to become an
"Énarque."

Ségolène Royal is a rare insider-outsider who managed to get her ticket
punched at all the mandarin way stations without ever appearing to join,
or
even to aspire to join, the old boys' club. She had to fight her way in;
and
the fight has never left her. Royal was born in colonial Senegal, the
daughter and granddaughter of military officers. Her father, Jacques, was
a
rigidly conservative martinet with a shaved head and a monocle. Life for
the
eight Royal children, first in Dakar and then in Lorraine, in eastern
France, was joyless and harsh, according to accounts Royal has freely
offered. Whatever was not demanded was forbidden. Her brothers were beaten
for even tiny infractions; she and her three sisters had the advantage of
being ignored. "My father always made us feel," she later told one
interviewer, "that we, my sisters and I, were inferior beings." The story
of
the monstrous father has imbued Royal's life with the improbable flavor of
a
Grimm fairy tale, and when I asked about her childhood, she said, "Well,
it
was a bit exaggerated." But in the next breath she explained that her
early
years had shaped her "in terms of resistance and resilience."

We were sitting in the back seat of a chauffeured car one spring evening
after a few local events of the sort that she both enjoys doing and
encourages journalists to watch her doing. Royal, who is 52, was
impeccably
turned out in a short cocoa-colored jacket and matching flared skirt. Her
manner was straightforward, with few of the girlish high notes that even
highly successful French women have a way of striking. At times she
laughed;
but although in public she could hold a smile for an hour without
faltering,
in conversation she did not bother with the instruments of beguilement.
(Our
discussions were in French; she says that she understands English, but
cannot speak it.) I was struck by Royal's verbal economy: she didn't watch
her words so much as dole out as many as needed, and no more, which felt
almost like parsimony compared with the performative flourishes that make
French politics such a delightful parlor game.

Like so many miserable children, Royal was saved by school. I asked if
anyone had encouraged her studies.

"Yes, my teachers."

"Anyone in your family? Your mother?"

"No." Her mother came from a bourgeois background and read books and
newspapers. But girls were not to furrow their brows with too much
learning,
she told me: "We were simply supposed to get married." Royal not only
escaped from her suffocating father, she also defined herself in
opposition
to him. The dark fairy tale is central to her own narrative of resistance
and resilience. She has long told the story that one day her father simply
rode away on a bicycle and abandoned the family; in fact, her mother told
a
biographer, it was she who at long last left her husband. But while Royal
repudiated her father's reactionary politics and machismo, she inherited
his
rigor and perhaps also his icy clarity of purpose. "I see a goal, I
organize
myself accordingly, I evaluate, I achieve it," she said. "It's very
military."

Like Bill Clinton, Royal is a true champion of the educational
meritocracy.
She had never even heard of the grandes écoles, but when one of her
sisters
mentioned a preparatory program for Sciences Po, she signed up. And soon
this hungry young provincial arrived in Paris, prepared to adapt and
conquer. She kept to herself, worked with the diligence and resolve of a
soldier's daughter and entered ENA in 1978. There she met her future
partner, a wry and amiable intellectual named François Hollande. Both were
recruited to work on François Mitterand's presidential campaign; when
Mitterand, in 1981, became France's first Socialist president in more than
30 years, both Royal and Hollande were inducted into Élysée Palace as
policy
aides. In just such a manner does the Énarque convert intellectual capital
into political fuel.

Mitterand became if not quite Royal's mentor then certainly her role
model.
According to Sophie Bouchet-Pedersen, then a colleague at Élysée and now
one
of Royal's policy advisers, "She learned from Mitterand how to govern, how
politics must take primacy over technocracy; and then will - that in the
end, politics is a matter of will." Mitterand was said to dote on his
young
aide, and she, in turn, identified with him. "He was from around here, in
Charente," she told me. "He wasn't from a very rich family. He must have
always had this inferiority complex of provincials who didn't sparkle in
society. But he climbed the hierarchy; and he always preserved a certain
joy
and a popular touch." She, too, was a provincial upstart with the will to
sweep obstacles from her path; she could climb the hierarchy as the
majestic
Monsieur le Président had done.

