Seven months after her defeat by Nicolas Sarkozy, Ségolène Royal settles scores with her fellow Socialists in a book today, blaming colleagues and her former partner for her failure to win the French presidency.

Ms Royal, 54, comes out guns blazing and “regretting nothing” in a defence of a campaign that went from charmed to doomed. She also indicates that she will try to take over the crippled opposition party and unseat Mr Sarkozy in 2012.

In one short passage, she reveals her bitterness towards François Hollande, the party leader and father of their four children, for his failure to support her candidacy. Her “secret humiliation”, over Mr Hollande's affair with a magazine journalist, undermined her campaign, she writes. The couple kept their separation secret until announcing it during the May 6 run-off when Ms Royal won 47 per cent of the vote.

She says that Mr Hollande kept a damaging distance from a campaign which he warned her against, telling her: “You won't make it; you haven't seen anything yet of their brutality. You're not strong enough.”

Writing of herself in the third person, she said “The candidate had no shoulder to lay her head on, to cry when things were hard (or to laugh at the happy moments),” she says.

Her account is a response to half a dozen books by senior Socialists this autumn that have depicted her campaign as a disaster by a woman who offered France a “blend of Joan of Arc and Evita Peron”, as one put it.

She writes: “I was caught in a pincer movement between apparatchiks from my own party on one side, and the Right (Sarkozy) on the other . . . How is it that the attacks came more from the Left than from the Right?”

The title of her 330-page book, Ma Plus Belle Histoire, C'est Vous (My most beautiful story is you), reflects the emotional, inspirational tone that was mocked widely in a campaign in which she cultivated a mystical “dialogue with the people”. She rejects the jokes about her religious tone, however. “I am neither Joan of Arc nor the Virgin Mary,” she writes.

The episode stirring most interest is Ms Royal's revelation that, before the run-off, she offered the post of prime minister to François Bayrou, the centrist who was eliminated in the first round.

Ms Royal made an appointment to visit Mr Bayrou at his Paris flat. She telephoned from the street downstrairs at midnight but he got cold feet and asked her not to come up. He said that he was worried that people might see him but she realised that he had got cold feet and did not want her offer.

“The horse flinched before the obstacle . . . like a lover who fears that he can't perform or shies from a dangerous adultery,” she says. Mr Bayrouhas challenged her version of the episode but confirmed the offer.

Mr Hollande had recently asked to come back to her and she refused, she says. “I told him that it was not a good idea. But that we could work together politically. I hope he is happy. He has so many qualities. And I loved him for so long.”

The book has received lukewarm reviews. Writing for Le Figaro newspaper, Jean d'Ormesson, a novelist, said that “from one end of the work to the other — and it is quite moving — one senses a woman injured by the inactivity, mistrust and hostility of her own side”.

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