The Attack of the Giant Lobsters

The ministers of the French government are housed in the great hôtels of Paris, the 18th century residences built by the nobility to escape from the king’s oppressive presence in Versailles.  They are lavish homes, with separate wings that lend themselves to a division of functions–public rooms, offices, living quarters–furnished from the Mobilier national of the state, and with vast private gardens in the middle of Paris.  They are also a visual representation of the elites, both then and now.  This reality was apparent early in the Gilets Jaunes crisis, when François de Rugy, Minister of Ecological Transition in Macron’s administration, met with spokespersons Eric Drouet and Priscillia Ludoski in the Hôtel de Roquelaure.  The meeting was supposed to be behind closed doors, but Drouet secretly filmed it and posted it on Facebook.  What struck many who watched this interview was the sheer sumptuousness of the public rooms of the ministry, as opposed to the financial struggles that had brought thousands of Gilets Jaunes into the streets.   Surely those who lived in these surroundings, spent their lives in settings of bygone luxury and excess, must come to see themselves as special and unbounded by rules. (On the other hand, what else would you do with all those palaces?)

Worse still, the images of grandeur emphasized the themes of the media scandal that soon enveloped Rugy and his new wife, Séverine Servat, a journalist. (They had met only a few months before he became president of the National Assembly, his post before his Ministry.)  She decided to write a book about their ordeal, titled La Marche du Crabe (The Crab Walk).   Her book is an honest attempt to capture the problems of living in a fishbowl–both in public and in the distinctly non-private quarters of the National Assembly and then of the Ministry of Ecological Transition: “I don’t remember ever having turned on music or dancing in this supposed private apartment,” she wrote of the first location. “It did not lend itself to these sorts of liberties. I self-censored. . . . In the course of days and weeks, I no longer lived in a home, but in a kind of giant office” (Servat de Rugy, p. 41). She continued her work as a journalist for Gala, a People-like magazine, taking the metro every morning by herself; when she was with François, they were followed by police escorts.

Her previous life soon intruded. Early in their marriage, Servat de Rugy attempted to stop a book written by the new partner, Émilie Frèche, of her son’s father, on the grounds that the bratty, awful child in Frèche’s obvious roman à clef was meant to be her son.  She herself was portrayed as a “manipulative mother and a bit of an hysteric,” which she also did not care for (Causeur.fr, July 17, 2019).

Nor would I.

As Servat de Rugy tells us, she came to an agreement with the publisher, by which each copy of Frèche’s book, Vivre Ensemble (Living Together) would include the following statement:

Madame Séverine Servat de Rugy, considering that some passages of the present work repeatedly infringe upon the intimacy of her private life and that of her minor child–which has been challenged by the author [of the book], who [nevertheless] acknowledges to have naturally drawn a part of her inspiration from her lived experiences, notably familial, and then to have fictionalized and exacerbated the traits of various personnages,–desires the insertion of the present notice (Servat de Rugy, p. 137).

That certainly must have made things better. 

(And the statement itself, by the way, is as awkward as the translation.)

The father, Jérôme Guedj (at 1:20 in the video), appears rather self-pitying: she tried to present herself as “Mother Courage,” he says, and made him sound like a bad father just because he did not object to an unflattering portrait of his son in a novel (https://youtu.be/Fx9M_CCQk3g, September 4, 2018). “From the moment Séverine learned that I shared my life with Émilie, she sent me hundreds of insulting texts,” he added gallantly (Causeur.fr, July 17, 2019).

And then there was her I Love Lucy moment, when she “infiltrated” an environmental protest in front of the Ministry of Ecological Transition–her husband’s ministry, and their home. The police, exhausted by weeks of the Gilets Jaunes protests, surrounded her. She was embarrassed, she says, by the need to show her identification card, allowing her to escape within (Servat de Rugy, pp. 163-164).

Altogether she sounds like a wacky fun friend, especially with her penchant for dramatic, brightly colored outfits. Unfortunately she and her husband were caught up in the fever of a media scandal, with very little scandal and way too much media.  But we’ll start from the beginning.