As Mitterand's first term was ending in 1988, Royal told party officials
that she wanted to run for the National Assembly, though she and Hollande,
who have never married, already had three children. She was given an
unpromising, traditionally conservative district in Poitou-Charentes. As
Royal has told the story, she dropped the kids off with Hollande's mother,
leapt onto the train just in time to register her candidacy and began
introducing herself in a region where she knew no one. And she won. Five
years later, when France turned to the right and a great many Socialists
were defeated, Royal improved her margin. She was named minister of the
environment in 1992, and when President Chirac of the right-leaning Union
for a Popular Movement Party was forced to share power with the Socialists
after 1997, she served as minister of education and then of family and
childhood.

These were "women's jobs," but Royal, who knew a good deal more about real
life than most of her colleagues, made a virtue of her second-tier status.
At the same time that President Bill Clinton was clearing political space
for the Democrats by advocating school uniforms and V-chips, Royal was
instituting such modest and homey reforms as requiring separate copies of
report cards to be sent to both parents, in order to ensure that fathers
as
well as mothers were engaged in their children's education. She criticized
popular culture, advocated paternal as well as maternal leave, campaigned
to
increase the punishment for pedophilia. Unlike virtually any other
prominent
member of her party, she spoke not only of rights but also of
responsibilities - of parents, of teachers, of workers. She wrote books,
as
an ambitious French politician is expected to do, though usually on what
might be construed as women's-magazine topics: "The Springtime of
Grandparents," "The Baby Channel-Surfers Are Fed Up" and a memoir, "One
Woman's Truth," in which she frankly recounted some of the hair-raising
tales of her upbringing.

Royal's crusades may actually have lowered her standing among her own
colleagues; the books vanished without a trace. What endured were Royal
herself and the strikingly new feminine persona she was delineating. She
was
a leftist who stood up for old-fashioned values, a chic cosmopolitan who
was
imbued with a respect for tradition and order. She was unmarried but
monogamous and, more important, a mother. She was photographed in bed with
the youngest of her four children, surrounded by both work and the clutter
of motherhood. Her femininity never faltered; neither did her air of
omnicompetence. There had literally never been anyone like her before. And
yet many French women recognized themselves, or an ideal self, in
Ségolène.
Michèle Fitoussi, an editor at French Elle, remembers watching her at a
luncheon: "She discusses policy, and then the mobile phone rings and it's
her daughter, and she says, 'Yes, you have to go here and here.' It was
like
women all over the country. We deal with all these things at once."

And Royal had the raw ambition of the parvenu. In 1997, when Jospin and
another stalwart were deadlocked in a struggle to lead the party, and thus
possibly to become prime minister, Royal, at the time a mere backbencher,
floated the possibility of challenging both. François Hollande persuaded
her
to wait her turn, but Jospin, who became prime minister, apparently never
forgot the act of impertinence. Pascale Robert-Diard, who was then
covering
the prime minister's office for Le Monde, says that she used to ask party
functionaries why they weren't sending Royal, who was so popular, out to
the
hustings. "Because Jospin can't stand her," she was told. But Royal was
irrepressible. In 2004 she ran for president of Poitou-Charentes, a job
previously held by Jean-Pierre Raffarin, then serving as prime minister
under Chirac. And again, confounding expectations, she won. It seemed that
she had some talent for getting people to vote for her.

But that scarcely qualified her, in the eyes of the Socialist elite, to
run
for the presidency. It was bad enough that she was a woman. But to be
president of the republic one must demonstrate gravitas, stoic endurance,
global reach, celestial grandeur. One should, if at all possible, as the
journalist (and Royal's biographer) Daniel Bernard wrote earlier this
year,
quote "Huntington, Machiavelli, Baverez, Hegel, Jaurès, Sollers and
Seneca."
In his book "Les Prétendants 2007," Alain Duhamel, supreme arbiter of the
French political scene, handicapped the candidates from all sides. Royal,
in
contrast to figures like Laurent Fabius, who lumbered far behind her in
the
polls, did not even make the cut. She wasn't serious. And in any case it
wasn't her turn. What about her partner, M. Hollande, who by then had
become
leader of the party? Surely he took precedence.

