Valerie and François

Warning! A Rottweiler can bite

By Marie Decreme
05/09/2014

Merci pour ce moment [Thank you for that moment]: an explosive book published by Valérie Trierweiler. Three hundred and twenty pages secretly written in which the former first lady tells everything, from her arrival at the Elysée palace to her break-up with François Hollande. According to the Huffington Post, 200,000 copies of the book have reportedly been printed – an identical first run for a new book written by Marc Levy or Guillaume Musso, two of the best selling French authors … only now, the characters are Valérie and François.

The affair between Hollande and Gayet revealed in May 2014

Inadvertently, she reveals that during his early days as president, François Hollande was overwhelmed by his private life. She confirms: “Everything I have written is true. At the Elysée, I sometimes felt as if I were on a reporting assignment. And I have suffered too much from lies to use them myself”. Jealousy, despair, Valérie Trierweiler writes about the affair between Julie Gayet and François Hollande: “I lost it. I didn’t want to hear about it. I rushed into the bathroom. I grabbed a small plastic bag containing sleeping pills (…). François followed me, he tried to snatch the bag”, she relates. Her words plunge us into the downward spiral of a doomed couple.

Valérie Trierweiler also looks back on the decisive tweet she sent that precipitated the end of the couple. Two months before the June 2012 parliamentary elections, François Hollande swore to her that he would not support Ségolène Royal publicly. The next day, a press release announced she had his full support. “He swore he had nothing to do with it (…). That is the coup de grâce”. She responded with a tweet backing Royal’s opponent. “But a time-bomb was set by François Hollande and Ségolène Royal, and their constant public-private game, with family photos and ambiguous declarations” she explains.

The book seen by the humorists (©Canal+)

More bad news for François Hollande who is not spared in this book. She tells us that «  The president does not like poor people. He, a man of the left, calls them in private: “les sans-dents” (the toothless ones). He is very proud of his humour ». Some rather shocking words! The president now has to face his private life becoming public.

On both sides of the spectrum, politicians denounce Valérie Trierweiler’s lack of decency: « Private life should stay private » throws Najat Vallaud-Belkacem. Some others used her revelations as a way of attacking the president; Florian Philippot, vice president of the Front National, tweeted « Is it because he sees them as the ‘toothless ones’ that François Hollande has always been serving the same soup to the French?.».

In 2013, Cécilia Attias had also published a book about her break-up with Nicolas Sarkozy. A total 55 000 copies were sold. Public life, private life, power, intimacy, they all seem inseparable.

Valerie Trierweiler

One thing is certain though, first ladies are no longer willing to keep quiet about their private life and that of their exes. Danielle and Bernadette you were true saints!