François de Rugy had been a deputy in the National Assembly since 2007, as a member of EELV (Europe Écologie–les Verts), the Green Party; he had also been the co-president of the small ecology group in the Assembly, and thus a frequent spokesman.  Halfway through Hollande’s term, the EELV had broken away from their alliance with the majority socialist party. Subsequently Rugy had formed his own microparty, consisting of environmentalists still in support of the Hollande government.  In the summer of 2016, he had announced his candidacy for the primary of la Belle Alliance populaire, the union of the left, dominated by Socialists (Le Monde, July 12, 2016).  Ultimately Benoît Hamon won the presidential primary and entered into an electoral alliance with the EELV primary victor, Yannick Jadot.  Rugy had pledged his support to the eventual winner of the socialist primary, but on February 22, 2017, he switched his support to Macron and joined his LREM party (Le Monde, February 22, 2017).  He was elected to the presidency of the National Assembly, a five-year position with considerable influence and prestige; the president presides over the Assembly and its bureaucracy, works with the executive, and is a leading figure in the French government. He received well over the needed majority of votes:

Servat de Rugy had watched this scene, live, on her computer (p. 71). She realized, though they had not yet married–that would happen in December–that her life had changed. She moved into the residence in the Hôtel de Lassay.

The Palais Bourbon, of which the Hôtel de Lassay is a part, had passed through the hands of a number of owners related to the royal family, but the most significant was the Prince de Condé, the descendent of the 17th century military hero, the Great Condé. The late-eighteenth century prince had spent his fortune in raising an army in a futile attempt to reestablish the monarchy after the revolution had begun. Napoleon had later kidnapped his grandson and executed him, thus snuffing out his family line, an act universally considered barbaric. Either Talleyrand or Fouché–I’ve seen it credited to both, and either could have said it–had pronounced that executing Condé’s grandson had been “not just a crime, but a blunder.” The building became the home of the National Assembly (in the past called Chamber of Deputies) during the July Monarchy, and was refurbished from time to time (i.e., the Delacroix ceiling).

Despite the grandeur of the hôtel de Lassay, there was no private kitchen in the apartment, but rather an executive chef and a palace kitchen; they wanted light meals for their dinner, but “we ate what we were given.”  There was no central heating, but they made do with space heaters on wheels.  There was no privacy; she was surrounded by the constant murmuring of voices nearby, sometimes rising in volume.  In the Hôtel de Roquelaure, the Ministry of Ecological Transition, she found walls marked by the paintings of previous owners, a general dilapidation of the finishings. She also listened to the “incessant mouse ballet” behind the walls (Servat de Rugy, pp. 33-45).

Bruno Le Maire, currently the Minister of Economy and Finance for Macron, was previously the Minister of Agriculture for President Nicolas Sarkozy.  He kept a daily journal, noting at one point that on November 20, 2010, he had been awakened by a mouse scratching behind the wall.  He punched the wall and it stopped. “Two or three minutes passed.  Scarcely had I gotten back to sleep, than the scratching began again, timid, scarcely that of a nail scraping a bark, than the scratching gained in power and obstinacy, it was digging for I don’t know what in the wood, at a more and more rapid speed, almost frenetic.” (Le Maire, p. 30).  He was in the Hôtel de Villeroy, a 17th century building, and thus a century older than the rest.

Servat de Rugy would have preferred Bercy, the new Ministry of Economics and Finance built in the 1980s out of glass and concrete, and with its own boat launch to carry ministers into the center of government by way of the river, allowing them to avoid traffic.  Jean Arthuis, appointed in 1995, was one of the earliest to live there, and found it cold and sterile (though, as he acknowledged, with incredible views).  He also liked being on the water, but he was forced to go more slowly when the waves he created regularly rocked nearby houseboats (Arthuis, pp. 18-20).

