Wives should welcome their husbands' extramarital affairs as a sign of a healthy marriage, France's most prominent female psychologist has suggested.

Maryse Vaillant claims French men should stop being castigated for being womanisers and that keeping a mistress can actually improve a marriage.

In Men, Love, Fidelity, a new book on the effects of infidelity on married life, Miss Vaillant writes that her aim is to "rehabilitate infidelity".

According to figures cited in the book, an estimated 39 per cent of French men cheat on their wives at some stage. "[Most] don't do it because they no longer love them, on the contrary," she writes. "They simply need breathing space. For such men, who are in fact profoundly monogamous, infidelity is almost unavoidable."

Once French women accept that the "fidelity is not natural but cultural", and that infidelity is essential to the "psychic functioning" of certain men who are still very much in love, it can be a "very liberating" for women, she writes.

One woman bound to disagree is Sylvie Brunel, who recently became the first ex-wife of a serving minister to write an expose on his alleged infidelity, and midlife crisis.

In her Guerrilla Handbook for Women, Miss Brunel, 49, claims Eric Besson, France's minister of immigration and national identity, was an insatiable cheat with "interchangeable mistresses".

At their wedding in 1983, when the mayor began reciting the vows of "fidelity, aid and support", she says Mr Besson commented: "Fidelity, no."

Miss Brunel, although "humiliated", convinced the shocked mayor it was a joke. But Mr Besson was, she claims, unfaithful for five years before their marriage and 25 years afterwards, adding: "I can't say I wasn't warned."

Mr Besson left his wife for a woman "almost as young as our eldest daughter" and who "oozed narcissism from every pore of her pretty skin", according to his ex-wife.

Mr Besson described her book as "shameless". She hit back, saying: "What's shameless is the way you've treated me for 30 years."

Miss Vaillant insists in her book that fidelity is not proof of love. In fact, "pathological monogamists" in many cases lack the strength of mind to take a mistress, she suggests.

"They are often men whose father was physically or morally absent. These men have a completely idealised view of their father and the paternal function," she writes.

"They lack suppleness and are prisoners to an idealised image of a man of duty."

Several high-profile French politicians have been reported to have had mistresses. Valery Giscard d'Estaing's alleged love of women was given greater credence when his car collided with a milk truck at dawn during his presidency. The whole country assumed he had been returning from a tryst with a mistress - and his opinion poll ratings went up.

The late Francois Mitterrand would spend most nights with his mistress, Anne Pingeot. The existence of their secret love child, Mazarine, was only disclosed after he died.

Jacques Chirac recently admitted in a book: "There have been women I have loved a lot, as discreetly as possible".

Miss Vaillant was divorced 20 years ago but said she had since been in a "stable" and "faithful" relationship.

The Daily Telegraph

men can easily stay faithful, its just these days we are encouraged not to so much that many feel they have a right to cheat.

I guess those pp should never get married but for those who do and there are millions, its a terrible trap to try to escape from once kids come along and the all the nasty reality of just how restrictive that peice of paper that they signed on the happiest day of their life , can be..

Marriage has been out dated for a long time and is why its not nearly so popular anymore..

Men are usually the losers from marriage..think about that. Marriage is for women and children..men go along with it...

Ive heard it said most men would not marry of they didnt have to.

I am not a feminist/hate feminism..it has buggered relationships between men and women..up to a point., but like every woman I constantly have to say that I am not a feminist because the feminist movement has tarnished the name of all women, even if they dont know it.

@Annie,

The female vote only came a few years after male suffrage was won and decades before aboriginal suffrage here in Australia.

Prior to male suffrage, only the landed males could vote.

Female suffrage should not be likened to feminism. It was not feminism.