La Femme
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.”
ven 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.”
