In the French socialist party, Marie-Noellë Lienemann is referred to as "the brains" or "the big mouth". As excerpts of the former cabinet minister's new book were leaked to the press yesterday, Le Monde accused Ms Lienemann of "spitting in the soup after eating her fill". Some of the deepest outrage came from "Marie-No's" own camp, with a close ally in the socialist left labelling her book "bullshit".
But a festering wound has been opened. Ten days before their "summer school" at La Rochelle, the defeated socialists have undertaken an autopsy of how they lost power. Laughable as it may seem, accusing each other of "drift to the right" or "drift to the left" is mortal insult. The tone of public comments, and the open letters they sign in Le Monde, is vindictive. At this rate, it could be a long time before the French left return to power.
Ms Lienemann is the first socialist official to dare attack Lionel Jospin, the former prime minister who botched his bid for the French presidency four months ago. Her book, My Share of Inventory, is a virulent diatribe against his alleged mishandling of power. The title is a deliberate play on the late Francois Mitterrand's "My Share of Truth" and Mr Jospin's "right of inventory" - the words he used to turn against Mr Mitterrand a decade ago.
Ms Lienemann, who has three times served as an MEP, was vice-president of the European Parliament and was junior minister for housing in the Jospin government. She says Mr Jospin betrayed his socialist ideals when he ratified the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997. It was all downhill from there, with the socialist leader "locked in his ivory tower", "surrounded by courtiers" and developing a "hypertrophied ego". The politics of his youth left "the mark of a Trotskyist mindset" on Mr Jospin, yet he "did not try to resist the mermaids' song of social liberals".
Much of Ms Lienemann's book would have been considered banal commentary while Mr Jospin was in power, but her status as a former cabinet member raises it to the level of treason. The former prime minister "has an intellectual relationship to politics", she says. "Shaking hands, listening to problems, giving of oneself to voters - all that is foreign to him."
She twists the knife further: Mr Jospin was all right as first secretary of the party and prime minister; "but to be a candidate for the highest office, other qualities are necessary: a direct relationship to people, an ability to rise above politics, the charisma of a statesman".
When early in his campaign Mr Jospin announced that his programme was "not socialist", Ms Lienemann experienced the remark "as a slap in the face", a major error "that strengthened the impression, very widespread among people of the left, that we had given up changing society and resigned ourselves to liberal globalisation". Mr Jospin's withdrawal from politics as soon as he lost the presidential poll was the final blow, "not worthy of the leader of the left and the man who aspired in our name to the state's highest office . . . Dignity is not abandoning your troops in the midst of battle."
Now the socialist party leader, Francois Hollande, is walking a tight-rope, trying to reconcile a half dozen factions in Europe's most miserable opposition. Two groups of "modernists" are led by the former ministers Laurent Fabius and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Ms Lienemann accuses the latter of "being obsessed by the middle classes" and "talking only about lowering taxes".
She, Henri Emmanuelli, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Julien Dray constitute the left of the left, but Dray has opposed Emmanuelli and Mélenchon's attempt to join forces. Then there's the "young Turk", Arnaud Montebourg, famous for trying to impeach President Jacques Chirac. And "Regénération", a group of militants in their early 30s who deplore that the average age of a French socialist is 55. "It is a fact: the socialist party no longer has a shared vision," the spokesman, Vincent Peillon, admitted.
While his orphans slug it out, Mr Jospin is on holiday in Corsica. "I shall not always remain silent," he promised Corse-Matin a few days ago. Mr Hollande claims his former boss "must be chomping at the bit" to criticise the Raffarin government. Mr Jospin's old friend, the deputy Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, says the distant, lost leader will discuss the present, may address the predicament of the party, "and will finally look back" - but not until at least a year has passed.