I digress; but the point is that ministers and their families live, if they choose, in private apartments in the palaces of the old nobility, that these apartments sometimes need maintenance as would any 200-year-old structure, and that because the homes are a part of the national patrimony, any repairs must be within the parameters, and according to the judgment, of the bureaucracy tasked to watch over historic heritage buildings. 

François de Rugy’s ordeal began on July 10, 2019, with the first exposé by Mediapart (Mediapart, July 10, 2019).  The journal claimed that in 2017 and 2018, while de Rugy was President of the National Assembly, the couple had entertained their friends with lavish dinners, all at the expense of the taxpayers.  “This débauche of state dinners, essentially organized by Séverine de Rugy, journalist of Gala, has taken on such proportions that it has provoked the indignation of certain functionaries of the National Assembly,” they wrote, as if speaking of Marie Antoinette, adding that they had “documents, photos, and witness statements” about the couple’s abuses of their station.  The photos–the same ones to be reproduced again and again on old and new media, and visible in the link here–consisted of a photo of Séverine in front of a 500-euro bottle of Mouton-Rothschild 2004, and a plate of five large lobsters on an elegantly set table.  “For the fortunate guests, essentially the friends of Séverine de Rugy and her husband, the result was luxury and voluptuousness under the gilding–and at the cost–of the republic: crystal glasses, porcelain, small golden spoons, chandeliers, tableware, floral bouquets composed for the occasion according to the color chosen by Madame.”  Moreover, and in a nice populist touch, the journal reported that the kitchen and service personnel of the Hôtel de Lassay had been forced to work late into the night to satisfy the excessive demands of the couple.  Mediapart claimed that they could identify ten such dinners between October 2017 and June 2018, which each had included between ten and thirty people.  

In this initial article, they paraphrased a response by de Rugy, who spoke of “‘informal dinners, linked to the exercise of his functions, with personalities from civil society’ . . . all while insisting that the expenses of entertaining at the hôtel de Lassay had been 13% lower [than the year before].”  Mediapart seems not to have investigated his assertion that he had been frugal. A member of his “entourage” also insisted that the dinners had been small, including those “from the economic, media, cultural, scientific, university worlds,” and reflected his desire to hear what regular people were saying.  Mediapart summed it all up as ”Pals from [television and radio] and journalism, directors and producers, people in finance, B-list actresses and writers . . . (sic).”

One of the attendees who was willing to go on record was Jean-Michel Aphatie, a journalist of Europe 1 and France 5, who said he had gotten the invitation through his wife, who was Séverine’s friend.  “I hesitated to go, because if lunch is a work space, dinner is an ambiguous space.  But I said yes . . . I quickly understood that it did not make a lot of sense for me to be there.  It was not a working dinner.”  (His wife is Stéphanie Videau-Apathie, in communications and publicity.)  Aphatie hastily scurried for shelter from the media storm, even if he was only a plus-one.

But Mediapart understood the game: don’t reveal everything all at once, but shingle the series of revelations, each one building on the previous story, creating an impression of endless revelations to come, to the point that the pressure mounts and becomes irresistible.

On the very same day, and in another posting, Mediapart noted the absolute silence of the members of the majority LREM, apparently stunned by the “symbolic power of the images of the giant lobsters” (Mediapart, July 10, 2019).  

On July 11, they published another revelation that de Rugy’s executive assistant, Nicole Klein, had kept an HLM (subsidized housing) in Paris since 2001, even though for much of that time she had not lived in Paris.  The manager of the HLM, 1001 Vies Habitat, stated that the State had generally taken anywhere up to 30% of his apartments for the use of functionaries who were based in Paris, as she had been in 2001, and was again.  But she had kept the place for too long, and de Rugy fired her immediately (Mediapart, July 11, 2019).

