Does privacy exist any more? And if so, do public figures have a right to it? In our wired world – in which everyone, it seems, is regarded as a celebrity and anyone with a camera phone is a potential paparazzo – the dividing line between public and private is fading fast. Occasionally, it has been rubbed out altogether, as it was in the US in 1998 when President Bill Clinton was forced to testify in public about his sexual shenanigans near the Oval Office.

The balance between an individual’s right to privacy and the public’s right to know is feverishly discussed in many countries, but nowhere more so in recent days than in France, where privacy has traditionally been protected by journalistic custom and legal stricture. The British media may be – in Tony Blair’s phrase – “feral”, but the French press is normally a more domesticated feline, curling up in the lap of the powerful and purring whenever stroked. It was only at the end of François Mitterrand’s presidency that the public learnt how ill he was with prostate cancer and heard that he had fathered an illegitimate daughter.