La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (27 page)

The minister was not identified, but the chattering classes speculated that the only person who could have fit the description was Strauss-Kahn. When I asked Jean Daniel, the magazine’s director, about the article, all he would say is that, in his personal opinion, it should not have been published.

When Strauss-Kahn was appointed head of the IMF in 2007, the French media did not investigate the rumors. The lone journalist to train the spotlight on them was Jean Quatremer, the
Libération
correspondent in Brussels. He wrote on his blog that Strauss-Kahn’s “only real problem” was his “rapport” with women. “Too insistent, he often comes close to harassment,” Quatremer wrote. “A weakness known by the media, but which nobody mentions. (We are in France.) The IMF, however, is an international institution with Anglo-Saxon morals. A misplaced gesture, a too specific allusion, and it will be a media scramble.”

Quatremer’s posting opened the way for other journalists to write coyly about whether Strauss-Kahn’s rumored private life was appropriate to write about. A year later, the issue exploded. In the fall of 2008, Strauss-Kahn was put under investigation by the IMF for allegedly abusing his position after engaging in a sexual relationship with Piroska Nagy, an IMF economist. The French elite, right and left alike, rallied behind Strauss-Kahn and said his personal behavior was private. He hired a public relations firm and issued a statement in which he admitted infidelity. He called the affair “an incident in one’s private life,” accepted responsibility, and expressed “regret.” Then he went silent.

His wife took the position that this was minor-league straying. “These things happen in the life of any couple,” she wrote on her personal blog. “This one-night stand is now behind us…. We love each other as much as on the day we met.” He was cleared of any wrongdoing.

Can these old French codes stand in a world of greater transparency and political correctness? In the wake of the scandal, Stéphane Guillon, a comic on France Inter’s radio breakfast show, went after Strauss-Kahn just before he was to give an interview at the station’s studios in Paris. To get ready for the IMF director’s arrival in the building, Guillon said, “exceptional measures have been taken in order not to awaken the beast.” As a precaution, women were advised to wear “antisex” clothing. High heels, leather, and chic underwear had been banned. The head of publicity would greet Strauss-Kahn in an Afghan
burqa
. At the sound of a siren, “all female workers must be evacuated.” Guillon even alluded to Strauss-Kahn’s penis as the “best-known organ of the IMF.” Strauss-Kahn was not amused. On the air, he said, “Humor is not funny when it is essentially nastiness.”

More generally, though, there was relief in the French government when the scandal passed. Among the French intelligentsia, there was also a willingness to forgive even his apparent excess. When I asked the historian Mona Ozouf whether Strauss-Kahn fit the tradition of the libidinous politician, she laughed softly and said, “Surely. He has exceptional energy.”

The absence of a sexual aura can also hurt the politician who lacks it. The inability of Lionel Jospin, the Socialist Party candidate in the 2002 presidential election, to appear sexy contributed to his lack of electoral appeal.

Weeks before election day,
Libération
asked leading female editors about the women’s vote. Claire Dabrowski, then the director of Téva, a satellite television channel for women, said that Jospin’s subtlety and drollery were not enough. “If women don’t appreciate Jospin, it is without doubt because he is not very sexy,” she said. “Plus he has those big eyes. You think that’s he’s going to scold you. In short, we cannot imagine crazy nights of lovemaking with him.” Françoise Le Cornec, editor in chief of
Jeune
&
Jolie
(Young & Pretty), a magazine for teenage girls, echoed these sentiments. “Lionel Jospin is not seductive at all,” she said. “He has no charisma. He has an awkward air. He is as antisexy as possible. Chirac on the contrary has more presence. Plus, he’s got this reputation as a womanizer, which gives him an aura among women.”

