Forgiveness yes, but forgetting, no. In an interview with Guillaume Pley, the former minister and presidential candidate recounts how, twenty years ago, she endured her partner's double life.

a wound that's still open. In 2018, Ségolène Royal already recounted this in her book, "What I Can Finally Tell You."   "The violence of adultery" that she discovered in 2005: her partner François Hollande was cheating on her with journalist Valérie Trierweiler. A shock all the more difficult to bear as she was under the pressure of the presidential campaign in which she was the Socialist Party candidate.

She revisited this period on Legend , a show hosted by Guillaume Pley on YouTube. "I'm suffering from this bigamy," she told the host. "What the French don't see is that I'm keeping quiet during the presidential campaign; I have to deal with this, on top of raising my four children."

And she pointed the finger at the attitude of François Hollande, then head of the Socialist Party, who remained aloof. "He was supposed to support me as my partner, as the father of my children, and as the First Secretary of the Socialist Party, and I'm suffering the consequences," she confided. " Every day, I told myself: 'It's going to get better, it's going to stop, he's going to realize the cruelty and absurdity of the situation, he's going to say to himself, 'I messed up, I'm getting back on track,' but no."

"Will you marry me?"

Ségolène Royal had tried everything to save her relationship, even going so far as to ask François Hollande to marry her during the TF1 program "Sagas" in the summer of 2006. "We love each other, I'm waiting for François to propose," she declared to the camera, putting her partner on the spot. "François, will you marry me?" And seeing his embarrassment, she added: "You see, he's still hesitating."

We know what happened next: she lost the 2007 presidential election to Nicolas Sarkozy and officially announced their separation in the aftermath, ending a love story of nearly thirty years during which she and François Hollande climbed the steps of power together.

“I think those around her didn’t play their part,” she explains today in Legend, denouncing a climate of misogyny within her own socialist camp. “They should have told her: ‘If you behave like that, you’re leaving the campaign, leave her alone.’ If it had been the other way around, a man running for president with a wife who’s off jetting off somewhere else, leaving the children behind and not even supporting him, they would have said: ‘She’s out!’”

Since then, much water has flowed under the bridge: François Hollande eventually left Valérie Trierweiler for the actress Julie Gayet, whom he married, and Ségolène Royal went her own way, sharing her life for a time with the economist Bruno Colmant. "Now, I've recovered," she confided after the release of her book in which she revisited her wounds. "The very act of writing it was good for me. And I'm not the only one; I thought it could help other women too." She concluded: "I've forgiven, but I haven't forgotten."