In 1985, François Hollande came to ask me for a job.

I was the editor of the economics and business section of Libération, the French left-wing daily with a then-soaring circulation. He was unemployed after a stint as a junior aide to Socialist President François Mitterrand, and said he wanted to become a journalist. In the course of a lunch arranged by a common friend, it soon became clear that Hollande wasn’t interested in reporting or investigating; he wanted to be a columnist, giving his opinion on economic policy and worldly matters. After briefly checking with Libération’s founder and top editor Serge July, I turned him down.

I’ve told that story only a few times during the five years since Hollande became president of France, usually at the end of a boozy dinner. And the invariable response has been a half-joking lament from one of my dining companions: “Why, oh why, didn’t you hire him?” The undertone is obvious:

“Why didn’t you spare us his presidency? You could’ve changed French history.”

I was reminded of that encounter a few months ago during a conversation with Pierre Moscovici, the European commissioner and Hollande’s one-time finance minister. We were talking about Hollande’s travails. The French president was polling at single digits, dragged down even further by damning revelations in a recently published book of interviews by two Le Monde reporters.

Hollande and his predecessor Sarkozy are similar political beasts. Both grew up in the shadow of the bigger men who ruled France in the 1970s and 1980s.

Moscovici was spelling out what had long been the consensus among the top brass of the Socialist Party: Hollande wasn’t destined to be president; his ascension was an aberration, a casting error, if such a thing exists in politics.

“All of us thought that what he really wanted to do was to become a journalist,” Moscovici then said.

Colorless apparatchik

Hollande’s legacy is terrible for the French left. His record-breaking unpopularity forced him to become the first president in the country’s history not to run for a second term. And his term in office has destroyed the party he once headed. Its presidential candidate Benoît Hamon came in a distant fifth on Sunday, winning 6.3 percent of the vote, and now the French Socialist Party looks destined to limp, like so many of France’s old institutions that never die, into lasting irrelevance. The election’s front-runner (and its only new face), Emmanuel Macron, built his political persona outside and against the party machine.

Yet Hollande’s failure predates his presidency. In the 27 years between my meeting with him and his election as president, no one would have cared much about my story. The man wasn’t what you’d call conversation material. In his many years in the top ranks of the French Socialist Party, he was known as bright, but bland and colorless. Always someone’s right-hand man, or someone’s spouse (his partner Ségolène Royal was the Socialist presidential candidate who lost to Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007).

To the French public, Hollande was just one of the apparatchiks raised like battery chickens under the presidency of François Mitterrand in the 1980s. For Socialist bigwigs, Hollande was a man easily dismissed or ignored.

Look at his career. When Lionel Jospin became prime minister in 1997, Hollande succeeded him as leader of the party. But he was never its real boss. He was either someone’s obedient aide (under Jospin) or later left in place because the party bigwigs were too busy fighting each other.

Jospin seems to have never considered making Hollande a minister. And the only reason he received the Socialist nomination in 2011 was that the party favorite Dominique Strauss-Kahn had been disqualified by allegations of attempted rape and involvement in a prostitution ring. Which explains why Hollande is the only French president to have been elected with no prior government experience.

Bitter and mean

Hollande and his predecessor Sarkozy are similar political beasts. Both grew up in the shadow of the bigger men who ruled France in the 1970s and 1980s. For decades, men like Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Mitterrand or Jacques Chirac left the younger members of their party only small crumbs to feed their ambitions. As they were busy governing, the underlings were consumed by the small-town maneuvers and cynicism that, for them, came to encapsulate what politics is all about.

Hollande, former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius once said, is just a “man who tells little jokes.” His frequent, and some say forced, attempts at humor can be a source of exasperation for those close to him, because he is more often unfunny than not.

One of Hollande’s friends notes that in private the president can also be mean and bitter, making derogatory remarks about people behind their backs. “You think Hollande is a nice guy, because he smiles and makes jokes,” he told me. “He is anything but.”

He then recounted Hollande’s behavior in 2007, shortly before his partner Ségolène Royal was chosen as the party’s presidential candidate, to the surprise and disdain of the Socialist old guard. “She had already declared her candidacy, and we were at a dinner together,” he said. “François talked all the time, with her keeping silent throughout, as he explained how she would fail to get the party’s nomination — the party he headed, remember — and he could then jump into the void to clinch it.”

Hollande’s presidency failed because he never managed the deep divisions his mid-term conversion to market-friendly policies created in his party.

The Hollande-Royal couple was already in the process of disintegrating, as was made public a few months later, after her loss to Sarkozy. But throughout her campaign, Hollande never spoke once in support of his children’s mother, on whose defeat he had bet. And, perhaps following his cue, none of the other “elephants,” as French Socialists have come to call their party’s older leaders, offered a supportive word.

Cynical ambiguity

Hollande’s presidency failed because he never managed the deep divisions his mid-term conversion to market-friendly policies created in his party. Faced with open rebellion by a large chunk of the party MPs (a group called “les frondeurs,” or rebels), he declined to sanction them. He even tolerated opposition within his cabinet, and only resigned himself to the ouster of Economy Minister Arnaud Montebourg after Prime Minister Manuel Valls demanded it. Among the other ministers to go at that time was Hamon, the surprise winner of the Socialist primary who focused his campaign on a systematic criticism of Hollande’s presidency.

But Hollande’s refusal to settle the dispute between the French left’s radical and reformist wings dates back at least 20 years. He himself is a reformist, and tried hard to convince former European Commission President Jacques Delors to run for president in 1995. But his history at the helm of the party illustrates all the hypocrisies of French socialism.

When Jospin pointedly declined in the mid-1990s to join British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in their attempt to define a “third way” for European social democrats, Hollande was among those who cheered his boss’ clairvoyance. Jospin’s priority was to keep together the scattered fragments of the French left, including the weakened Communist Party. Hollande went along, obsessing over tactics, never bothering to address the mounting ambiguity in his divided party.

Instead of joining Blair and Schröder, Jospin introduced the 35-hour work week. He pursued market-friendly policies overall, but always stressing that they’d been made necessary by European Union rules, or by the creation of the monetary union. The party’s theoretical dogma was left untouched, its intellectual foundations unrevised.

Hollande throughout these years remained the cynic-in-chief, the top apparatchik whose goal was to get to power by mustering as many votes as possible from the left. Later, grand statements such as “finance is my enemy,” during his 2012 campaign, could only leave the voters who took him at his word feeling betrayed.

Detached observer

In the last few months, Hollande has taken to traveling through France, like a retiring singer on a last tour. On one of these stops he was heard making the trivial comment that he was “happy and proud to have done the president thing.” As if becoming president had for him been the goal, the crowning of a career, not the beginning of an opportunity to govern and reform. That might be why the French decided it should indeed be, for him, the end.

After our lunch together, Hollande did go on to write a column for a newspaper, Le Matin de Paris, a struggling socialist daily that later went bankrupt.

Throughout his presidency, Hollande had frequent and regular conversations with the two Le Monde reporters, who chose a telling title for the resulting book: “A president shouldn’t say this.” In its pages, Hollande sounds like a detached observer, like the journalist he once wanted to be. He describes the successes and failures of his allies and enemies as if he wasn’t a concerned party.

After our lunch together, Hollande did go on to write a column for a newspaper, Le Matin de Paris, a struggling socialist daily that later went bankrupt. To be fair he can’t be blamed for that failure. Just as I cannot be blamed for the fact that he soon opted to run for parliament, embarking on a long political career that I’m not at all certain I could have prevented.

Pierre Briançon is POLITICO's senior correspondent in Paris.