When François Hollande stepped down as French president after a term marked by rock-bottom ratings, government infighting and a notably turbulent love life, many assumed that he would quietly disappear.
Yet, here he is, six years later, sitting in a grand office near the Louvre in central Paris, offering his analysis of the riots that have shaken his country and warning other nations not to be too smug about them.
He says the violence witnessed in France in recent days is the work of a generation rendered socially dysfunctional by the Covid lockdowns and impoverished by inflation, and he believes that similar tensions could erupt elsewhere, including in Britain.
At 68, Hollande is past the legal French retirement age, even after President Macron’s contested decision to raise it from 62 to 64 this year.
However, as he takes swipes at his successor, whom he implicitly suggests has nourished the violent streak in French society by contributing to a loss of faith in democracy, he does not sound like someone planning to spend the rest of their days looking after the grandchildren. Indeed, it is difficult to escape the sense that he still has hopes of making a comeback amid a centre-left revival in France.
The scenario seems far-fetched given that his socialist movement is in ruins and his image remains shaped by the paparazzi photographs of him slipping out of the presidency on a motorcycle to see Julie Gayet, the actress who was his mistress and is now his wife.
Yet Hollande could be forgiven for clinging to unlikely dreams. When he ran for the Élysée in 2012, five years after Ségolène Royal, the mother of his three children, had stood and lost in the second round to Nicolas Sarkozy, pollsters gave next to no hope.
Nevertheless, he became only the second left-winger to win a French presidential election on the back of a tax-and-spend manifesto that proved popular with voters but a millstone in office. It all ended badly, with economic realities forcing him into U-turns that split the ruling coalition and undermined his popularity to such an extent that he renounced running for a second term, leaving the path free for Macron, his former economy minister, to take his place.
Hollande now counsels Sir Keir Starmer against making the same mistake, saying the Labour leader should promise only what he can deliver, notably on health and education, which he believes to be as decisive in Britain as it is in France. “The problem with the French left is always that we promise too much, hence the disappointment which follows,” he says.
The former president was always known for his wit and charm, and he appears to have lost none as he welcomes me with a smile and speaking in English. He has recently been taking lessons.
Our interview was supposed to focus on international politics after the publication of Bouleversements, his latest book, on the new world order. Yet the agenda has been overturned by the riots that have reverberated across France after a police officer shot dead Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old from the Paris suburb of Nanterre, at point-blank range at the wheel of his car. Even by the standards of a nation well used to violence, the latest outbreak has been extreme, with arson attacks on more than 1,000 premises, from shops to town halls, and including at least 250 police stations.
There have been comparisons with the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but Hollande plays them down. He says it would be an “insult” to French police to suggest they may behave like the officers who suffocated Floyd. He concedes that young people from ethnic minorities growing up in France’s troubled suburbs view themselves as the victims of discrimination but argues that if they are stopped and searched more than their counterparts in wealthy neighbourhoods, it is because there is more criminal activity on their council estates and not because of “systemic racism” in the police.
Hollande also notes that France has not seen the emergence of anything like the Black Lives Matter movement that followed Floyd’s death.
“After the drama [of Nahel’s death], the first reaction was doubtless one of emotion and solidarity but very quickly it degenerated and the motives were no longer solidarity with the young man but an opportunity for robbery and looting,” he says.
He adds that the rioting was exacerbated by social media that encouraged copycat actions and produced a “domino effect as the nights got more and more violent, with youths who knew nothing about the Nahel affair allowing themselves to be carried along”. Drug dealers and other criminals also got involved, seizing the opportunity to persuade rioters, the average age of whom is 17, to destroy CCTV and other equipment that hinders their trafficking, he says.
Hollande places the destruction in the context of a generation marked by lockdowns that “shut away part of this youth, which withdrew in on itself, in on its neighbourhoods, in on its networks, in on its communities and that led to a loss of openness, of discipline and of the rules of life in society”.
Inflation has not helped. “This made part of the population poorer and so when there was the unleashing of violence, there was also a desire to go and get goods that you cannot buy in ordinary times. It was not a politically structured social movement, it was an opportunity . . . to break into shops and take everything inside.”
Could other countries, such as the UK, with their own experience of lockdowns and inflation, face similar unrest? He believes so. “Those people who sometimes look at us with a little irony should tell themselves that the same thing could happen there. The images [of the riots] do not only circulate between Paris, Lyon and Marseilles, they also circulate in the towns and cities of the UK, Germany, the US.”
