The 50-year-old elected official and his close guard at the town hall are considered by the courts to be the "main protagonists" of a judicial investigation into the filming and use of a sexual video in which we can see his ex - first centrist deputy Gilles Artigues being massaged by a man in a hotel room, end of 2014.

Namely accused by Mr. Artigues, placed in police custody in mid-September, quoted in damning audio recordings published by Mediapart, Mr. Perdriau has always protested his innocence.

"Do not associate yourself with the scavengers who want to bring me down, so be patient!", He launched Monday to the municipal councilors by assuring that he "would change absolutely nothing" in the exercise of his elective functions in indictment case.

The scandal, however, has already pushed him to dismiss his chief of staff and then to renounce his representative functions in the city and the Metropolis, while one of his municipal assistants accused of having shot the compromising images resigned.

His exclusion from LR was pronounced without even waiting for any legal action.

'Heinous' campaign

At the end of November, his efforts to block the publication of a new Mediapart investigation into his "political methods" sparked a storm of protest in the world of the press, before being finally challenged by a court decision on Wednesday.

In the process, the president of the LR group in the Senate, Bruno Retailleau, called on all the elected representatives of the majority of Saint-Etienne to ask for his resignation.

Long silent, the LR president of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region Laurent Wauquiez, announced that he was going to sue him for defamation in connection with information published by Mediapart in his article entitled "the mayor and the poison of slander".

Generally reputed to be affable, Gaël Perdriau is however described by his detractors as an authoritarian man who wears down his collaborators and is capable of bloodshed when he is resisted - an attitude vigorously denounced by his opposition during the last two municipal councils.

Born in Cholet (Maine-et-Loire) in 1972, he moved to Saint-Etienne when he joined the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce at the age of twenty.

As a student, he campaigned for the Republican Party, then for Liberal Democracy, before joining the UMP and finally Les Républicains.

A sales executive at Total, then GDF Suez for fifteen years, he also got involved in community life in Saint-Etienne by presiding over the integration through employment association Tremplin 42.

The mayor of Saint-Étienne Gaël Perdriau during a municipal council at the town hall of Saint-Etienne, September 26, 2022 © OLIVIER CHASSIGNOLE / AFP/Archives

Anyone who claims to belong to the social right as embodied by General de Gaulle or Philippe Séguin was a municipal councilor in the team of Michel Thiollière (UDF-Rad), from 1995 to 2008. After the defeat of 2008 in the As part of a triangular UMP/centrists/PS, he gradually established himself as the leader on the right in opposition to Maurice Vincent (PS).

He was finally elected mayor in 2014 with the support of the man who now accuses him of blackmail, UDI Gilles Artigues, who then became his first deputy.

He was re-elected in 2020, retaining the presidency of the metropolis of 400,000 inhabitants.

He had begun to distance himself from LR at the end of 2021 by sharply criticizing the very muscular line of Eric Ciotti and the right-wing of presidential candidate Valérie Pécresse.

This earned him to be removed from the vice-presidency of his party, but did not prevent him from continuing to assert his difference, refusing to position himself in the first round of the presidential election before suggesting to LR to "negotiate a government contract" with Emmanuel Macron, of whom he was nevertheless a fervent critic.

He considers that it was his political positions that sparked an "odious" campaign against him.

© 2022 AFP