Cresson Confronts Paris Gossip Mill, Double Standard : Politics: Her appointment revives a rumor that she once had an affair with Mitterrand. And it shows that in France, the rules for women are different.

As if anticipating the inevitable rumors and whisperings that would accompany her appointment as the first woman prime minister of France, Edith Cresson complained in an interview published last week that “not one woman is elected without the explanation being heard that she really got the post because she slept with so-and-so or so-and-so. Unfortunately, we are still there.”

Cresson was named by President Francois Mitterrand on Wednesday after the resignation of outgoing Prime Minister Michel Rocard. But before she could even move her files into the Hotel Matignon, official residence of the French prime minister, the rumor campaign that she predicted had already begun.

Opposition politician Francois D’Aubert charged that her appointment was “Pompadourian”--referring to Marquise de Pompadour, the mistress of King Louis XV, known as “the favorite.” Cresson’s appointment revived widespread gossip that she once had an affair with Mitterrand, with whom she has had a long, close political relationship. Cresson and Mitterrand are both married.

But rather than ignore the rumors, which popped up in a television interview Thursday, Cresson confronted them directly. Opposition gadfly D’Aubert, she charged, is “one of those who thinks the whole world lives in a boudoir.”

With a broad, defiant smile, Cresson, an engineer and economist, added: “Possibly I am the ‘favorite,’ but I am the ‘favorite’ of my voters.”

Cresson, 57, is known as a tough political campaigner. In addition to being an elected member of the National Assembly, she is the popular mayor of Chatellerault, a city in southwest France.

Cresson’s quick counterattack is likely to defuse the rumors. Having served four times previously as a minister in government (agriculture, industry, external trade and European affairs), Cresson has an established reputation that should shield her from future allegations of favoritism, even as she assumes her higher-profile post.

But the episode highlights a conspicuous inequality in French politics: When it comes to male politicians, private relations and sexual activities are considered strictly off limits. However, as the Cresson appointment has shown, the rules for women are different.

French male politicians, for example, were universally aghast during the 1988 campaign for the U.S. presidency when Sen. Gary Hart’s sex life became a central, and eventually fatal, issue in the campaign. Nothing like that, they said, nearly to a man, could happen in France, where the private and the public are scrupulously separated.

The French regard with bewilderment the preoccupation of the British press with sex scandals among its politicians. It is almost impossible to imagine Mitterrand or any other male French politician being asked the same type of sexually oriented question that anchorman Philippe Lefait posed to Cresson on Thursday on state-owned television. The question was posed in typically indirect fashion.

“There are people in the opposition who speak of a Pompadourian regime,” Lefait said. “What is your reaction?”

But the effect of the question, however oblique, was the same as if he had asked her if she were having an affair with the president, making Mitterrand the modern equivalent of Louis XV.

French feminists found it outrageous. “When it involves a woman, suddenly it’s a question of the sexual being,” commented Maya Sudute, a leader in the Feminist Movement Against Rape, after viewing the television interview.

“In France, compared to Great Britain and the United States, we never make allusion to the private life of a male politician. No one falls because of his love life. But with allusions like ‘Pompadour,’ we are going outside this old tradition of French life. Apparently, since it is a woman involved, she is treated totally differently, with references to her private life that are absolutely misogynous.”

Antoinette Fouque, one of the founders of the French women’s movement and now president of the Women’s Alliance for Democracy, described the Pompadour reference as a “gross rudeness.” “Madame Cresson is a true woman of state,” she said. “It is an insult that will rebound against the one who makes it.”

But Fouque said she is surprised that there were not many other such references. “I expected a lot more criticisms of this nature,” she said. “You understand that France is an endemically macho society.”

Like other feminists, Fouque views the appointment of Cresson to the premiership as a sign of progress. “France has its tradition in Athenian democracy,” she said, “that’s to say, without women.”

After Cresson resigned her Cabinet post as minister of European affairs in October, there were no women among the five ministers of state or 14 full ministers in the government.

Cresson, whose doctoral dissertation at a university in Brittany dealt with the state of women in a rural setting, has especially strong feelings regarding male prejudice against women in French politics. When she was a minister in Rocard’s government, she was excluded from the working breakfasts at the Matignon Palace.

“I don’t regret at all not going to the breakfasts,” she told journalist Catherine Nay in an interview for the women’s business magazine Contemporaine that was published last week. “I never asked to go.” She described the breakfasts as typical “bragging sessions” among male politicians.

At the time the interview was conducted some weeks ago, Cresson was out of government in private business, with apparently no idea that Mitterrand would ask her to become the first woman prime minister in French history.

In the interview, she strongly criticized French political parties, including her own Socialist Party, for sexist attitudes. “In a party, a woman is always in a position of inferiority. You must have noticed that when she climbs the podium to speak, you can’t hear her” over the sound of “all the men talking to each other--it’s repulsive.”

However, she reserved special respect for the 74-year-old Mitterrand, whom she described as “the only male politician who is truly concerned with promoting women in the national interest.”