He says the response to the riots should focus on the education system and involve more funding for schools in poor neighbourhoods, as well as social mobility to give pupils hope of moving out. He suggests that Macron has left les banlieues to their own devices after commissioning a report that recommended a €48 billion investment — only to ditch the document. “It was abandoned,’’ Hollande says. “I don’t know if it would have prevented what we have just witnessed if it had been implemented.”
He adds: “The response of the elected representatives in these areas was to say that because the report was abandoned, we too have been abandoned.” He says they are right to the extent that, under Macron, urban regeneration has been limited to the “renovation of certain sites”.
The riots are by no means the only disturbance confronted by Macron since taking office in 2017. In 2018 the largely provincial yellow vests held weeks of violent protests over what they perceived as growing inequalities. Earlier this year tensions over Macron’s pension reform became so acute that the King’s state visit was postponed.
Hollande admits that France has a history of violence but says things were getting better until Macron’s emergence signalled the collapse of the traditional parties of the centre left and the centre right. He says this has given French voters an unenviable choice between the president’s centrist movement, which he describes as inexistent, and extremists on both sides. Democracy has been weakened, and radicalism reinforced.
“When you no longer believe in the ballot box, when you do not think that democracy can resolve your problems, you turn to violence,” he says.
With the remnants of his socialist party engaged in an alliance with ultra leftists that he believes are unelectable, the main beneficiary, in the short term, will be Marine Le Pen, the right-wing populist National Rally figurehead, he says. “The most widespread sentiment [in France] is fear; fear that the country is losing its way, fear of disorder, fear of immigration,” he says. “[Le Pen] uses fear but she also embodies it.”
Hollande suggests that French society can best be pacified, and Le Pen stopped, by a return to the two-party system and, notably, the relaunch of a credible centre-left movement. When asked if he could take its leadership again, he kicks the question into touch, although not before mentioning the need to “enchant the population to give it the desire to choose its destiny” — a reworking of a campaign slogan he used in 2012.
“You have a lot of problems in the UK, including Brexit, but you still have a political life. I think that what you invented a long time ago you should keep and reproduce for as long as possible because, when you are unhappy with a government — and that can happen in the UK — you can opt for the opposing camp.”
What about Brexit? An incredulous look crosses Hollande’s face. “What have the British lost? They have lost an influence that was great in the EU, they have lost competitiveness that was stimulated by the EU, they have lost an ability to weigh politically in the EU. What have they gained? They have more bureaucratic procedures than they had before and more constraints on their movement.”
He was in office when David Cameron was seeking concessions from EU leaders to convince Britain to vote to stay in the bloc. Hollande, a committed European, says that if Cameron had done a Thatcher and asked for a rebate, he may have got it. But he says the former prime minister wanted to end freedom of movement to curtail EU immigration into the UK, and that this was an attack on its core values.
Hollande adds that Brexit has settled the debate about a Frexit. “If there was a referendum in France today, no one would campaign in favour of leaving. Thanks to the British, the populist parties, the extremist parties, which used to say they wanted to leave the EU, now no longer want to leave.”
He says populists such as Le Pen have also changed their tune about Russia. She used to like to be seen with President Putin and would cast herself as a French version of the Kremlin strongman. Hollande says the invasion of Ukraine has forced Le Pen to rethink and she is now keen to downplay her ties with Putin.
It was during his presidency that, in 2014, Russian-backed separatists sparked a conflict in the Donbas, which, together with Angela Merkel, the then German chancellor, he sought to limit by overseeing an agreement between Kyiv and Moscow. He denies that they were naive, saying it was important to “freeze” the war because the Ukrainian army was vulnerable.
Hollande says: “This time Putin made a mistake because he underestimated our capacity to respond and especially that of the Ukrainians and now that he has committed an irredeemable act, the only balance of power that can be imposed on him is military. There can be no possible negotiated solution before there has been Ukrainian progress on the battlefields and so the only thing we can do today is to offer massive help to the Ukrainians to reconquer the most possible territory.”
Might we conclude that Hollande’s position is closer to Boris Johnson’s than that of Macron, who tried to talk Putin out of invading Ukraine and continued to telephone the Russian leader after he did so?
Hollande raises his eyebrows in an expression that suggests he has no wish to be compared with Johnson but says: “What is true is that the UK, which has had three prime ministers during this period, has been coherent. It helped Ukraine straight away when the Europeans . . . still thought that Putin was going to stop.”
Why did EU leaders get it wrong in the run-up to the invasion? “We don’t like war and we think that reason will carry the day. Emmanuel Macron did everything possible to woo Putin for a time until the day Putin . . . decided to invade Ukraine and then, after a few weeks, Emmanuel Macron understood that we had to be tough, and now he is tough.”
