If he is one of the most popular figures on the left, and he does not hesitate to regularly attack the government and right-wing leaders, François Ruffin is not the most talkative about his private life . Discreet father of two pre-teens, he even remains very secretive about his love affairs. However, it was one of his ex-partners and collaborators, Johanna Silva, who decided to tell a little part of it in an event book…
Their love story ended a long time ago: in 2019, François Ruffin and Johanna Silva, his collaborator and companion, saw their paths separate. From a private but also professional point of view, since although she remains close to the political ideas of the Picardy deputy and La France Insoumise, the young woman abandons her position as parliamentary assistant and moves to the south of France.
Always very discreet and extremely secretive about his private life, François Ruffin has never officially addressed the subject. However, according to the portrait devoted to her by our colleagues at Libération this Tuesday March 5, the young woman has been everywhere since their meeting in 2013. Present at her side during the success of the documentary Merci Patron!, which won a César in 2017, but also of the launch of the Nuit Debout movement, she was also close to him during the legislative campaign in 2017.
But this “brunette with a very white complexion”, who has released a book on their relationship in recent days, Love and the Revolution, remains in the shadows even if she is aware that it “goes beyond the scope of work and friendship”. She also came out of their relationship “exhausted and unhappy”: “I wanted him to know that I am a stylish girl”, she says today. To the point of managing everything in the life of the forty-year-old, from schedules to “bobos and egos in an environment of dominant males”.
Different visions
“I realize that I wanted to have a guide, to be in total fusion. I saw us as Sartre and Beauvoir, a beautiful and powerful couple. It was a fantasy. François was sometimes tender with me, other times distant. He was never clear and he did not take my suffering into account,” she explains today. A vision which ultimately caused their breakup in 2019. She is 30 years old, he has just passed his forties.
Both realize, after five years at this pace, that their visions are no longer aligned: “Ultimately, we did not have the same vision of politics. François sometimes saw people only as means, while I “I tried to always consider everyone as an end,” she says.
A different vision which does not prevent him, today, from continuing to espouse the same ideas as him. But when she left Montreuil for Marseille, the young woman rediscovered her independence and her joy of living. She surely observes from a little further the journey of her ex-companion, father of two pre-teens, and who is emerging as one of the most popular left-wing candidates for the future presidential elections…
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