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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 moped 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 moped, 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 only learned of his affair the night before the photographs were published in Closer celebrity magazine.
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 moped.
Late night assignations were unlikely to have harmed Hollande’s reputation. Unlike certain predecessors, 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.
The conservative – and married – president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing once hit a milk float as he drove home in his Jaguar from the arms of a girlfriend; his 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 successor, Jacques Chirac, was driven to extramarital assignments by the presidential chauffeur.
Instead it was the widespread ridicule generated by the image of a helmeted Hollande, in a dark suit and black dress shoes, on a moped that did the damage.
The rest is history. “Gayetgate” rumbled on for a few weeks. Trierweiler was admitted to hospital with “exhaustion”, Hollande announced their relationship was over, decided not to stand for re-election in 2012 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 moped at the centre of the drama, built in 2009 with 34,000km on the clock, and worth about €1,300, that 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.