It was, in fact, a bizarre and very touchy situation. Royal says that she
would not have run against her partner, and in fact waited until it became
clear that he would not be a candidate. She declared her own intentions
last
September in an interview in Paris Match - itself a calculated affront to
Socialist high seriousness.

Worse yet, the article included winsome photographs of Royal with her
younger daughter. Party leaders were meeting in the Burgundian city of
Nevers when the article appeared; Royal's brazen display of comeliness, of
family and family values - in short, her ragingly successful politics of
the
self - made the elephants go berserk. Laurent Fabius issued what must have
seemed a wicked jape aimed at both Royal and Hollande: "But who's going to
watch the kids?" Soon it was open season on the Socialist siren. "The
presidency is not a beauty contest," groused another party leader.

But Royal's strategy, as Daniel Bernard observed, consisted of betting
that
the French were sick of the culture of the old guard and the narrowness
and
sterility of its discourse. She has behaved with calculated insouciance.
Last fall, she skipped a commemorative event for Mitterand in order to fly
to Chile and campaign for Michelle Bachelet, a Socialist aspiring to be
the
first woman to be president of that country. Royal was mocked for
grandstanding - the press jeered at her for wearing high heels - until
Bachelet won, and suddenly it was Royal who represented the feminized
Socialist future, her colleagues locked in the Mitterandist past.

Royal's legend has grown apace. Like Nicolas Sarkozy - minister of the
interior, abrasive leader of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement and a
likely presidential candidate - she would not toe the party line. "I will
guard my freedom of speech to the very end, come what may," she announced
to
yet another magazine reporter. Like the current prime minister, Dominique
de
Villepin, she harbored a sense of destiny: "I am ready," she told one and
all. And unlike the others, she listened. On her Web site, Désirs d'Avenir
(Wishes for the Future), she invited visitors to express their views
rather
than offering pensées of her own. But she could spit nails if she needed
to.
When I asked Royal whether her success had blunted the attack from the
left,
she shot back: "It's getting worse, because they're afraid. They've
invested
so many years themselves that they think my popularity is an imposture,
ephemeral, unwarranted, undeserved, dangerous - as if a democracy of
opinion
is worth nothing."

It is the democracy of opinion that Royal is offering the French people.
She
had, she told me, laid out her credo in the draft of the first chapter of
a
book she has begun to write, also to be titled "Désirs d'Avenir." She sent
me the piece, which was called "The Democratic Disorder" and which barely
touches on France's place in the world, the consuming preoccupation of her
rivals' manifestoes. Royal writes instead about the relationship of
politicians to voters, arguing that diminishing turnout, the ominous
popularity of the far-right-wing National Front and even the repudiation
last year of the E.U. Constitution are all symptoms of a deep national
disaffection from, and disgust with, mainstream political culture. These
protest votes, or nonvotes, spring from citizens who are deeply
pessimistic
about their prospects, who feel that France is adrift. She argues, in the
manner of centrist Democrats courting red-state voters, that the
"nostalgia
for 'traditional values' " that many National Front voters cite is less a
harbinger of protofascism than a rejection of value-neutral politics. The
answer, she claims, is a new kind of politics, respectful of public
opinion,
modest in its claims, transparent, accountable and, above all, "concrete"
rather than abstract. Her book, which is to appear in September, when the
Socialists draw up their official list of candidates, is unlikely to
narrow
the gulf between Royal's popular following and her standing in the party's
inner councils.

