The French Justice Minister, Mrs Elisabeth Guigou, says it is twice as difficult for a woman to succeed in politics as a man, partly because everyone is obsessed with the appearance of female politicians.
In her 1997 book on Being a Woman in Politics, Mrs Guigou wrote that "attacks based on sex are the usual fate of women in politics.
"If I had been a boy, I would have had fewer problems. But you mustn't give in."
Because of what one French newspaper calls her "Hitchcockian beauty", (blonde, blue-eyed and fragile, in the mould of Tippi Hedren, Grace Kelly and Kim Novak), Mrs Guigou is doomed to be noticed, despite the monochrome trouser suits she wears every day. Gone are the skirts and long curls which led Edith Cresson, another Mitterrand protegee, to dismiss the late president's adviser for economic affairs as "the Barbie doll".
When Mrs Guigou was a member of the European Parliament from 1994 until 1997, most of the men in the Strasbourg press corps had schoolboy crushes on her. "But when you spoke to her, you always had the impression she was on the defensive, that she was waiting for you to act like a male chauvinist," a French correspondent told me.
Just meeting Mrs Guigou at a reception can be unsettling. She fixes her radiant smile on you, and her eyes seem to bathe you in a blue searchlight. Detractors have called her an ice maiden, a "techno-iceberg". ecoles). Her barbs in National Assembly debates are sharp and placed with total self-control. One sometimes wonders if she could be a "replicant", one of those perfect but emotionless creatures in science fiction films whom real mortals frequent at their peril.
When the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, made her France's first female Justice Minister in 1997, everyone was surprised. Her American literature studies had left her with a lasting affection for Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. A second diploma, in economics, meshed better with her serious public image.
As Minister for European Affairs in the early 1990s, she fought hard for the Maastricht Treaty. But justice? Mrs Guigou had no legal training. And justice issues, from the nationality code to the status of homosexual couples to the new law requiring political parties to field equal numbers of male and female candidates in all elections, have dominated the Jospin premiership.
Last autumn, as Mrs Guigou continued to rise in opinion polls, the French press began to speak of her as premier ministrable, a term until then reserved for her friend, the Minister for Employment, Mrs Martine Aubry.
At the moment, all bets are on Mr Jospin to become France's next president in 2002. The Socialists are keen to name a woman prime minister, to erase memories of Mrs Cresson. But Mr Jospin is said to be frustrated by Mrs Aubry's inability to control France's welfare budget. And unlike Mrs Aubry, Mrs Guigou has no enemies on the left and is even palatable to some of the right-wing opposition.
Last week a jury of French journalists voted Mrs Guigou the "political personality of the year" for 1999. Another first. In presenting the award, Paul Guilbert, a columnist for the right-wing Le Figaro, praised Mrs Guigou for "brilliantly and deliberately holding her ground at the centre of all great debates in French society to such a point that she came to symbolise the certainties and doubts of our time".
The day before she received her award, a joint session of the National Assembly and Senate was to have consecrated Mrs Guigou's chief undertaking of the past 2 1/2 years, changing the constitution to make judges independent of politicians.
The justice reform collapsed at the last minute. Mrs Guigou didn't blink, excoriating the right for sabotaging a reform that 77 per cent of French people favoured. "This only increases my determination to go forward," she said.
