Where's the Gray Suit?

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An adviser to another Socialist challenger, former Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn, strikes a similar note. "What the polls measure is popularity, not competence," he says. "Socialists have a furious love of debate, and she's not debating. What does she think about debt, about foreign policy, about economic governance? You've got to talk about this stuff. And you can't talk to party activists like you do to public opinion."

Oh no? Royal thinks she can. She promises a bottom-up approach to an electorate disenchanted with France's élitist and sclerotic political culture. She stays away from the abstract nouns beloved of French intellectuals, and makes a very public point of listening instead to voters' concerns, often sent to her heavily-frequented website called, in sturdily nonideological fashion, Desires for the Future. Cavalierly breaching party doctrine, she advocates a tougher line on delinquents, wants to loosen widely circumvented rules requiring students to attend schools in their neighborhoods, and has even criticized the 35-hour workweek. "She is popular because she's a woman who has a nondoctrinaire stance toward politics," says Stéphane Rozès, director of the polling firm CSA-Opinions. "People see her as out to solve problems, while so many others, most of them men, are stuck in the fog of ideology."

That's a sense that has taken hold not just in the wider public, but among activists. Socialist Party membership rolls have almost doubled since the beginning of the year, and more of the newcomers are female, better educated and younger than the average. As a crowd filed into a desperately hot market hall in Rennes to hear Royal speak one evening this summer, Jean-Pierre Planckaert was at the back of the hall taking in new party applications. Party membership in the region had almost trebled since the beginning of the year, he said, "and the new members are 15 years younger on average than the old ones."

That isn't politics; that's evidence of fandom. "What's interesting about Ségolène to many of us is that she's a modern woman who has kept a lot of traditional attributes," says Eliane Obis, a teacher and deputy mayor in the Toulouse suburb of Montrabe. "She's not a woman who seems to be a man." Catherine Le Guen, a marketing executive from Bordeaux who just joined the Socialist Party, says she is drawn to the way Royal "doesn't pontificate, but touches sensitivities. And she doesn't epitomize careerism, like other candidates."

Well: yes and no. In truth, Royal's career has always been politics. Born in Dakar, Senegal, the daughter of a French army officer, she grew up as the fourth of eight children in a large house in Lorraine, not far from that of her paternal grandfather, an army general. Her father's regime was a strict one (the family had to sing Gregorian chants on Sundays). Royal was sent to a Catholic boarding school and the University of Nancy before attaining the classical educational polish of the French political élite: a degree from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris ("Sciences Po") and another from the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ena), where her class included the current Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, and her partner, Hollande. They met there in 1978 and had their first child in 1984.