SEVEN YEARS ago this month, Paris Match reporter Valérie Trierweiler was standing in the scrum of journalists gathered outside the French prime minister’s office in Paris for the arrival of the new incumbent, Dominique de Villepin.
As the cameramen jostled in the courtyard for the best shot of the man of the moment, Trierweiler caught a glimpse of the politician’s wife, Marie-Laure, discreetly taking in the scene from behind a curtain.
“I said to myself that I wouldn’t like to be in her position, required to be there yet at a remove from what was happening,” Trierweiler recalled this week. “She looked so sad.”
When François Hollande formally becomes president of France in a ceremony at the Élysée Palace this morning, Trierweiler will find herself on the other side of the velvet rope, cast in a role she gives every sign of assuming with trepidation.
Two weeks ago, she could ride her bicycle around Paris unnoticed or do her shopping at the local supermarket without a second thought.
In a few days, all that has changed. Despite her pleas to be left alone, a bank of photographers has taken up residence outside the apartment she shares with Hollande in Paris.
She has been assigned a security detail and control of her diary has been transferred to the Élysée.
From today, she can expect to become one of France’s most recognisable public figures, her every word parsed, her gestures scrutinised and her fashion choices pored over.
Trierweiler, at 47, is about to become one of the lead characters in a drama she has spent her professional life describing.
It is a transition she approaches tentatively, telling journalists she has yet to figure out what she will make of it all. But already Trierweiler represents a break with the past.
For the first time in France, the incoming presidential couple are not man and wife. She may turn out to be the first “first lady” with a job, if she sticks to her pledge to keep working as a journalist to provide for her three teenage children from a previous marriage.
“I have no intention of raising my children at the state’s expense,” she said. “My financial independence, as for millions of French women, is a concrete reality and a priority.”
Trierweiler grew up in a family she describes as belonging to the “impoverished bourgeoisie”. Her father lost his leg at the age of 12 while playing with an unexploded shell during the second World War. They lived in a council house in Angers, and her mother did part-time work as a cashier at a local skating rink.
One of six brothers and sisters, Trierweiler moved to Paris to attend university and in 1989 was taken on as a political reporter at Paris Match, where she still works. Assigned to cover the Socialist Party, she got to know Hollande as he rose through the ranks and they have been together since 2005; openly so since 2007, when Hollande’s relationship with fellow socialist Ségolène Royal was publicly ended.
After the glamour of Carla Bruni and the homely reserve of Bernadette Chirac, Trierweiler also promises a stylistic break with the template set by previous French “first ladies”.
She has said she has no interest in the limelight and will happily do all “the necessary smiling”, but has also made it clear she does not see herself as a decorative puppet.
For inspiration, she looks to Hillary Clinton or Danielle Mitterrand, the activist wife of the late French president François Mitterrand.
“I think it will be easier for me at the Élysée than it was for Carla Bruni,” she said. “She came from a world totally alien to that of politics. She did not necessarily know the political codes.”
Trierweiler is steeped in politics, and played a central role in Hollande’s campaign. She was at his side constantly as he toured the country and had her own office at the campaign headquarters.
She recently recalled the advice she gave her partner when he first asked her whether he should run for the presidency: “If you think there is someone better than you for the job, don’t do it. If you’re the best, do.”
Just as Hollande positioned himself as “Mr Normal” and the antithesis of Sarkozy-era “bling”, Trierweiler styles herself as a woman of simple tastes. She told a women’s magazine she buys clothes at the market and that the only big-label designer dress she has worn was borrowed for an Élysée Palace dinner 20 years ago.
But in at least one respect Hollande and Trierweiler’s life for the next five years will not be as normal as they had hoped. The couple’s plan to stay in their apartment rather than move to the Élysée has met stern resistance from the presidential security service.
“They would have to block the street and check every resident in the building going in and out. It’s difficult,” said Trierweiler.
“We’ll need some time to work all of this out.”