The firing made their next revelation particularly awkward.  On July 11 (again), Mediapart reported that de Rugy had rented an appartement à vocation sociale in a suburb outside of Nantes, his constituency.  The term refers to a privately owned apartment with low rents for those in straitened circumstances, an institution originating with nineteenth-century charities.  The more famous HLMs are subsidized housing units funded by the state, but the principle behind the two types is the same: low-cost housing for struggling families.  Moreover, the journal added, de Rugy had violated the rules of the place: the small apartment had to be his “primary residence,” which was no longer the case since he had become president of the National Assembly and lived in the palace (Mediapart, July 11, 2019; see Le Journal du Dimanche, July 12, 2019, for an explanation of the apartment’s status; see also Le Figaro, July 11, 2019 for a summary of the state of the scandal on this, the second day).

The journal had sent de Rugy a list of questions about this apartment, which he had answered, also posting this information on his facebook page.  He stated that he had “NEVER” been informed of the special status of the apartment.  He had rented it at the time of his divorce, and used it to stay with his two children, ages 15 and 7, during his visitation rights (their mother had primary custody and still lived in Nantes).  He posted emails of his exchanges with the realtors.  Mediapart followed with a detailed exposition of the size of the apartment, the level of income for potential renters (which he was well above), and so on.  And the place had a terrace.  “Already entangled in the scandal of his lifestyle at the National Assembly and in the ministry, François de Rugy adds a new line to the affaire that bears his name” (Mediapart, July 11, 2019). It was Day 2.

Arguably the most significant revelations came from Le Parisien, which had been on his case a year earlier, in the summer of 2018, and whose journalists were no doubt kicking themselves for being scooped.  They had reported then that when de Rugy as president of the National Assembly had decided to have a holiday party for his office staff, they had come up with the idea of a raclette party, which would appear, from the following, to be the ultimate in comfort food.  

The Assembly kitchen, however, did not have the required bowls and spatulas and equipment, so they bought them for 200 euros.  De Rugy had also bought an elliptical trainer for 769 euros.  The Assembly had paid for both.  His staff had stated that he intended to leave all the items in the Assembly when he left, and in fact he had done so (Le Parisien, July 20, 2018).   

Le Parisien had something new to add a year later on July 11, 2019, the day following Mediapart’s revelations.  After rehashing their past discoveries, including a supposed “third chauffeur” to drive Séverine’s child to school (she firmly denied this, p. 183), they added something new: “The journalist”–in other words, Séverine–had acquired at public expense a hair dryer covered in gold leaf, for 499 euros.  (This is an actual thing: Dyson gold-leaf hairdryer).  Servat de Rugy claimed that she had simply asked for a Dyson, arguing that she was in the public eye, and this purchase was cheaper than a hairdresser would have been, but this is still somewhat questionable: don’t people buy their own hair dryers (Servat de Rugy, p. 182; Le Parisien, July 11, 2019)? 

Le Parisien’s  most important revelations, however, concerned the renovations to their apartment in the Hôtel de Roquelaure, the seat of the Ministry of Ecological Transition. These had cost over 63,000 euros, including 17,000 euros for the “famous dressing”–not a lavish dressing room, as implied, but a battery of closets in a hallway (Le Parisien, July 11, 2019).

De Rugy was in Deux-Sèvres on July 11, 2019, to discuss water resources with local officials, and was greeted by a small group holding a large plastic inflatable lobster and shouting “We want lobsters!”  Suddenly Prime Minister Édouard Philippe summoned him to Paris, forcing him to cancel the rest of his agenda (La Voix du Nord, July 11, 2019).  Le Monde reported that he had saved his position in the government after this interview.  He had been ordered to submit his dining expenses to the National Assembly and had declared that he would reimburse “each contested euro” to the government.  There would also be an examination of the renovation expenses.

“Lobstergate” (Homardgate) was blowing up, and those who disagreed were mostly silent or anonymous.  Libération believed he was done for.  They also noted the comments of Julien Bayou, spokesman (and now the head) of the EELV–which de Rugy had left–stating that he should resign because of his “lie” about working dinners–an indication of the infighting among the members of the various Green parties.  A former questeur (in charge of expenses, security) of the National Assembly, and a member of the conservative Les Républicains, was disgusted at what he considered the hypocrisy of the attack: “We put at the disposition of the president of the National Assembly a cave, a kitchen, and exceptional chefs who love to propose sensational dinners.  They are there.  In the residence.  It’s a non-affaire” (Libération, July 11, 2019). 

