Ségolène the gendarme

Cassandre
LA PRÉTENDANTE
154pp. Philippe Rey. 12euros.
978 2 84876 074 5
 
Evelyne Pathouot
SÉGOLÈNE ROYAL
Ombre et lumière
203pp. Michalon. 16euros.
978 284 186 394 5
 
Marie Eve Malouines and Carl Meeus
SÉGOLÈNE ROYAL, L’INSOUMISE
346pp. Fayard. 20euros.
978 2 213 63111 0
 
Gérard Grunberg and Zaki Läidi
SORTIR DU PESSIMISME SOCIAL
Essai sur l’identité de gauche
239pp. Hachette. 19euros.
978 2 0123 7266 5
 
Marc Lambron
MIGNONNE, ALLONS VOIR . . .
195pp. Grasset. 14euros.
978 2 246 72031 1
 
Few ever expected Ségolène Royal to get this far. Not her authoritarian father, a traditionalist army officer, who did not even want her to go to university; not the chattering classes in Paris, who greeted the bid of this provincial lass, this “bécassine”, for the Socialist candidacy to the French Presidency with haughty derision; not the political pundits, who ponderously explained how and why it was inconceivable for someone that inexperienced to be chosen (in Alain Duhamel’s book Les Prétendants, a group portrait of the fifteen likely candidates for the Presidency, published early in 2006, her name was not even mentioned); and, above all, not the older Socialist elites, some of whom had been patiently coveting the supreme prize. When asked about her candidacy, the former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius’s response revealed the misogynistic
irritation of the Party hierarchy: “Mais qui va garder les enfants?”.

Yet, despite it all, Ségolène Royal was duly picked by the Socialist membership and, in late November 2006, at a rally at the Palais de la Mutualité in Paris, she savoured her triumph: the Party faithful gave her a thundering ovation, in presence of those very men (seated, to compound their humiliation, in the front row) who had poured scorn over her during the previous thirteen months. In order to appreciate the scale of her achievement, we should first get some sense of the obstacles she had to overcome, especially from her own side. To be seen as a legitimate Socialist leader is historically a very difficult exercise in France, because of the Left’s extreme ideological fissiparousness, its inherent anti-individualism and its enduring suspicion of power; potential leaders are therefore especially vulnerable to accusations of treachery and deception. Royal’s credentials were frequently challenged by drawing on these negative tropes. In La Prétendante, an anonymous pamphlet published in the autumn of 2006, as the battle for the Party nomination was reaching its climax, she was portrayed as incompetent; as a political lightweight who would be eaten alive by her Conservative rival for the Presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy; and as a highly retrograde advocate of moral and cultural conservatism. In short, she was a renegade. Alongside this flaying of her public values, she also had to endure a barrage of ad feminam attacks, many of them from women in her own Party; as one of them put it, “the Presidency is not a beauty contest”. Évelyne Pathouot’s Ségolène Royal: Ombre et lumière offers an edifying compendium of this anti-feminist line of attack. Written by a disgruntled former parliamentary assistant, it claims to reveal the “true” character of Ségolène Royal. The Socialist candidate thus emerges as an uncaring and disloyal employer, exploiting the goodwill of local militants; an insincere and vindictive careerist, interested only in her own self-promotion; and (predictably) an unworthy mother, refusing the offer of a seat in President Chirac’s plane to attend to her hospitalized son simply because she did not want to appear indebted to a political adversary. Pathouot also excoriates the “cult” of Ségolène, and confesses that she herself also fell victim to this idolatry: “the fascination she exerted over me made me lose all critical sense”. Not just a traitor, then, but also a witch.

In truth, there was not much sorcery in Royal’s defeat of her internal opponents, but a great deal of clever politics. In Ségolène Royal, l’insoumise, Marie Eve Malouines and Carl Meeus provide a compelling account of her ascendancy, dwelling particularly on her strategic astuteness and her original political style. She emerged into the limelight in the summer of 2004 when she led the Socialists to victory in the regional elections in the Poitou-Charentes, the bastion of the then Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin. Still traumatized by their stinging defeat in 2002, France’s left-wing voters were suddenly given a glimpse of a political leader who could successfully take the battle to the heartland of the Right. From this moment on, Royal’s strategy became manifest: to rely on her popularity in the country to circumvent the Party bosses in Paris, and appeal directly to the mass membership (Socialist ranks swelled by some 50 per cent in 2006). She cultivated her singularity by pursuing a solitary campaign, in which she presented herself as the mirror of her main rivals. While the Socialist barons never missed an opportunity to appear on television, she shunned the press. Whenever they paraded the streets of the capital in support of various social groups, she stayed in her beloved Poitou, inaugurating markets and visiting school fairs. When they rallied dutifully to commemorate the tenth anniversary of François Mitterrand’s death, she flew off to Chile to be seen alongside the Socialist candidate Michelle Bachelet (who was duly elected). As they spoke the cerebral language of Parisian elites, she celebrated the value of “participatory democracy”, and invited the French public to help construct her manifesto by writing in to her website, Désirs d’avenir. While they trotted out the usual Socialist homilies about justice and equality, she revived the Thomist concept of a “just order”, and made the issues of security, motherhood and the family the lynchpins of her political platform. In short, she outmanoeuvred her adversaries at every step, and showed up Messrs Fabius, Lionel Jospin, Jack Lang and Dominique Strauss-Kahn for what they really are: faded relics of a bygone past.

