By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 18, 2006; A15
PARIS, Oct. 17 -- French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie -- one of the world's few female defense chiefs -- relishes describing her first encounter with the Saudi Arabian military.
"For the troops, it was extraordinary to see a woman there," Alliot-Marie, 60, said in an interview, recalling the 2003 trip. "Some smiled. And others -- if they could have stoned me, they would have done so."
Back home in France, some of her encounters have been no less strained. After years of stealing kisses in phone booths, Alliot-Marie said, she was forced to publicize her secret romance with French lawmaker Patrick Ollier seven years ago when a French magazine photographer shimmied up a tree outside her apartment building and snapped pictures of the couple through a window.
During France's bitter transatlantic rift with the United States over the Iraq war, the defense minister was one of the first officials President Jacques Chirac dispatched to the United States to try to patch up relations.
On Wednesday, Alliot-Marie returns to Washington, not only as Chirac's defense minister but as a potential candidate to succeed him as president next year.
Her visit comes a month after her chief rival in the ruling party, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, made his own four-day campaign-style swing through the United States proclaiming his ardent support for the Franco-American alliance.
Although tensions between Washington and Paris have subsided dramatically in the past three years, the French public remains dubious of its political leaders being seen as too close to members of the Bush administration. Sarkozy returned from his trip to scathing newspaper headlines and columns denouncing his appearances with President Bush.
At a Ramadan dinner at Paris's Grand Mosque last week, Alliot-Marie dined on slices of roasted lamb. Afterward, young Muslim leaders grilled her on her views of the U.S. approach to the problems of the Middle East.
"It's easy to make war, especially with the means the Americans have," the defense minister replied from the head of the table in a room with ornately painted ceilings and velvet wall tapestries. "But it's always harder to make peace."
A few days later, in an interview in her massive office at the Defense Ministry, Alliot-Marie said, "I think we should always distinguish between administrations and peoples. There are very strong ties between the French and the American people," which she said remain intact regardless of the administration in office.
In an effort to highlight the historical ties between the two nations, Alliot-Marie will attend a commemoration of the Battle of Yorktown in Virginia, where white-uniformed French soldiers joined George Washington's ragtag American army to defeat the British during the Revolutionary War in 1781.
Alliot-Marie's agenda for her meetings with American officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, will be centered on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Iraq and Afghanistan.
On the political battlefront at home, the French press has focused on the possibility of two female candidates running for president in 2007 -- Alliot-Marie from Chirac's Union for a Popular Movement party, or UMP, and Segolene Royal from the Socialist Party -- if their parties nominate them.
"I think it would shake the French up a bit," said Alliot-Marie, who said she will not decide whether to seek her party's nomination until later this year. "But after all, it already shook them up a lot to have a female defense minister, and with time they found out it was not so bad."
While Royal tends to play up her feminine side -- she offered few complaints when newspapers ran unauthorized photographs of her in a flattering blue swimsuit during her summer vacation -- Alliot-Marie insists on being called Le Minist re , using the masculine French form, rather than La Minist re , the feminine form. To help prove she was up to the job of defense minister, she has parachuted with troops and visited soldiers in Afghanistan and Lebanon. She exudes a forceful personality, wears her hair cropped short and favors trousers and tailored jackets.
"The first time I arrived in this office, all the major generals were here," Alliot-Marie said. "They all gave me the military salute, and I saw in their eyes that they wondered what was falling upon them. It was visibly a shock to men."
She was the first woman to lead Chirac's former RPR party and remains close to the president. She was elected to the lower house of Parliament in 1986 and has been reelected every term since, leaving the National Assembly only when she became defense minister in 2002.
Alliot-Marie, who is divorced, began dating Patrick Ollier -- another member of the National Assembly with higher ambitions -- about 22 years ago. Alliot-Marie said they kept their romance secret for 15 years so neither would overshadow the other's career.
"It was really amusing," she recalled. "From time to time, in the National Assembly when both of us were deputies, we hid in telephone booths to kiss."
Ollier, 62, is chairman of Parliament's economic affairs and environmental committee and is mayor of his home town in central France.
Since they went public with their relationship seven years ago, "we never had time to get married." Such partnerships are not uncommon in France. Royal also is not married to her longtime partner and the father of their four children, Francois Hollande, who is leader of the Socialist Party.
When Alliot-Marie accompanies Ollier on weekend trips to his home district, she said, she leaves her bodyguards behind and tries "to be the mayor's wife and not the minister of defense."
Constituents often seem surprised to see the defense minister in the local markets.
But Alliot-Marie, dressed on a recent day in a military-style brown-striped jacket and olive-brown skirt, said, "When I leave the ministry, and when I take off my minister costume, I'm a woman like any other."
Researcher Corinne Gavard contributed to this report.