I didn’t find it comforting to know that female journalists were as concerned about the sexiness of their political leaders as Giscard was about the shape of his female voters’ silhouettes. Still, I understood what they were saying about Jospin. I met him only once, on the Île de Ré, an island off the coast of France, where we were playing tennis on adjoining courts. During a break, I introduced myself. “It’s an honor to meet you,” I said. Except Jospin heard my pronunciation of the word
honneur
as
horreur
—horror. He lashed out at me. “
Horreur
! It’s a
horreur
to meet me!” he exclaimed. His big eyes glowered. I was mortified. I fell over myself with my apologies and joked that my flawed French was to blame. Still, I knew that Chirac would have thrown back his head with a loud guffaw and cracked a joke.

Unlike Americans, who are forced to take up the mantle of purity just when assuming high office might give them an advantage in the sexual game, French politicians are allowed to enjoy their enhanced opportunities. This reality flows from centuries of precedent. The kings took sexual seduction to new heights. There was a hierarchy to the women in their lives: wives, significant others (known as “favorites”), and women passing through the court who provided fleeting adventures. To make sure that no one forgets France’s royal history today, the kings’ escapades are routinely retold in cover stories in mainstream weekly news magazines.

In 2010, to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of the death of Henri IV, he was celebrated in exhibitions, books, magazine articles, and guided tours exploring his life. Did he really ride a white horse? (No one knows; accounts varied until the nineteenth century, when the Romantics made it white.) Did he really promise all Frenchmen the means to have a “chicken in every pot” on Sundays? (Yes, but promoting this dish from his birthplace was a political gesture, not a gastronomic initiative.) Did he smell as bad as people said? (Yes. Catherine Henriette de Balzac d’Entragues, one of his mistresses, told him he was lucky to be a king because otherwise she wouldn’t have put up with it.)
Le Figaro
ran big color ads for a special edition on Henri: “The adventurer, the seducer, the king. Long Live Henri IV!”

Henri was married twice and was an indefatigable lover, with four important favorites, innumerable one-night conquests, and more than a dozen children. His letters to the favorites capture the depth of his passion for them. “Certainly, for a woman, there is no equal to you…. I cherish, adore, and miraculously honor you,” he wrote to Gabrielle d’Estrées, considered his
grande
mistress. With Balzac d’Entragues, he was more graphic: “
Bonsoir
, my love. I kiss your tits a million times.”

Henri’s son, Louis XIII, considered a cold fish, contented himself with small, inconsequential affairs. Louis XIV built Versailles in part to facilitate his sexual adventures. Louis XV, shy as a teenager, became so sexually voracious that he went through women of all ages and classes of society, including four women who were sisters, and kept several women at a time in a mansion in a remote corner of Versailles. Louis XVI, by contrast, let seven years elapse before he consummated his marriage to Marie Antoinette and suffered politically as a result. “All of Europe knew well that Marie Antoinette’s brother was explaining to him a bit how things worked,” said Ozouf. “He was the laughingstock of Europe.”

The tradition of seduction carried forward into modern times. Edgar Faure, a politician who wrote crime novels under a pseudonym and was a member of the Académie Française, liked to say that he had all the time in the world to succeed in his operations of seduction. When Faure became the president of the Council (de facto prime minister) in the 1950s, he availed himself of all the perquisites of office. “When I was a minister, some women resisted me,” he told a friend, according to
Sexus politicus.
“Once I became president, not even one.”

Edgar Faure is not to be confused with Félix Faure (no relation), a president of France in the 1890s. Tall and blue-eyed, he was better known as “President Sun” and “Félix
le Bel
” (Félix the Beautiful) because of his taste for luxury and young women. One of his lovers, Marguerite Steinheil, would enter the Élysée Palace through a secret door that had been built in the mid-nineteenth century by Louis Napoléon to give his own mistress easy access.

