Bruno Le Maire must have a prodigious capacity for work. He combines a very demanding position, as French Minister of Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty, with his activity as a writer. The publication of his latest novel, Fugue américaine, has given rise to a brief erotic fragment. The mockery has been joined by the new debate on whether a politician with such high responsibilities can dedicate time to producing literature.
The controversy surrounding Le Maire comes a few weeks after the one that starred a secretary of state and former minister, Marlène Schiappa, for giving an interview and posing for Playboy magazine. These are episodes that can harm the Government and President Emmanuel Macron himself because they convey a sensation of a certain frivolity at a time of strong social unrest due to the unpopular pension reform.
Le Maire, 54, who joined Macron’s team in 2017 from the right, is among the possible candidates for the Élysée in 2027. His position is very important because it also covers supervision of the digital world, with its implications economic and legal. His presence in the Executive from the first hour has given stability. He is a well-known face for the markets and in institutions such as the EU or the IMF.
Fugue américaine, 480 pages long, is the fifth book in four years. It is dedicated to the Russian-born American pianist Vladimir Horowitz. It is “a hymn to classical music”, according to Le Figaro. It has received good reviews. It includes a very explicit fragment of eroticism, set in Cuba, in which a woman says she is very excited, “dilated like never before” and shows her breasts to her lover lying on her bed.
The problem for Le Maire is that his work and the erotic part have been discussed in a difficult economic situation, just when the credit rating agency Fitch has lowered the solvency note for France, a hard blow for a country with high self-esteem . Deputy François Ruffin, from La France Insoumisa (LFI, radical left), estimated that a minister of the Economy in a country with so many problems, including rampant inflation “should not have a minute, an hour, or a week of his time to devote to writing a book”.
The minister has defended himself and described his new novel as a “great human adventure”. “Read the book,” he said in an interview with the France Info radio station. “Nothing will ever limit my freedom to write.” “Between freedom and censorship, I have always chosen freedom.” According to the head of Economy, “politics is a necessary commitment, but there is nothing worse than politics devouring everything”, so “you can have a life alongside politics and a life outside of politics”.
Le Maire is the author of fifteen books. As a young man he wrote, under a pseudonym (“Duc William”), stories with erotic content for a publishing house. It is not the first time that this activity has interfered with politics. Almost twenty years ago, in Le ministre, he included an intimate scene with his wife since 1998, the painter Pauline Doussau de Basignan, with whom he has four children. Pauline’s hand that gently caressed my sex”. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy once alluded to Le Maire, in a tone of derogatory humor, saying that he had read a book in which he masturbated.
