As Parisians deserted the capital in August for their sacrosanct summer holidays, French Prime Minister Fran?ois Bayrou remained stationed at his desk in an otherwise hushed H?tel de Matignon.
The 74-year-old veteran centrist leading a fragile minority government has never liked idleness, people who know him say, a trait that stems from his childhood as a farmer’s son in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Instead, he has embarked on a solitary ascent of another mountain: “the Himalaya” of national debt that he has repeatedly warned would wreck France. He laboured for weeks on a belt-tightening budget to put to a fractious parliament in the autumn.
Although more prone to citing classical poetry than posting on social media, Bayrou even released a series of YouTube videos in August in which he exhorted the public to help him address what he cast as a danger to France.