A cheer went up in bars and cafés across France when TV stations interrupted their mid-evening programmes on Wednesday night to announce: “Íngrid is free.” The first name was enough because Íngrid Betancourt, until then a hostage in her native Colombia, is a French heroine, a national cause célèbre and an “obsession” of President Sarkozy.

To the rest of the world, Betancourt, 46, a Colombian politician, may have been just one of dozens of VIP hostages held in the jungle by Farc, Latin America’s oldest surviving guerrilla army. But this “Joan of Arc of the Andes”, as she has been dubbed by the Colombian press, was French-educated and a dual national by a first marriage.

For six years her epic ordeal of solitude and survival has caught the popular imagination in France, her image as resonant as Madeleine McCann’s in this country. Betancourt’s portrait has been suspended from hundreds of town halls, including in Paris, her spirit of resistance and force of character touching a nation as details of her plight filtered out sporadically in videos, letters and accounts from fellow captives.

Throughout this time she attracted the full might of the French Establishment — first from Dominique de Villepin, the former Prime Minister, and later from Sarkozy, who even pledged to win her freedom in his election-night victory speech last year.

But why should a Colombian politician, whose French nationality came only from a first marriage to a Frenchman she later left, attract such powerful support?

The story goes back to the 1980s when Villepin was her university tutor and close friend in Paris. From the time she was taken hostage Villepin campaigned hard for her release and even sent a planeload of French secret agents on a diplomatically disastrous mission to free her in 2003.

The mixing of private relationships and official handling under Villepin was widely seen as counterproductive and was criticised in a book by Jacques Thomet, the former bureau chief for Agence France Presse in Bogotá. He pointed out that Betancourt’s sister Astrid was having an affair with the French ambassador to Colombia, whom she later married. Le Figaro, the most pro-government newspaper, yesterday called the state management of the Betancourt affair unhealthy.

Nevertheless, there is no disguising the joy and relief over her release in France. Sarkozy said: “All of France is happy about the rescue.” As he spoke on Wednesday night, he was flanked at the Elysée Palace by Betancourt’s 22-year-old daughter Melanie and 19-year-old son Lorenzo, who have themselves become celebrities as the story has unfolded. In chains in the jungle, Betancourt said she looked at magazine pictures to try to imagine how the boy, whom she last saw aged 13, would look now.

Even before her capture in 2002, Betancourt had won French hearts with a bestselling book on her political life. A Francophile Latin American intellectual, she became a media celebrity with La Rage au Coeur, a French-language lament to the corruption of violence in her native land. It went down badly in Colombia where she was seen as “Parisienne”. She was a senator at the time campaigning for the presidency for her new, tiny environmentalist party called Oxygen. “For a hundred years, a handful of great families descending from the Spanish Conquistadores pillaged and exploited the poor,” she wrote. “I know what I am talking about because I am myself one of this privileged caste.” Knocking her country from abroad was deemed unpatriotic.

Betancourt embarked on her quixotic political career after a gilded childhood and marriage to Fabrice Delloye, a fellow student who became a diplomat. Her father was a Colombian education minister, who served as an ambassador to Unesco in Paris. She spent her early childhood on the Avenue Foch, one of the grandest quartiers, returned to Bogotá to attend the French lycée and then graduated from the Institut des Sciences Politiques, nursery of the French governing class where Villepin was teaching.

In 1990, she left her husband and children in New Zealand to take up the political life that she had always dreamt of in Colombia, then emerging from the chaos of the drug cartels and political violence. Campaigning against corruption, she caught attention with stunts such as handing out condoms in traffic jams, symbolising protection from corruption. She was elected to parliament in 1994 and later became a senator but she lost favour and was heading for only 1 per cent of the vote as Oxygen’s presidential candidate in 2002. She had in the meantime married a Bogotá businessman.

In February that year, she insisted, against government orders, on visiting a mayor in a guerrilla-controlled zone. She was captured on the road, along with her entourage, including a photographer for Marie Claire, the French magazine that was following her.

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