On the following morning, July 12, 2019, de Rugy was undergoing trial by Jean-Jacques Bourdin, the famous morning host of BFMTV. His voice shaking, he accused Mediapart of slander, and said that he would bring suit. In regard to his supposed social housing, he noted that he had provided the emails with his realtors as well as receipts to Mediapart, and they had simply ignored his response, continuing with their original assertion. It was not a rooting out of corruption, but simply a “fantasy of beheading” a government, any government. He declared that he would not resign.

Besides, he hated lobsters. Also oysters, champagne, and caviar.

De Rugy resigned on July 16, six days after the first revelations, four days after he said he would not resign, and a week before the investigations were completed. The headline of Paris Match was “François de Rugy’s descent into Hell” (Paris Match, July 18, 2019).

The secretary general of the National Assembly, Michel Moreau, was put in charge of the investigation of the dinners. He had begun his term in 2016 (and thus was present throughout de Rugy’s entire tenure). The Secretary General ensures correct parliamentary procedure, as well as the administrative functions of the Office of the National Assembly.  The individual in question is thus a functionary linked to the position rather than to a particular president; he sits next to the presiding officer and is particularly important for inexperienced presidents. The linked video in this article shows a secretary general in action (Libération, April 9, 2018).

Moreau’s Rapport du Secrétaire Général, July 2019 began with a detailed exposition of the procedures regarding expenses in the Assembly president’s office, undoubtedly meant to demonstrate that the Assembly was not careless in these matters.  One of the questeurs and a committee of 15 deputies representing all of the political groups in the Assembly provided oversight.  Once certified by these individuals, the list of expenditures was sent to the Cour des Comptes.  Budget line 6563, he stated, covered “expenses linked to dinners and receptions of all types organized at the Hôtel de Lassay and which do not have an international dimension.”  (At this point, he was simply showing off.)  The expenditures had shown that they had in fact spent substantially less than was allotted to them.  He noted, finally, that the expenses were not merely for the President’s dinners, but for the numerous events, including colloquia and formal receptions, that had nothing to do with the President of the Assembly but were simply held in that space.

The cave had its own budget line.  Wines were purchased en primeur, meaning very early, and before they had risen in value: a kind of speculative bet by an expert that a particular vintage would age well (see vins en primeur).  The de Rugy dinners had, then, served wines purchased under previous presidents.  He considered the menus to be what one would expect in terms of official entertainments.  There was nothing out of the ordinary in regard to decor; on a single occasion, the table was decorated “with a forest theme,” reusing items in storage. 

Secretary General Moreau further reported that he had met with de Rugy, in the presence of the déontologue of the National Assembly (the ethics watchdog) on Saturday, July 13, 2019, for nearly two hours.  He had focused on twelve dinners that were not obviously “official,” and de Rugy had shown him the guest lists and themes.  Of these twelve, nine dinners seemed within the norm, and six of these had had clear themes, including culture et media, the digital world, universities.  There was nothing special about the dinners, beyond the usual excellence of the culinary staff.

There were three, then, that were troublesome.  They included a family dinner with seven guests on Christmas Eve, of whom six were family members; Séverine later accused the seventh, last-minute guest of being the source of the exposé (Servat de Rugy, pp. 116-117).  Then there was a special Saint-Valentine’s dinner for the two of them, judged excessive in terms of normal private dinners.  The third dinner had four guests.  By the time the report came out, de Rugy had already resigned and announced that he would reimburse the state for those three dinners.

Mediapart, which provided a link to the report, wasn’t having it.  The report was a “farce” because the Secretary General was a former subordinate of de Rugy.  Moreau, furthermore, had worked from the guest lists provided by de Rugy; he had not consulted detailed breakdowns for each dinner, but merely the global account of all the expenses in the food line (they had no way of knowing this).  He had not questioned the guests, as Mediapart had done, unearthing the plus-one Apathie.  Moreau had not responded to Mediapart’s own inquiries, which were “crucial for gauging the seriousness of his investigations” (Mediapart, July 23, 2019).

