French first lady in hospital after reports of Hollande affair

[TellMeWhy]

French first lady in hospital after reports of Hollande affair

BY GEERT DE CLERCQ AND ELIZABETH PINEAU
PARIS Sun Jan 12, 2014 7:23pm GMT

Valerie Trierweiler, companion of French President Francois Hollande, reacts as she visits the primary school Charles Beuvin in Creteil near Paris, December 2, 2013. REUTERS/Charles Platiau

(Reuters) - French first lady Valerie Trierweiler has been admitted to hospital following reports of an affair between President Francois Hollande and an actress, but will be discharged on Monday, sources said on Sunday.

Daily newspaper Le Parisien said on its website earlier that Trierweiler, 48, had been taken to hospital after being shaken by a celebrity magazine's reports of a liaison between her partner Hollande and French actress Julie Gayet.

"She has been in hospital since Friday. She will leave tomorrow," her spokesman Patrice Biancone told Reuters.

Asked about the future of Trierweiler's relationship with the president, Biancone said: "She needs rest. Then she will decide what to do."

A source at the Elysee declined to comment on Trierweiler's hospitalisation and the magazine report.

"The president is at work. He is preparing Tuesday's news conference," the source said.

On Tuesday, Hollande will face the media in a traditional new year news conference that had been scheduled well before the reports of the affair broke.

Hollande, who came to power in May 2012, is expected to announce new measures to boost the French economy, including lower charges for companies, cuts in public spending and a simplification of business regulation.

THREAT TO SUE

Hollande and Trierweiler are scheduled to make a state visit to the United States in February and are set to attend a state dinner with President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle on February 11.

On Friday, Hollande, 59, threatened to sue celebrity magazine Closer, complaining of breach of privacy after it said he was having an affair with Gayet, 41.

Closer published a series of photos of a woman resembling Gayet entering a Paris flat close to the Elysee presidential palace, followed by a man masked by a black motorcycle helmet who the magazine said was Hollande.

Gayet, a mother of two, has dozens of film credits to her name but is little known outside France. Last year, she starred in "Quai d'Orsay", in which she plays a vampish diplomatic adviser in the foreign ministry.

In March last year she filed a complaint with the Paris prosecutor for breach of privacy over Internet rumours alleging she had a relationship with Hollande.

Hollande and Trierweiler, a journalist for celebrity magazine Paris Match, are not married but have been in a long-term relationship for several years.

"TURN THE PAGE"

Hollande has four children from a previous relationship with Segolene Royal, a senior member of his Socialist Party who ran for president against Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007. Royal announced their separation right after she lost the election.

Speaking on France 2 televison on Sunday, Royal declined to comment on the affair, saying that French people had more important things to worry about.

"It is necessary to turn the page and get back to work," she said.

Opposition leader Francois Coppe, head of the conservative UMP party, said the affair was "disastrous for the image of France abroad".

At home, the reports of Hollande's affair have had little effect on his image and French media at the weekend mainly focused on Closer's unprecedented breach of presidential privacy rather than on the alleged relationship with Gayet.

A poll by Ifop showed that 84 percent of the public had not changed their opinion about Hollande following news of the affair and that 77 percent considered it "a private affair that only concerns Francois Hollande".

"At the moment, the revelations about his liaison with Julie Gayet have no effect on public opinion. In fact, he is already so unpopular that there is no change," said Ifop analyst Frederic Dabi.

In November one survey gave Hollande an approval rating of only 15 percent. He is the most unpopular president in France's modern history according to several polls.

Hollande's Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti said the French were responsible and mature and the Ifop poll showed they respected one another.

"This may be specifically French, but let's be proud of it," she said on BFM television.

(Additional reporting by Gerard Bon; Editing by Andrew Roche)

 

[TellMeWhy]

François Hollande threatens legal action over affair claims

French president says he deplores attack on privacy by Closer magazine, which published alleged images of him visiting actor

Kim Willsher in Paris
The Guardian Friday 10 January 2014 09.46 GMT

French actor Julie Gayet and President François Hollande, who are alleged to be having an affair. Photograph: Valery Hache/AFP/Getty Images

The French president, François Hollande, has threatened legal action over claims he is having an affair with an actor.

The glossy celebrity magazine Closer published a special edition on Friday including a seven-page report on the leader's alleged relationship with Julie Gayet.

In a statement from the Elysée Palace, Hollande did not directly deny the report but accused the magazine of breaching his privacy. He said advisers were looking at what action to take against the magazine, which caused a storm in 2012 after publishing paparazzi photographs of the topless Duchess of Cambridge on a private holiday in the south of France.

The statement said Hollande "deeply deplores the attacks on the principle of respect for privacy, to which he, like every citizen, has a right". However, it did not directly deny the story of the affair.