Explaining such a meteoric rise is one thing, understanding its wider significance is another. One of the most stimulating analyses on offer here is Gérard Grunberg and Zaki Laïdi’s Sortir du pessimisme social: Essai sur l’identité de la gauche. Its final chapter is devoted to what the authors define as “ségolisme”, which they see as emblematic of broader transformations of left-wing political culture in France. Royal’s distinctiveness, in Grunberg and Laïdi’s eyes, stems from her successful appeal to the people through the deployment of unifying integrative concepts (the family, the land, the nation); her insistence on drawing on experiences of ordinary folk to derive her policy prescriptions (a cultural revolution in a country where, at least since Auguste Comte, “expertise” is accorded supreme value); her “triangulation” of the Left–Right divide, which leads her to appropriate traditionally right-wing themes such as security and individual responsibility; and, above all, her capacity to lead the Socialists while at the same time cultivating a distance from the Party. There are interesting echoes here of older versions of French Republicanism: with her moralism, her insistence on the civic role of education and her social conservatism, she would have been at home in the early Third Republic – with the important caveat that, as a woman, she would not have been regarded as a full citizen then. But the discerning reader will also have detected a powerful whiff of Blairism here, and it is interesting that both Royal and Sarkozy have expressed their admiration for the Labour Prime Minister. The difference perhaps is that Sarkozy is more interested in Blair’s economics, and Royal in his politics. Or, to put the same point differently, Sarkozy does need to distance himself from his Party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) which he fully controls; and she cannot afford to alienate France’s predominantly anti-capitalist (and largely Eurosceptic) left-wing electorate by threatening to go down the Blairist road of greater economic “flexibility”. Indeed this prudence was apparent in Royal’s Presidential programme, whose hundred proposals were outlined in her Villepinte speech on February 11. She began with praise for the entrepreneurial spirit of French capitalism, and for good measure went on to condemn the bloated size of the French bureaucracy. But she then proposed a string of measures (in health, education, social welfare, housing) which would, if implemented, lead to a massive increase in public expenditure. And she rounded it all off by reasserting a number of eccentric “ségolian” precepts, notably dispatching young offenders to boot camp, and teaching youngsters a sense of “respect”: we can almost hear the officer’s daughter cracking the whip. Her companion, François Hollande, freely admits it: in all family matters, and particularly when it comes to raising their four children, “c’est Ségolène qui fait le gendarme”.

Little wonder, given this ideological hybridity, that Madame Royal has provoked such perplexity across France. Feminists are often just as baffled as any other group: they generally welcome the prospect of her election as a powerful symbol of women’s equality, but are dismayed by her social and moral conservatism; furthermore, many acidly remember that while they were leading the battle against male chauvinism in France, she was swotting to get into the École Nationale d’Administration, the select technocratic training school for French elites. This fascination with the Ségolène phenomenon has also produced a great deal of entertaining semiology. Marc Lambron’s Mignonne, allons voir . . . is one of the finest specimens of this genre: captivating, witty and perceptive – provided it is not taken too seriously. What Ségolène Royal is not, Lambron tells us, is just as revealing as what she is. She is not “new”: after all, she cut her political teeth in the 1980s under the wing of François Mitterrand. There is no shred of Marxist culture in her, and it is doubtful that she has ever read the French Socialist classics: Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum mean little to her, and the libertarian spirit of May ’68 essentially passed her by. This is perhaps Lambron’s most important insight: the reality of SégolèneRoyal is not to be found in her politics or her ideology but in her sociology, and particularly in her coming of age in that strange generation which emerged in the 1970s and 80s: not yet disenchanted, but not obsessed either by the traumas of Occupation, Reconstruction and Algeria, and somehow seeking to offer a message of healing and hope. Indeed Lambron’s most tantalizing proposition is that Royal’s success bears witness to the potency of Catholic culture in France. He draws a compelling contrast between her former rival Jospin, the arch-Protestant, with his reserved demeanour, his closed and secretive past and his tormented inner self, and the Catholic undertones in Royal’s appearance and discourse: the white dresses, the beatific smile, the frequent recourse to the metaphor of motherhood, and the cult of order and authority. Will this Catholic providentialism be enough to forge that privileged link between one candidate and the nation, which is the first necessary step in the election of a French President? Ségolène Royal has shown that she possesses a great deal of energy and determination, but it is as yet unclear that this will suffice to make her the incarnation of the General Will.

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Sudhir Hazareesingh's La Légende de Napoléon, published last year, was awarded the 2006 Prix d'Histoire of the Fondation Napoléon.