FRANCE:As any journalist knows, the secret motivations of politicians are choice ingredients for a book.
The underlying thesis of La Femme Fatale, by Raphaëlle Bacqué and Ariane Chemin, both political correspondents with Le Monde, is that Ségolène Royal might never have become the Socialist presidential candidate if François Hollande, the party's leader and her companion of the last quarter-century, had been faithful.
The book has been at the top of the non-fiction best-seller list since it was published two weeks ago, with 290,000 copies on order. That hell hath no fury like a woman scorned may be a cliché, but such human drama is particularly fascinating when it involves a high-profile political couple.
In 2005, Bacqué and Chemin write, Royal was worried to see her partner "preoccupied with a beautiful, blonde and lively journalist, assigned by her magazine to cover the Socialist Party". Royal asked Thomas Hollande, the eldest of the couple's four children, then aged 18, to phone the journalist's editors to ask them to reassign her. When that failed, she went to her brother, Gérard, a former French intelligence agent who was involved in the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. Gérard Royal's phone call worked.
That is the last we hear of the blonde, but the rest of the 227- page book reads like a novel, the story of what the authors call Royal's "ambition liberated through betrayal".
"At the beginning, we thought she was unbeatable," Bacqué explains. "She has charisma, and he holds the party. But the bond between them fell apart. This is a political investigation into the deterioration of what should have been an advantage."
By late summer of 2006, Royal was ahead of all other Socialists in popularity ratings. As leader of the party, Hollande should by all rights have been its nominee. But his showing in opinion polls was abysmal, and he approached Lionel Jospin, the former Socialist prime minister who was eliminated in the first round of the 2002 election.
Julien Dray, one of many advisers whom Royal poached from Hollande, told journalists: "Ségolène has a hand grenade with the pin out. She tells : 'If you use Jospin to block me, you'll never see your children again!'"
Royal has not followed up on her threat to sue the authors for defamation and invasion of privacy. We learn that Hollande often slept over at the homes of Socialist friends, that the couple clashed during the campaign over political issues, including the minimum wage, tax rises and Royal's eleventh-hour overture to the centrist candidate, François Bayrou.
Once she was invested by the party, Hollande campaigned hard for Royal. She continued to seek his advice, though she often kept information from him, and refused to appear on a stage or be photographed with him.
Even the book's authors seem uncertain whether Royal and Hollande are still together. "Any couple is complicated," Chemin explains. "We recounted the differences between them because we thought it was politically important. As for the rest, perhaps we are very French, but we didn't want to delve further. We feel it's none of our business."
Royal long ago made her private life public, inviting television cameras to her hospital room after the birth of the couple's daughter Flora. A year ago, Royal suggested to journalists that she and Hollande might marry in the South Pacific. He was stunned to learn of her proposal via the AFP wire agency.
Royal returned to the theme in Maintenant, the book she published during the campaign, saying she regretted that "François's entourage" sabotaged the marriage idea. "Yes, we are still together and yes, we still live together," she said.
Bacqué and Chemin finished writing their book at dawn on May 7th, the morning after Royal's defeat. Had she won, the book would have been entitled La Présidente. But they realised last winter that "their" candidate was too ill-prepared and disorganised to win, so they chose Femme Fatale as a back-up title.
"We wanted a title that grabbed people," Bacqué explains. "She was fatal for the left, fatal for the old party of François Mitterrand. And it's an expression that foreigners understand."
Femme Fatale explains how an advertising executive friend turned Royal into a "lovemark" - the term invented by Saatchi & Saatchi for a brand that establishes an emotional rather than a rational relationship with the consumer. But the book also chronicles the amateurism of Royal's campaign and her distrust of Hollande's party.
Royal has made no secret of her desire to be a candidate again five years from now. A poll published by Libération this week shows she is still the most popular left-wing politician.
"If she wants to be the candidate in 2012, she must take the party away from François Hollande," Bacqué predicts. "Hollande will be sacrificed to atone for her defeat. He knows it; he is waiting for it."