One evening in February 1899, the president drank a cinchona aphrodisiac. He and Steinheil met as usual, in a blue and gold salon. A few moments later, the president’s chief of staff heard the young woman scream. Faure, dressed only in a flannel cardigan, was dead. Steinheil left the Élysée so quickly that she forgot her corset. The first lady called a priest to deliver the last sacraments, even though her husband was already dead. Upon approaching the salon, the priest asked, “Does the president still have his
connaissance
?”
Connaissance
means “consciousness,” but it can also mean “acquaintance.” An orderly replied that the
connaissance
had already been ushered out the back door. (The exchange is still considered one of the cleverest examples of
second degré
humor in French political life.) The real story was little covered in the French press, but the libertarian newspaper
Journal du Peuple
wrote, “We can say that he was not poisoned, but that he died because he sacrificed too much to Venus.”

Rather than being embarrassed by these stories, the French seem to revel in them. In prime time one Saturday evening in the fall of 2009, French television aired a ninety-minute docudrama on Félix Faure’s love affair. It showed the president and his mistress falling in love with one
regard
, and included several long scenes in which they did nothing except gaze at each other. “Americans would have no patience with this,” said Andy as we watched.

An explanatory program on power and seduction followed—featuring interviews with former politicians, talking heads, and celebrities. The Italian actress Claudia Cardinale dismissed as “absurd” rumors that she had had a love affair with Chirac. The program also presented the far-right political leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was in his eighties, as having a certain “allure” because he was such a terrific ballroom dancer.

Even the most sober politicians seek to promote their virility. In 2004 Bruno Le Maire, the longtime chief of staff to Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, wrote a book about his boss, most of which is a straightforward defense of the man he served for many years. In the middle of the narrative came a personal confession about sensuality. During a trip with his wife, Pauline, to Venice in 2003, Le Maire recalled the sweet beginning of their day together. He had been in the bath. “I let myself be overwhelmed by the heat of the bath, the light of the lagoon that floated on the mirror of the door, the green tea soap, and Pauline’s hand that softly caressed my
sexe
,” he wrote.

We assume theirs is a requited love. And yet, the frank passage, coming in an otherwise straightforward book on Villepin’s diplomacy, stands out. Maybe it is jarring only to my American ear.

For Le Maire and Giscard, and presumably for their readers, there is nothing unnatural about linking the quest for political power with the projection of an image of sexuality. I was on the road visiting farmers one day with Le Maire, now the agriculture minister, and I asked him why he included the sex scene in a book about French diplomacy. “There is an American puritanism that doesn’t exist in France!” he said, defensively. That may be so, but his face had turned bright red.

“Not even for the most serious of politicians?” I asked.

“That’s certainly my case,” he replied. And then he laughed. “What I like about life is to be fully engaged in what I do,” he said. “And this is as true in my personal life as it is in my work.”

In the modern era, the seductive politician has found a new, expansive stage for his performances: the presidency of France. For the first half of the twentieth century, the country’s constitution was based on a parliamentary system. There was a prime minister, but his power was diluted by the strength of the national legislators. The constitution of the Fifth Republic, created in 1958, gave France its presidency, an exceptionally powerful one with some of the trappings of monarchy.

The Fifth Republic did not begin with a seducer in the royal tradition. Charles de Gaulle, the first president, governed not with bedroom eyes but with austerity and moral authority. His
rigueur
, as it was called, meant that he did not succumb to the long-standing royal tradition of self-indulgence over principle. But de Gaulle had unusual personal charisma, the natural seductive power of the strong leader. And he added to that a great seduction of the whole French nation that was arguably as powerful as sex. He created a story line that appealed to the masses and convinced the world: far from being a nation of Nazi collaborators during World War II, the French had remained pure, even as they had been victimized, outraged, broken, martyred, and betrayed by an evil minority in their midst.

De Gaulle rewrote the narrative of the war in a famously improvised speech on the day of Paris’s liberation, August 25, 1944. He portrayed the city as ravaged but liberated with the help of “all of France, of the fighting France, of the only France, the real France, the eternal France!”

It was a tour de force. For the previous four years, France had indeed been collaborating with the Nazis, but de Gaulle created a nobler image. She was a virgin in his eyes, “the princess in the fairy stories or the Madonna in the frescoes.”