The conservative party of President Nicolas Sarkozy won a solid victory in parliamentary elections on Sunday, but in a surprise, it failed to trounce the opposition on the left the way both the polls and politicians had predicted.

In a sign that the left is alive and well in France, there was a net gain of seats for the Socialists and a net loss for Sarkozy's governing Union for a Popular Movement in the 577-seat National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament.

Sarkozy's party won 314 seats, a loss of 45 members; the Socialists won 185 seats, a gain of 36, according to Interior Ministry figures issued early Monday morning.

In the most high-stakes contest, Alain Juppé, Sarkozy's minister of a new high-profile mega-ministry for the environment, transportation and energy and the mayor of Bordeaux, lost to a Socialist. As required, Juppé will step down from what is the No. 2 position in the government, a humiliating setback for Sarkozy.

In a less important but symbolic defeat for the conservatives, Jean-Louis Bruguière, who had earned a global reputation as France's leading antiterrorist investigative magistrate, also lost to a Socialist.

There was also high drama of a more personal sort. Ségolène Royal, the defeated Socialist candidate for president, and François Hollande, the father of their four children and the leader of the Socialist Party, have separated, according to a book to be published next Wednesday.

"I asked François Hollande to leave our home, to pursue his love interest, which is now laid bare in books and newspapers, on his own," she is quoted as saying, adding, "I wished him happiness."

In the book, "Behind the Scenes of Defeat," Ms. Royal said that she and Hollande "remain on good terms." She also said that she will seek to replace Hollande as leader of the party.

Following the disclosure, Hollande issued a communiqué confirming the separation, which had been rumored for some time.

The latest development in the Royal-Hollande saga became public only after polls closed and did not seem to be a factor in the election.

The victory by the "blue wave," as the political power of the Sarkozy forces has been called, was the first time in 29 years that a governing party had retained its majority in the lower house of Parliament.

Both the left and the right claimed to have triumphed. "The French people showed they did not want to give all of the power to Nicolas Sarkozy," said former Justice Minister Élisabeth Guigou, a Socialist.

But Prime Minister François Fillon congratulated voters for their "clear and coherent choice, which will allow the president of the republic to implement his project."

Certainly, the outcome gives Sarkozy the mandate to push through his ambitious program to cut taxes, strip some labor protections, slash unemployment, impose curbs on immigration and make France more competitive economically. But psychologically, the Sarkozy government may lose some momentum.

Parliament, consisting of a National Assembly and a largely symbolic Senate, does not enjoy nearly the same authority as the American Congress does in serving as a counterweight to the presidency. In the period before the vote, the Socialists and other parties of the left had warned that a consolidation of power behind Sarkozy would be potentially dangerous for democracy in France.

Hollande attributed the stronger-than-expected showing of the left to what he called the "first unfair measures of the government." He cited a much-criticized proposal to increase the value-added tax on goods and services and another to curb reimbursements for medical care.

In separate comments, former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who belongs to Sarkozy's party, admitted that popular fear of the extra tax as well as of the party's "blue tsunami" had eroded support.

In one month since assuming office, Sarkozy has shown signs of wanting to expand the power of the presidency, usurping some functions carried out by the prime minister.

He has ordered a special summer session of the new Parliament, when much of the country is on vacation and not inclined to protest in the streets, to immediately consider his first set of bills on taxes, labor rules, universities, immigration and crime.

In foreign affairs, Sarkozy has several proposals: for the crisis in Darfur, the moribund European constitution, the fate of Kosovo, climate change. At the recent Group of 8 meeting in Germany, he appeared confident, even cocky, in meetings with other heads of state, lecturing Britain's departing prime minister, Tony Blair, about why he was not more popular and musing with President Bush about the 2008 presidential race in the United States.

Despite a sizable increase in the number of women who will serve as representatives, the new National Assembly will remain overwhelmingly male, white and middle-aged.

The new Democratic Movement Party of François Bayrou, the centrist who came in third in the first round of the presidential election, won only three seats, down from 29.

The Communist Party, which in the 1970s had as many as 86 seats and had 21 in the last National Assembly, won 15 seats. The Greens won four seats. Sarkozy's allies in a small centrist party took 22 seats. The far-right National Front won no seats.

The right had been projected to do better. In a first round a week ago, Sarkozy's party and two other parties of the right won 109 seats outright under a system that requires a winner to take more than fifty percent of the vote; the Socialists took only one seat. The remaining seats were decided in the Sunday runoff.

The low turnout, estimated at 60 percent, seemed to reflect both certainty that Sarkozy's party would inevitably prevail and voter fatigue. By contrast, voter turnout in the presidential runoff in May was more than 84 percent.

This is an unsettled moment in French politics for other reasons. Jacques Chirac's departure from office and return to private life after 12 years as president coincides with his sudden fall from grace. His immunity from prosecution expired Saturday, one month after moving out of the presidential Élysée Palace.

There are five separate investigations involving Chirac, a 74-year-old career politician, although his most serious vulnerability is an investigation of an illegal party-financing scheme that dates to more than a decade ago when he was mayor of Paris.

It resulted in the prosecution of, among others, Juppé, his former prime minister, who received a suspended jail term in 2004 and was barred from holding public office for a year. It was unclear whether Juppé's closeness to Chirac was a factor in his defeat on Sunday. He was the only one of 11 ministers and senior members of government who ran for Parliament who did not win.

In a political rule peculiar to France, government ministers and certain other senior officials are allowed to run for Parliament, but then give up the posts to designated stand-ins if they win.

The outcome of the election on Sunday is expected to give a much-needed boost to the Socialist Party, which has been riven by internal divisions over strategy and the public squabbling between Ms. Royal and Hollande.

The parliamentary campaign was marked by moments of Socialist Party desperation. Ms. Royal, who did not run for re-election to Parliament, confessed she would have been ready to take over the party reins from Hollande if he had stepped down.

After the party's dismal showing in the first round, Ms. Royal reached out for support to Bayrou, who spurned her proposal for an alliance against the right. Hollande was apparently infuriated.

The daily newspaper Le Monde called their bickering a "vaudeville act."

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