The Veil of French Politics

New York Times Blog: By Judith Warner

[Ségolène Royal] justified this unusual incursion into her private life on the grounds that it advanced “the cause of women.” She also posed at home with Hollande and their children to showcase the kind of “organization” that was necessary to balance high-level government work with the needs of a large family...

...[A]ll this exposure isn’t necessarily shocking from an American perspective. Royal’s penchant for making the personal political can even be seen as an admirable form of public expression for a woman who has consistently spoken out on behalf of working women and their families since escaping from the home of her domineering, authoritarian father in the 1970s. But it’s been a major style shift for France, where the separation between public and private life has traditionally been so absolute – and protected so assiduously by the judicial system, politicians and the inner court of Parisian journalists who cover (and sometimes sleep with) them – that Francois Mitterrand was for decades able to maintain, at taxpayer expense, an illegitimate daughter and a mistress without the knowledge of the broader electorate.

This secrecy, we might say, is self-serving and elitist. But it has also led to a somewhat higher level of political discourse than Monkey Business and Monicagate.

At base, the French would say (they said it to me, in fact, incessantly, when I was there covering politics at the time of the Clinton impeachment scandal), it’s emblematic of a profound philosophical difference that sets them apart from Americans: the fact that the French don’t subscribe to the idea of “transparency.” “Transparency,” in this context, is the notion that a person’s innermost soul is revealed in each and every one of his or her acts. To believe in that kind of transparency is naïve, the French believe; it’s more realistic to recognize that human behavior is murky and messy and, in the case of politicians in particular, often highly compartmentalized. So it’s pointless to make sweeping judgments about a person’s political valor by his or her private life – and it’s none of the public’s business, anyway.

That attitude, apparently, is now changing...