Will France get a sexy new president who looks like a film star (and will we at last become a chick world when Hillary becomes US prez)?

France's Ségolène Royal: A Candidate Out of the Ordinary – by William Pfaff/ International Herald Tribune

After Ségolène Royal was elected last week as the Socialist Party candidate in France's 2007 presidential elections, she said a striking thing: "Don't be afraid."

Royal had been much criticized during the campaign for breaking with some ancient themes of the French left. One of her campaign assertions had been that people should take their lives in their own hands by facing facts about themselves and their real possibilities.

But why were the words familiar? Obviously I was recalling President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first inaugural address in March 1933, when he said the only thing Americans had to fear "was fear itself."

Royal undoubtedly spoke spontaneously. But the situation of the two countries at these two points in their histories - Americans as the Great Depression was extending its reach, and the French today - have in common a certain failure of nerve and a sense of stalemate.

Another parallel suggests itself. From the start of her candidacy, Royal has been criticized as succeeding on mere looks and charm, and attacked for lacking a well-defined program, substituting what her critics call "populism" - an appeal to voters to write the program of a new government together with her.

In the white blazer of her campaign appearances and the three televised debates, always addressing the people and not the other politicians, the photogenic Royal (Ségolène, as she now is universally known) was mocked in the press as "the Madonna of the Opinion Polls" - which she has consistently led since the beginning of her campaign.

In 1933, the American commentator Walter Lippmann called the young governor of New York "an amiable man with many philanthropic impulses, but he is ... too eager to please. ... Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would like very much to be president."

This was true. In 1932, Roosevelt had no idea what the New Deal would become (he had thrown the phrase into a hasty draft of his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in Chicago).

Nor did anyone else know, least of all what reporters called his "brains trust" of advisers from the professions and universities. The New Deal was improvised by the thousands who did have ideas and wanted to work with him, and to whom he and his closest advisers were prepared to listen.

Much didn't work, and then they tried again. But out of this came the unprogramatic array of innovations that gave America an original, pragmatic response to the crisis of the Great Depression.

Royal's victory last week unexpectedly became something of a beatification. The size of the vote for her, and the poll evidence of her wide popularity, silenced her critics. A usually acerbic columnist, Michèle Stouvenot, retreated into a respectful irony, writing that "In her white blazer, like the Immaculate Conception, she seemed standing on a little cloud, as if in levitation, transfigured, transcended by the force of destiny. She was General de Gaulle on the Champs- Elysées the night of Liberation."

Royal said she would be the candidate of insoumission - meaning insubordination, unwillingness to be subdued. Even President Jacques Chirac's wife, Bernadette, remarked that "the hour of women has arrived," adding that she "used to consult her husband before speaking to journalists. I don't anymore." Stouvenot wrote: "Another victory for Ségolène. She has liberated Bernadette."

Royal's victory was instantly taken as an event of importance, more in French society's evolution than in politics, but possibly of major political importance as well. The immediate political result is to put the Socialists' center-right opponents under enormous pressure to conduct their own debate among candidates, and possibly to cause other candidates to challenge the conservative front-runner, Nicolas Sarkozy.

It might even make Chirac intervene - as his wife has threatened he might. As that could only be as spoiler, it would mean that he would prefer to give way to France's first woman president, a Socialist, than to be succeeded by a male rival from the right. Such is gallantry.