COLUMN ONE : Politics Gets Personal in France : After years of discretion, presidential candidates and other public figures are revealing details of their private lives. They discuss love, money and family secrets in campaigns based on image, not issues.

When Jacques Chirac, the high-profile mayor of Paris, hosted a quiet wedding for his adopted Vietnamese daughter a few years ago, even some of his closest aides were shocked. It was the first time they learned that their boss even had an adopted daughter.

“None of us knew. He was very secret about it,” said Lydie Gerbaud, Chirac’s loyal press secretary for nearly 20 years. “But that’s just how he is. He knows he’s a public man, but he wants to keep a part of his life to himself. He’s very discreet.”

But that taste for privacy, once as savored and treasured as a French truffle, is being chipped away these days by a hot presidential campaign being waged more on image than issues, fueled by a public demanding to know more about its elected officials.

Chirac and his fellow candidates in the first round of voting next Sunday are, for the first time in modern French history, volunteering important--and not-so-important--details of their private lives.

Spouses are emerging from behind the candidates to grant interviews, chatting about everything from their tastes in music to, yes, their discomfort at being in the public eye. The smiling wives of Chirac, Prime Minister Edouard Balladur and Socialist Party candidate Lionel Jospin posed together for the cover of the current Paris Match magazine beneath the headline “They talk to us about their husbands--and why they love them.”

Not to be outdone, the Paris daily Liberation last week investigated the drinking preferences of the candidates: “Jospin loves whiskey, Chirac beer, and Balladur admits a weakness for Bordeaux (wine).”

But French tongues really started wagging in March when the candidates voluntarily opened their bank accounts and tax returns for public inspection, “putting their cards on the table,” as one newspaper put it.

Now everyone in France knows that Chirac, the presidential front-runner who has spent most of his life in public service, has a Paris apartment, two country homes and $700,000 in the bank.

Balladur, another conservative, also has three homes and $900,000 invested on the stock exchange. And, wouldn’t you know it, the Socialist Jospin lists his assets as two cars (only one of which is paid off), a piano, several hundred old books--and nothing else.

Indeed, the rules are changing for French politicians. Their jardin secret , secret garden, can no longer be protected from public scrutiny by the simple demand, so often voiced in the past, that they be judged on their policies and not their innermost predilections.

“This is all very new,” said Pascal Perrineau, director of the Center for the Study of French Political Life. He said the cause is the disappearance of strong ideological differences among the candidates.

“What is left to distinguish between them?” he asked. “Only their personal images and, of course, their private affairs.”

That helps explain the sudden appearance here of “Private Lives--The Hidden Face of Politics,” a book in which 40 politicians reveal such things as their brands of cologne, their tastes in men and women, their phobias and the swear words they usually use.

Dominique Voynet, the presidential candidate from the ecological party, told the authors that she’s in love with a 26-year-old German who has fathered her second child out of wedlock. The Communist Party candidate, Robert Hue, buys his suits off the rack at Yves Saint-Laurent, wears Faberge cologne and hates snakes (the reptile kind).

Jean-Marie Le Pen, presidential contender from the far-right National Front, says he never uses a credit card and regularly carries $600 to $800 in cash. He also never wears cologne. “It appears I don’t need it,” he explained, “because people tell me I already smell like warm bread.”

Some went further. Michel Mouillot, the mayor of Cannes, admitted that “when I first meet a woman, I try to look at both her eyes and her breasts at the same time, which requires a very quick look.”

And Andre Labarrer, 67, a member of the National Assembly from the Socialist Party, spoke openly of his homosexuality. “Naturally, I’ve had lots of lovers,” he said. “Once, in the 1950s and 1960s, I had a feverish liaison with a male politician who is very well known today. But don’t count on me to say his name.”

What has suddenly cracked open the sanctity of these private lives?

Critics of the trend blame the United States, where, they like to point out, such things as Bill Clinton’s past marital indiscretions and O.J. Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark’s hairstyle get more media attention than policy-making in Washington. Others blame Britain, where tabloid papers pulsate with news of randy royals and indiscreet government ministers.

But the real culprits may be the French politicians and high-profile corporate leaders themselves. Their excesses, evident in dozens of recent corruption investigations across the country, have led the media and public to reconsider their hands-off approach to the rich and powerful.

In ordinary circumstances, idle talk about money has long been discouraged in French society. It would be considered very rude, for example, to admire a friend’s new sofa and then ask how much it cost. And many French think Americans vulgar for speaking so openly about money.

But as their own salaries stagnate and unemployment remains high, workers have become angry with the politicians and company presidents who have enriched themselves unfairly.

“Money has always been ambiguous for us in France,” said Perrineau, the Paris-based political analyst. “But it is the inequality between ordinary citizens and the bosses and politicians that really bothers us.”

On the other hand, the French care little about the sexual indiscretions of their elected officials, almost all of whom are men. Even if the public knows that a politician is having an affair, it won’t harm his reputation.

Six months ago, when Paris Match revealed that President Francois Mitterrand had a 20-year-old illegitimate daughter, it wasn’t the news that he had a lengthy extramarital affair that spurred criticism. What bothered the French was the claim that his mistress lived in an apartment paid for by the government.

The penchant for privacy, even among ordinary citizens, has been slowly eroding for some time. A television program, “L’amour en danger” (“Love in Danger”), features everyday couples with marital problems that the audience is asked to help resolve. Another show, “Pour la vie” (“For Life”), invites unmarried couples to appear before a panel of TV personalities, who then decide whether the man and woman are right for each other.

But the French remain constantly wary of government attempts to invade their private lives, which is one reason it is illegal to conduct wiretaps except in national security cases.

A few years ago, the French police were taken to task for catching motorists in automated speed traps and sending photos as proof to the violators’ homes. After a successful lawsuit brought by a motorist whose wife saw the photo, and caught him where he shouldn’t have been, the police changed their policy. These days, those photos are available only at the police station.

For the same reason, many ordinary citizens cringed in February when the state telephone company announced that it would, on request, provide itemized bills.

One Paris newspaper predicted “chaos in the family,” and another said such bills would put unfaithful husbands and wives “under surveillance.” Not surprisingly, the phone company says few customers have requested them.

“It’s true that there is a movement in France toward knowing more about private matters,” said Loic Rousseau, spokesman for the National Commission on Computers and Freedom. “But we’re still a long way from the way you do it in the United States. There’s still a great chasm between private lives and public lives.”

As the presidential elections approach, the candidates are using the public’s sudden interest in their personal lives to polish their images and win voter support. But some still find the new scrutiny, and their lack of control over it, a bit uncomfortable.

Chirac’s new, well-honed image as a man in touch with the concerns of the poor was certainly helped when his staff spoke about the Vietnamese refugee he adopted some years ago. (When was she adopted? “It’s a secret,” says his spokeswoman.)

But the mayor didn’t much like the recent revelations that he pays about 20% of market rent for his Paris apartment, which happens to be owned by a company that does business with the city. And when Le Monde, the esteemed Paris newspaper, reported that his wife, Bernadette, made $300,000 on a real estate deal in 1993, she called the report “undignified.”

“For the first time,” Mrs. Chirac complained, “people are attacking the family of the candidates.”