Virginie Aubard, the controller-general of the army, carried out the investigation of the renovations of the hôtel de Roquelaure that housed the Ministry of Ecological Transition, again linked by Mediapart on their site (L’enquête sur les travaux).  

Aubard reported that the place had last been fully renovated in 2003, and “refreshed” in 2009; her report essentially justified the expenditures in the living quarters as necessary, though in some cases perhaps the finishings were “finer” than they needed to be.  The writers of Mediapart begged to disagree.  The cost of painting was too high, explained by the cost of painting the elaborate molding in a different color from that of the walls.  Certain of Rugy’s demands had been “pushed back”; they didn’t get the drapes he wanted.  Some of the furniture, instead of being “custom-built,” came from Ikea.  Indeed, Séverine reports that she had wanted Ikea closets, but the national heritage people had refused, insisting that the closets had to be made to measure (Servat de Rugy, pp. 44,m 184).  (Mediapart included a photo of the “fameux dressing” which suggests that Ikea might well have been preferable Mediapart, July 23, 2019).  They also criticized the justification for more closets: the three children (his two, her one), who would allegedly need the closets, were seldom there all together: the closets, they said, were for them.  For HER.

So he resigned. As Séverine wrote, “a life of conviction and political action [was] swept away by a photo of a lobster” (Servat de Rugy, p. 170)

Dominique Reynié, Professor at the elite Sciences Po, noted that de Rugy had indeed been cleared by the investigations: he had been frugal, the renovations had not been excessive, the apartment outside Nantes had not been “social” and he had not been “irregular” in his conduct.  “In fact,” he continued, “what should alarm us, [is that] the resignation was inevitable because of the sole fact of the media uproar, which took on the air of a manhunt.  This infernal machine is becoming familiar: a name is thrown out, he is publicly indicted, whether founded on not, unleashing an unsustainable pandemonium . . . The machine, delirious then devouring, has no need of truth, appearances alone suffice to feed it.  Suspicion becomes accusation, accusations are convictions” (Le Figaro, July 21, 2019).

François de Rugy had gone back to being deputy from Loire Atlantique, one of 577 in the National Assembly.  Séverine, who did not speak during the crisis, instead wrote a book, and entered in March 2020 into a modest interview circuit.  Of course, she noted, her husband had read the book–it was about him–and had not attempted to stop her.  Writing it had been “a way of absorbing the shock.”  She believed that, “In this affair, I had the impression that I was instrumentalized in a sexist fashion, as if I were a mistake.”

She knew who had been Mediapart’s source, because she had recognized the photos.  It was the only time they had served lobsters, on Christmas Eve; she had invited her “friend” to a family dinner because she was unhappy.  The woman had asked for interventions and introductions, favors, from de Rugy, and Séverine had said no.  She also argued that as environmental minister he was targeted by industry lobbyists.  He resigned without waiting for the reports largely because they were in the midst of a “violent social context” with the Gilets Jaunes.  He had become a problem (Le Journal du Dimanche, March 7, 2020).

She notes here that she had not spoken earlier because the episode had gone “beyond the rational.”  She had made a mistake: she had not shown the necessary caution in inviting the individual who betrayed them; she had not seen the potential dangers of “treason” in the situation.  She adds, finally, that ”Mediapart functions by denunciation.”

I like Mediapart. I don’t like their role in this story.

I don’t find de Rugy to be a particularly strong environmentalist. But it seems clear that he did not commit a crime. Not even a blunder.

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Arthuis, Jean. Dans les coulisses de Bercy. Paris: Albin Michel, 1998.

Le Maire, Bruno. Jours de Pouvoir. Paris: Gallimard, 2013.

Servat de Rugy, Séverine. La Marche du Crabe. Paris: Michel Lafon, 2020.