By the time I arrived in Paris, in mid-March, Ségomania had been
temporarily
supplanted by the nationwide furor over précarité, a word most usefully
translated as "insecurity." The French regard the protection of job
security
as a fundamental obligation of the state. But France's unemployment rate,
which has not gone below 8 percent for years and now hovers around 10
percent, is usually ascribed to the reluctance of firms to hire new
workers
whom it will find prohibitively burdensome and expensive to lay off. Young
people with only ordinary credentials, including a college degree, often
find it extremely difficult to break into the labor market; unemployment
among the young is estimated to be as high as 22 percent. The employment
system that has evolved in recent decades looks and feels very much like
an
American university, where junior faculty members scramble desperately to
find a position, their passage upward blocked by the ponderous mass of
tenured faculty, secure for life.

It was the Union for a Popular Movement Party that opened the Pandora's
box
of insecurity. Responding in part to the riots that tore apart the
country's
suburbs the previous fall, Dominique de Villepin had introduced the "first
employment contract," known in French as the C.P.E., in the hope of
increasing employment opportunities for disadvantaged youth. Workers under
26 holding their first full-time jobs would have, in effect, a
probationary
period of two years during which an employer could lay them off without
having to endure the elaborate judicial process to which employees can
otherwise resort. This was a rather timid and piecemeal approach to
labor-market reform, and for that reason it appeared to single out younger
workers for punishment rather than increasing opportunities for them.
Worse
still, by presenting this immensely controversial measure as if he had
received it from a whirlwind atop Mount Sinai, thus precluding all debate,
the magisterial Villepin only confirmed the worst suspicions, which is to
say that the center-right government was in league with "the bosses" to
keep
workers in a state of serfdom. And when students and union members
predictably took to the streets, the Socialists just as predictably
endorsed
the call to virtually shut down the country until the law was withdrawn -
which President Chirac ultimately agreed to do, in a humiliating rebuff to
Villepin.

It was as quintessentially French a melodrama as, say, the battle over
Terri
Schiavo's fate was an American one. Revolution is the only form of
political
activity in France that feels fully legitimate; so even the deeply
conservative demand for security takes the form of insurrection. And the
French still speak of "the bosses" as a class of bloodsuckers. As Alain
Touraine observes: "The main French idea is that there is an absolute
contradiction between social good and economic interests. Where else do
you
hear this, besides maybe Belarus?" The historic destiny of the left is to
use the power of the state to protect the people from the ravages of the
marketplace; the loneliness of the endeavor only increases its nobility.
As
Nicolas Domenach, a political commentator and an editor of the cheeky,
leftish magazine Marianne, put it to me: "One could be arrogant, that is
to
say French, and say that someone must guard against the omnipotence of
liberalism. But I would argue that France is not the exception but rather
the avant-garde. If we talk again a year from now, you will see
counterliberal movements across Europe."

Yet this sense of moral superiority, and the reflexive horror at the
unleashed energies of the marketplace, have plainly been losing force as
France's per capita wealth falls behind that of countries like Ireland and
Britain. Editorials in the center-left Le Monde lambasted Villepin for his
high-handed manner but acknowledged the need to reform labor markets.
Scholars and journalists routinely speak of a crisis, or a paralysis,
gripping the country. Gérard Grunberg, a leading scholar at Sciences Po,
told me: "There is no liberal tradition on either the left or the right;
there isn't even a place for a social-liberal party, because it would
imply
an acceptance of labor-market flexibility. It would imply that the state
isn't the sole guarantor of the collective interest, which is entrenched
in
French culture. It is the state that embodies and guarantees the
collective
interests; the rest is selfish individualism." And this antimarket,
antiglobalist posture, Grunberg argues, "resounds among the people,
because
the people are afraid."

