A ‘Normal’ President

Francois Hollande promised to be more morally upright than his predecessor, then cheated on his significant other. Doesn’t that make him a hypocrite? And is the French public’s overwhelming interest in the matter puritanical?

…it is not easy to feel much sympathy for M. Holland: not because, despite everything, he maintains his extremely dull exterior, but because he is a miserable little hypocrite. Before he was elected President he promised the French electorate that, if elected, he would be exemplary at all times and in all things, in obvious contradistinction to his predecessor, on behalf of whom even his most fervent supporters would not make no such claim. But a man who makes such a claim on his own behalf is either totally lacking in self-knowledge or, more likely, is an unprincipled scoundrel. (As Hamlet might have put it, a man may be dull, and dull, and be a villain.) A truly upright man does not go around proclaiming his uprightness. And if M. Hollande now rails against the Puritans, he ought to remember that it was he who accepted their values and code of conduct in the first place…

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