François Hollande’s ‘cabinet noir’: political myth or reality?

It’s just as well François Hollande won’t have the opportunity to meet Donald Trump in person before he leaves the Élysée Palace in early May. It will save the outgoing president of France any potential embarrassment. When Angela Merkel visited Washington earlier this month she stood in stony silence as the American president claimed in front of the world’s media that his predecessor, Barack Obama, was a serial phone tapper. As The Donald memorably quipped, just about the only thing he and the German chancellor had in common was the fact they’d both, allegedly, had their phones bugged by the Obama Administration.

Now it’s claimed Obama wasn’t the only western leader with a penchant for eavesdropping. A 240-page book published in France last week, Bienvenue Place Beauvau, [the address of the President’s office and the Ministry of Interior] alleges that phone-tapping is one of the many dark arts authorised by François Hollande in what is known in his inner circles as the ‘cabinet noir’.

Two of the book’s three authors are journalists for Le Canard Enchaîné, the weekly satirical newspaper that in February accused François