The Socialist Party, perhaps wisely, harvested the growing public outrage
over the C.P.E. without offering any alternative of its own. As party
head,
François Hollande led the attack on Villepin and the ruling party.
Ségolène
Royal kept mum, as she has done on almost all major subjects. But she was
tempted to separate herself from the herd. In early February, just as the
debate over the labor law was heating up, she was quoted as saying: "I
think
Tony Blair has been caricatured in France. It does not bother me to claim
adherence to some of his ideas." She even praised his policy of promoting
employment among the youth through increased flexibility. This was
sacrilege: flexibilité is the fighting word of French employers, and thus
the symbolic opposite of précarité. Royal, trying to cover her tracks,
explained that she had in fact used the word "souplesse" - suppleness -
and
that of course she, too, abhorred flexibilité. But she had opened herself
to
charges of apostasy. Laurent Fabius, addressing a crowd of 1,200
supporters,
declared that the Socialist Party would not succeed by "cultivating
I-don't-know-what politically ambiguous position" - a reference meant to
be
lost on no one.

In fact, Royal seems innocent of any taint of economic liberalism. She
regards Villepin's peremptory imposition of the new law as a sign of a
systematic failure to listen to ordinary people; but she does not view the
national suspicion of market forces as a comparable source of paralysis. I
was surprised, I said during our interview, that someone whose entire life
constituted a triumph over adversity would join the campaign to insure
against précarité. It was early afternoon, and Royal had ushered me into
her
large, sunny office, whose elegantly rusticized furnishings - a veined
leaf
pattern repeated in leather and cast iron - offered a cosmopolitan nod at
provincial motifs. Politicians, in my experience, generally like to crowd
into your space, but Royal took up her post behind her big glass desk,
while
I sat a distance off, a placement that lent itself more to the issuing of
dictums than to the politics of proximity. Royal countered my observation
with a familiar refrain: "The problem is that everybody isn't subject to
insecurity. Do you see businessmen being fired for incompetence? The young
see politicians, who also have a stable and secure job, being civil
servants, lecturing others on insecurity. So the young graduate will say,
'In the name of what am I going to sign an insecure contract?' "

Then the conversation took an odd turn. Royal asked me, with the air of
someone pulling out a trump card, "Are you in an insecure situation?"
Actually, I explained, as a contract writer for this magazine, I have
little
security.

Royal wasn't going to be put off the scent that easily. "Yes, but how many
years does your contract last?"

"I sign a new one every year."

Now she was frankly incredulous. "You could be fired every year?" For all
her own experience, Royal apparently viewed précarité as a kind of
socioeconomic stigma rather than the price you might choose to pay for
freedom. Or maybe you could say that for her, as for the left generally -
and not only in France - market liberalism and globalization have the
status
merely of fact, which is categorically inferior to a right. This is no
less
so if the fact appears to obviate the right. "The global economy shouldn't
be supported by wage earners," Royal insisted. "They have to be able to
build a future, like any human being." Royal is not actually opposed to
labor-market reform; she advocates the model the Danes call flex-security,
in which the state guarantees lifelong training, job placement and
unemployment insurance, so that workers can easily move among jobs. But
since she is also on record as advocating giant public-works projects, she
may be more devoted to the job insurance than the market-sensitive side of
this approach.

Some of Royal's supporters take the optimistic view that her empiricism,
her
disdain for ideological litmus tests, will ultimately lead her away from
the
party's hermetic dogma. One of her most celebrated and least likely
advocates, Daniel Cohn-Bendit - Danny the Red, when he manned the
barricades
of 1968 - suggests just this possibility. Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the
Green
Party and a rebel to the last, has outraged compatriots old and new by
describing himself as a liberal. Cohn-Bendit admits that he has no reason
to
believe that Royal shares his views, but he also feels, as did so many of
the people I spoke to, that French politics has reached a dead end. "You
have to create a situation where you're ready to debate your proposition,"
Cohn-Bendit contends, "where you say, 'We together will decide to take
this
risk, because there is no easy solution.' " Royal has, he says, the inner
freedom to take this route. What's more, he says, "To think of a president
with four children and not married - it's a revolution!"

Seated beside Royal as she was driven back to Poitiers after an annual
awards dinner at a sports club, I mentioned that we hadn't yet discussed
some of the major issues she would face as president. What about
terrorism?
And Iraq? Royal responded with a surprising question of her own: "Would
you
ask this of a man?"

