A series of shocking revelations has damaged, perhaps fatally, a candidate’s campaign for the nation’s highest office. Recorded transcripts reveal that he insulted federal judges and mocked the physically handicapped, as well as questioned the loyalty of Muslim citizens and the credibility of former lovers. No less disturbingly, the transcripts portray a candidate indifferent to the immense responsibilities he holds as his party’s standard-bearer -- a party, moreover, reeling in the wake of these revelations -- and unable to rise above the personal and petty. His polling numbers, fading prior to the revelations, are now tanking.
All that is missing is the candidate exclaiming on his Twitter account: Triste! In a remarkable reiteration of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, French President Francois Hollande’s hopes to win a second term in France have been shattered by the publication of remarks he had made, over the course of his presidency, to two journalists from the French newspaper Le Monde. Hollande’s table talk with Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme points not just to the decline and fall of a certain idea of the French presidency, but also to the transformation of politics in both our two countries.
Last week’s publication of Davet and Lhomme’s book, “A President Should Not Say That,” has stunned French observers across the political spectrum. In nearly 700 pages of conversations about his experience in the Elysée, Hollande’s remarks rarely rise above the unexceptional and uninspiring. But they all too frequently sink well below. In his bald assertion that “no one can doubt there is a problem with Islam,” and his identification of the veil with female subjugation, France’s Socialist president echoes the same reactionary language as the country’s extremist Front National. In his accusation that the nation’s judiciary is filled with “cowards” who “pretend to be virtuous,” Hollande questioned the integrity of the one state institution that still has the public’s respect.
Hollande even tapped into our Trumpian era of post-fact politics in his insistence that, in a controversial exchange with his former partner Valerie Trierweiler, he had never mocked the poor as “les sans-dents,” or toothless ones. (Trierweiler immediately retweeted the message in which Hollande had done precisely that.) For good measure, Hollande disparaged one group that Trump would never dare: professional football (as in soccer) players. Describing the lot of them as “poorly educated kids who have become fabulously wealthy stars,” he noted that what they required more than physical training was “musculature de cerveau,” or brain training.
Inevitably, all of this has left Hollande’s fellow Socialists wondering about the state of the president’s own cerveau. Remarkably, when Hollande struck his deal with the journalists, he neither demanded the right to decide on the publication date nor the right to review the manuscript. Unremarkably, these oversights left the president of the National Assembly, the Socialist Claude Bartolone, groping for an explanation. A leader, he finally concluded, “must not say too much about himself. The duty of silence is one of the office’s functions.” Among the rank and file, the expressions of shock and anger have been less restrained. One Socialist deputy, Christian Paul, summed up his colleagues’ reaction: “If only Hollande had given us as much time as he did to those journalists, we wouldn’t be in the mess we now find ourselves.”
It is this particular issue -- the nature of a president’s functions -- where, improbably, Hollande and Trump’s worldviews seem to meet. In the United States, commentators and critics have rightly wondered and worried about the impact of Trump’s rhetoric -- indeed, his very way of being -- on the public’s attitude toward the presidency. So, too, for Hollande. It is not just Hollande’s language but also his inability to distinguish between the personal and public, between his own self and the office, between his self-regard and regard for the republic, that threatens to debase the French presidency. As one prominent Socialist moaned, the president “doesn't preside, he prattles.”
This is the sixth book of interviews with Hollande that has been published. The president also met more than 60 times with Davet and Lhomme, often over long dinners, for the current iteration. As for Trump, the Republican presidential candidate undoubtedly devotes gobs more time gabbing to journalists than he does to foreign policy or constitutional experts. Governance, for Trump, begins and ends in the radio or television studio.
What is shocking, for French and many non-French observers alike, is the discovery that their own politics are not exempt from our era of Trumped-down expectations. At the very heart of the French Fifth Republic, created by Charles de Gaulle nearly 60 years ago, is a presidency that reigns rather than rules. For good reason: De Gaulle was too preoccupied by the instability and frequent inability of earlier republics, with figurehead presidents and powerful legislatures, to govern the nation. As a result, he tailored a presidency to his own dimensions, equipping it with quasi-monarchic powers and prestige.
Clearly, the Gaullist conception of the Republic was authoritarian. While it parried the dangers then confronting France both within and without, it may well be that it has outlived its time. But does that mean that the very notion of authority must also be consigned to the museum? No question is more essential, since it is the quality of authority that populist demagogues like Marine Le Pen in France and le Donald in our country have cornered and corrupted. When it comes to authority, the many calls made by Hillary Clinton’s supporters for the former first lady and secretary of state to be more human and more transparent may be displaced. A word of warning, at least, from General de Gaulle: “There is no authority without prestige, just as there is no prestige without distance.”