The Spectator’s Notes: French presidents used to have a touch of the monarch. Not any more

When I interviewed Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former president of France, for my biography of Margaret Thatcher, I asked him why, when she lunched with him at the Elysée Palace for the first time, he had been served before her: she had been offended. M. Giscard explained that no slight had been intended. It was a matter of protocol — the president is the head of state, the British prime minister only the head of government. ‘You must remember,’ he added, ‘that the president is in the line of sovereigns.’ I recalled these words when reading about President Hollande and his amorous adventures in his helmet. To the British, it is a puzzle that French presidents are protected from the media scrutiny we inflict on our own leaders. We tend to explain the difference by resorting to national stereotypes about Gallic lovers. Surely the ‘line of sovereigns’ point is more important. In creating the Fifth Republic, General de Gaulle consciously reclaimed kingship: ‘I have re-established the monarchy in my favour,’ he said. If the president is the king, an attack on him is an attack on France, so his privacy is a matter of state. Besides, kings, by unwritten right, were free to do whatever they wanted sexually. It was an expression of their power. So any attempt by the media to impede M. Hollande’s scooter and send him back home to what the Today programme oddly called ‘the First French Lady’ (by no means his first, actually) is not just cheeky journalism: it is almost unconstitutional. The trouble nowadays, though, is that the faith of the French in their monarchy is weakening. The president’s term is shorter than it was, and this president has made a mess of the economy. Now his grandeur is comically impaired. When he spoke of re-establishing the monarchy, De Gaulle went on to say this: ‘but after me, no one will be able to impose himself upon the country’.