It was the vehicle that sparked a French presidential scandal, the end of a secret love affair and legal action from a bodyguard nicknamed “Croissant Man”.
The former French president François Hollande’s scooter was sold for more than €20,000 (£17,000) at auction this weekend, double its listed price and many times more its secondhand value.
The vehicle, billed as the “love scooter”, played a central role in the political crisis of January 2014 when, two years into his five-year presidential mandate, a paparazzi photographer captured Hollande riding it to make late-night visits to the actor Julie Gayet.
Hollande was living at the Élysée Palace with his partner, the Paris Match journalist Valérie Trierweiler, who learned of his affair only the night before the photographs were published in the celebrity magazine Closer.
It was not the revelation that the French president had been making secret visits to his lover that scandalised the nation, however, but the fact he did so on a Piaggio MP3 125cc scooter.
Late-night assignations have seldom harmed presidential reputations. But Hollande, who was nicknamed “Monsieur Flamby” – a kind of French Mr Blobby – for what were perceived as wobbly leftwing politics, was seen as an unlikely Lothario.
Like many French presidents, the conservative president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was notoriously unfaithful to his wife. After it was reported that he had crashed a Ferrari borrowed from the film director Roger Vadim into a milk float in the early hours of a September morning in 1974, with a celebrated actress in the passenger seat – an incident he later denied – he was nicknamed Valéry Folamour (crazy lover).
D’Estaing’s successor, the Socialist president François Mitterrand, also married, maintained a double life with his lover for more than 30 years until his death in 1996; and his own successor, Jacques Chirac, was driven to extramarital assignments by the presidential chauffeur.
It was the image of a helmeted Hollande in a dark suit and black dress shoes on a bike that did the real damage.
The rest is history. “Gayetgate” rumbled on for a few weeks. Trierweiler was admitted to hospital with “exhaustion”; Hollande announced that their relationship was over, decided not to stand for re-election in 2017 and married Gayet in 2022. Hollande’s bodyguard, photographed supposedly bringing the president and Gayet breakfast from the boulangerie and nicknamed “Croissant Man”, claimed to be an injured party and unsuccessfully sued Closer for revealing his identity. A book later claimed the brown paper bag he was carrying contained presidential papers, not patisserie.
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The two-tone scooter at the centre of the drama, built in 2009 with 34,000km on the clock and worth about €1,300, which Hollande sold in 2015, was bought by a collector of “prestigious” and historic vehicles on Sunday.
It came with a ringing endorsement from the then president to the couple who bought it from him. “This scooter is the one!” it read.