In the middle of the afternoon yesterday I felt a strange sad mood settle over me like a stubborn cloud, and I could find, at first, no explanation for it. I went about my work, spoke to colleagues, rode the bus home, under my little cartoon-character cloud. Only when I’d relaxed, in various ways, did another metaphorical meteorological phenomenon reveal the reasons for my cloud: a bolt from the blue told me it was because of the presidential debate we had watched earlier that day at work, during lunch and even well beyond.

The French presidential debate, that is; not the Democratic or Republican ones that have been taking place months before any nominations have been decided. No, this was a serious, unusual debate between the two final candidates to determine the outcome of Sunday’s vote, and the next five years or more in a country already very uneasy with its present.
I won’t sum up the debate or even go into the politics; there are better websites and newspapers for all that. Most of you will be reading this after the fact anyway, and we’ll all know by then who is Président(e). No, I want to tell you what made me gloomy.

I will not hide that I have supported Ségolène Royal all along. Perhaps for some of the wrong reasons, but they are my reasons: the party she represents, the fact she’s a woman. The fact that I do not like Nicolas Sarkozy or his predictably old-boy politics. Et cetera. There are things I don’t like about Ségo but as a rule there are always things one doesn’t like about a candidate. Gore too stiff. Kerry too French. Hillary too strident. Ségo demonstrated some of those things, to me, in her debate: at times she was like some junior Shakespearean actress, oozing false sincerity. Berk. But at other times she was genuine, impassioned. And she held her turf, while her adversary merely lobbed scathing “Madames” at her (a Frenchman saying Madame in an unfriendly situation is about the same as a dog owner saying “Sit!”)…at least Ségo was always courteous enough to say “Monsieur Sarkozy,” even if she was pushy at other times. (One wonders if she would ever call him “Nicolas” in private…)

She held her turf, she convinced me that she could be a competent, if unenlightened, president. I did not even expect to like her that much, to be honest. But she showed that she cared about people—women and children above all.

After the debate was over I stood around with my French colleagues, discussing, comparing. The undecided seemed to have made up their minds. One young man enthused about Ségo; another said there was no way he could vote for her. “She’s incoherent, she knows nothing about the nuclear industry! And she went on and on and on! She gave no figures–where is she going to get the money?! Sarko, at least, he sets out what he’s going to do. You can see he’s a man of action. I don’t like him, but I like her even less. It would be a catastrophe with someone like her!”

What I realized—the reason for my storm-cloud—is that this young man, like other, older men with whom I’d discussed the debate, didn’t get it. He simply didn’t hear what she was saying, he didn’t understand what she was trying to say. Her discourse was that of a woman; Sarkozy spoke like a typical man, with his list of things to do, his numbers, his frosty Madame. Her discourse, and delivery, ventured over the line into the emotional, and into caring not about business, or purchasing power, but about real people—laid-off teachers, handicapped children, struggling adolescents. And it is true that like many women she talked a lot, perhaps too much to say the same thing (Sarkozy conceded three minutes extra to her in the debate)–this might be nerves, the need to get the point across, to be taken seriously. But many men won’t hear the important emotional, and social, let alone political content of her words: it’s not important to them. Or let’s just say that traditionally, throughout history, men have not heard women’s political discourse, when its content differs from theirs. Margaret Thatcher was an honorary man, as we all know; my argument doesn’t apply. I don’t speak German well enough to know what Angela Merkel is about. But the difference between a man’s reception/perception of Madame Royal’s speech and Monsieur Sarkozy’s was absolutely clear to me. And left me with a kind of hopelessness.

Her campaign advisers could have given her lessons in how to speak like a male politician. Or how to not mention the world’s unfortunates, even if she is a socialist and is supposed to have their interests in mind. She could have buffed up on her nuclear figures, and had a whole budget ready for those undecided voters susceptible to male discourse in things political. But then she wouldn’t have been herself; as it was, I got the feeling she had been groomed quite a bit already.

I had thought France was ready for a présidente; now I’m no longer sure. French may be the most feminine and emotional of languages, but Madame Royal and Monsieur Sarkozy do not speak the same French. Above all, what some people heard (and whose vote will cancel mine) was not at all what was being said—and that’s the tragedy (and no small reason to draw a cloud over one’s head). That we—femmes et hommes—still understand each other so very poorly.

P.S. Note that in the photograph above she is looking at him, and he is looking at his audience…