"Of course I would."

"If you were interviewing Laurent Fabius, you would never ask him, 'Can
you
lay out your planetary vision in 15 minutes?' "

I pointed out that she was, after all, hoping to be president of France.
Royal said that it wasn't the right moment; she would present her vision
when she was ready. I pressed her. "You're saying it's too early?"

Apparently I had asked once too often. Her smile vanished, and she said:
"I
refuse to be infantilized by being asked questions which imply that I know
nothing, that I'm the result of a media bubble. I haven't heard Fabius or
Sarkozy explain their vision of the world and of interplanetary
coherence."

Royal's reaction felt so hyperbolic as to be either a cynical ploy - which
I
doubted - or evidence that her astonishing record of success had barely
touched her inner sense of beleaguerment, of victimization. This, too, has
become part of the Ségolène legend. Two weeks after our conversation, "Les
Guignols," a popular television show that satirizes France's leading
political and cultural figures, had a sketch featuring a puppet Ségolène.
An
interviewer asks, "Are you truly a Socialist candidate?" and Royal, her
smile never faltering, shoots back, "You would never ask such a question
of
a man." At lunch, the waiter suggests "an excellent sole," and she
retorts,
"You only recommend fish because I'm a woman, and you assume I have to
watch
what I eat." And when she comes home to François, complaining about the
obstacles she must clear as a female politician, her partner, ensconced in
his reading chair, soothingly says, "Ah, Ségolène." She cuts him off:
"Would
you call me Ségolène if I were a man?"

She never did discuss her planetary views. The French do, in fact, expect
their president to cut an impressive figure at global meetings, and this
weakness, if it is a weakness, will be mercilessly exploited by her rivals
in the party, not to speak of those in the Union for a Popular Movement
Party. Has she thought seriously about international affairs, or European
integration or the questions of identity and immigration that now beset
France and all of Europe? The paper trail is almost nonexistent. Daniel
Bernard, her biographer, says that he canvassed her colleagues both from
Élysée Palace and from Jospin's cabinet to learn what she thought about
the
issues of the day; none had any idea. These days she often gives the
impression that "having views" is itself an expression of political
arrogance. She, by contrast, will tap the wisdom of the ordinary voter.
"The
citizens are refined, cultivated and very political," she informed an
interviewer who had accused her of abandoning political debate itself. "I
believe in the legitimacy of their participation." Yes, but then what?
She's
still listening, she says. In fact, her advisers say that she won't stake
out any positions before June, when the party platform, which she is
helping
to shape, will be published. In the meantime, she fires off one round
after
another of thunderous blanks, vowing to deliver "just order" and "real
equality" and "sustainable security." It's all rather abstract for the
candidate of concreteness.

But then, maybe what the French want is not a new set of views but, as
Royal
plainspokenly puts it on her Web site, "another way of doing politics."
And
it's easy to recognize her political talents. At the sports-club dinner,
she
handed out every award, chatted with every bashful volleyball player and
stayed until the bitter end, while her chief of staff anxiously fiddled
with
his BlackBerry. She showered her lovely smile on one and all. Afterward,
in
the car, I said that her political style was very American. "Oh, yes?" she
said absently, thumbing through a pile of papers. "Is that a compliment?"
I
said that I had meant it as one. I asked if she admired American
politicians.

"That I know of? No, not personally. But I'm going to meet Hillary Clinton
in June."

In fact, the two briefly met in 1998, though it seems not to have left
much
of an impression on the Frenchwoman. They would, at least if they have a
language in common, easily recognize themselves in each other. They are
both
tough-minded women, cultural icons known by first name only. They inspire
deep loyalty and deep mistrust. And they want to be president. A few years
from now, it could be Hillary and Ségolène sharing a joke at the G-8
conference. Whom are they laughing at? The old boys, of course."

/

James Traub, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine on the
possibility of a Democratic victory in this year's midterm elections.