Raw Politics on French Bookshelves

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/world/europe/raw-politics-on-french-bookshelves.html

Version 0 of 1.

PARIS — American politicians like to write heavy books, with ponderous titles. Hillary Rodham Clinton invites us to face her “Hard Choices,” John McCain tells us “Character Is Destiny,” and Mitt Romney makes “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.”

French politicians, in contrast, let it rip. Their books come out often, and fast. They tend to be short (fewer than 200 pages), and their titles are intriguing.

Here is a sampling from this season’s list: “I Will No Longer Stay Silent,” by Claude Bartolone, president of the National Assembly (the book comes out Oct. 15, so readers will have to be patient); “The Parties Will Die ... and They Don’t Know It,” by Robert Hue, a former Communist Party leader; and in a more melancholy vein, “To Future Generations Who Will Have to Pay for Our Mistakes,” by an 84-year-old former prime minister, Michel Rocard.

Not to mention “Thank You for This Moment,” the surefire best seller by the former journalist and first lady Valérie Trierweiler, who tells of how she tried to overdose on sleeping pills after learning that President François Hollande was cheating on her.

Two other books are making waves this fall, mainly because of their uncanny timing.

Cécile Duflot, a leader of France’s Green Party who resigned as Mr. Hollande’s housing minister in the spring, was the first off the presses in August with “From the Inside: A Voyage to the Land of Disillusion,” a blistering account of her two years in Mr. Hollande’s cabinet. And a biography of Arnaud Montebourg — the economy minister who last month brazenly challenged Mr. Hollande’s policies and lost, taking down the whole cabinet with him — is due to come out this week. The book, “Montebourg: I, President,” was in the works before the political crisis: Its content only confirms that it was time for Mr. Montebourg to go.

Speaking to the book’s author, Valentin Spitz, in January, Mr. Montebourg said of the French president: “Hollande lies all the time. That’s why he is at 20 percent in the polls. He lies. He lies all the time. From the beginning.” Three months after he made that statement, Mr. Montebourg accepted a top ministerial job.

Ms. Duflot’s description of Mr. Hollande is not much more flattering. “His main fault is that he doesn’t say what he means,” she writes. She criticizes him for abandoning his Socialist Party base — and by extension, herself. Her disappointment with a president who failed to follow her advice jumps off almost every page.

What is extraordinary about both books is not the disdain Mr. Montebourg and Ms. Duflot share for Mr. Hollande — recent polls in France indicate widespread dissatisfaction with him. Rather, it is that they openly expressed their contempt even as they sat in his cabinet and — here’s the key — thought they could get away with it.

This phenomenon speaks to Mr. Hollande’s authority, or lack of it, as well as his inability to unite France’s fractious leftist politicians as he pursues difficult reforms.

But it also points to a blinding narcissism common to French politicians, who come to their jobs with a sense of entitlement. It can come wrapped in a blind adherence to ideology (Ms. Duflot sees any attempt to back away from France’s problematic 35-hour workweek as an act of betrayal) or in a remarkable capacity for self-congratulation (Mr. Montebourg declared in July that his only opponent was “political and intellectual conformism”).

Luckily for the French, they have other ways to follow politics. They can watch “Les Guignols de L’Info,” a TV puppet show that regularly skewers politicians of all stripes. French cinema periodically offers an unvarnished glimpse inside Paris’s grand ministries and political campaigns: The film “Quai d’Orsay,” based on a best-selling comic book, painted a very funny picture of antics inside the Foreign Ministry.

And every summer, mainstream newspapers indulge their political fantasies with fictional series intended to keep readers hooked while on vacation. This year’s topics? “Hollande’s Exit” in Le Figaro, and “The Kidnapping of Montebourg” in L’Opinion, two cases of fiction skirting with facts.