Closer published photographs showing a man in a motorcycle helmet outside what it said was Gayet's Paris apartment, along with a man reported to be the president's bodyguard.

Subsequent photos taken in the morning show the man said to be the bodyguard arriving with what Closer said was a bag of croissants.

Hollande's partner is the former Paris Match journalist Valérie Trierweiler, who is considered to be France's first lady. He has four children with the politician Ségolène Royal, who ran against Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential race.

In March last year, Gayet, 41, began legal action to identify who was behind internet rumours that she was romantically involved with the president.

During Hollande's 2012 election campaign she took part in a political broadcast in which she described the presidential candidate as "humble", "incredible" and a man who "really listens".

In the past, the French media have been considerably more circumspect about the love lives of the country's leaders, who have taken refuge behind the country's strict privacy laws.

For many years, the last Socialist president of France, François Mitterrand, led a double life with his wife, Danielle, and lover, Anne Pingeot, with whom he had a daughter, Mazarine. Although the existence of Mitterrand's second family was an open secret, nothing was ever published until Paris Match obtained photos of Mazarine, then aged 20, and got the president's permission to publish them.

The Closer story provoked a storm on Twitter, coming just hours after the banning of a show by the controversial comedian Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala, and the announcement that La Redoute, a mail order company, was laying off hundreds of staff.

Journalist Guy Birenbaum wrote in the Huffington Post that the idea of personal privacy in France was being dragged into the 21st century. What would have started as polite whispers during chic dinner parties now "becomes information, some days or some weeks later".

"Nobody powerful,(including the president) has the power these days to stop or block anything, and certainly not this "type" of thing," Birenbaum wrote.

"The era when twenty Parisian journalists "protect" the second family of a president of the republic for years on end has passed. With Twitter, François Mitterrand's secrets would have lasted a month, the "escapades" of Chirac, not more than three weeks ... it's a fact, not a cry of joy."

He concluded: "The happy set up of newspaper stories with pictures of Madame, Monsieur and their children, belong to the past."

Reaction to reports of the alleged affair brought a rare unity to France's political class.

Harlem Désir, head of the ruling Socialist party said: "It's nothing to do with political life, therfore I don't see why it should be a political debate. There should be respect for the private person and for the presidential role. I have no comment to make."

Marine Le Pen, president of the far-right Front National, agreed. "I agree with having respect for privacy, for everyone. As long as it doesn't cost the taxpayer a centime, I consider that everyone has the right to have their private life respected … any attack on this shocks me."

The prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, said: "As a citizen, the president of the republic, François Hollande, has requested that his private life be respected. He is right. I have nothing to add to what he has said."

Laurence Piau, editor of Closer, told Europe 1 television: "He's a normal president, a normal person. He's a president who's fallen in love and an affair. Everyone has to calm down over the photographs."

A history of French presidential infidelity

When François Hollande stood for election as president in 2012, he promised to be "Monsieur Normal".

And French history reveals that nothing could be more "normal" than a French president who is, as the Quai d'Orsay diplomats might say euphemistically, a bit of a ladies' man.

Think François Mitterrand, who had a secret double life and "hid" his lover and their daughter for more than two decades with the complicity of a handful of French journalists.

Think Jacques Chirac, whose chauffeur told of driving the president to assignations and described him as "Monsieur 15 minutes, shower included"; Chirac's roving eye drove his formidable wife Bernadette to distraction. "Remember, when Napoleon lost Josephine, he lost everything", she would declare.

Think Nicolas Sarkozy, who, during a brief separation from his second wife Cecilia, who later left him for good, reportedly sent a text message saying he intended to ask the female journalist he had taken on holiday to marry him if his wife did not return forthwith.

Even the seemingly upstanding Valéry Gistard d'Estaing, president from 1974-81, was rumoured to have as many mistresses as Paris has salons. In the infamous "Milk lorry" case of September 1974, d'Estaing was at the wheel of a borrowed Ferrari driving through Paris with a mysterious woman in the passenger seat, when he pranged it in a collision with a milk lorry at 5am. The woman's identity has never been confirmed, but she was rumoured to be a famous French actress.

And spare a thought for Félix Faure, French president from 1895-99, who died in the bed of his mistress, Marguerite Steinheil, but who still had a Paris metro station named after him.

The list of French royal mistresses goes back to King Clovis I in the sixth century, but among the most celebrated and influential were Diane de Poitier, Henri II's courtesan, and Madame de Pompadour, official chief mistress of Louis XV.

In their book Sexus Politicus, journalists Christophe Deloire and Christophe Dubois write that to be successful a French politician must also be seductive. "Far from being a fault, to cast yourself in the role of seducer is without doubt an important quality in our political life," they say.