Mitterrand Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Philip Short

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Prologue

  1. A Family Apart

  2. The Captive

  3. Schisms of War

  4. Loose Ends, New Beginnings

  5. The Staircase of Power

  6. Requiem for Empire

  7. Crossing the Desert

  8. De Gaulle Again

  9. Union of the Left

  10. Politics is War

  11. The Novitiate

  12. The Sphinx

  13. The Florentine

  14. The Monarch

  15. The Survivalist

  16. The Testament

  Picture Section

  Picture Credits

  Acknowledgements

  Acronyms

  Bibliography and Sources

  Notes

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Aesthete, sensualist, bookworm, politician of Machiavellian cunning:

  François Mitterrand was a man of exceptional gifts and exceptional flaws who, during his fourteen years as president, strove to drag his tradition-bound and change-averse country into the modern world.

  As a statesman and as a human being, he was the incarnation of the mercurial, contrarian France which Britain and America find so perennially frustrating. He embodied the ambiguities and the contradictions of a nation whose modern identity is founded on a stubborn refusal to fit into the Anglo-American scheme of things. Yet he changed France more profoundly than any of his recent predecessors, arguably including even his great rival, Charles de Gaulle.

  During the war he was both the leader of a resistance movement and decorated for services to the collaborationist regime in Vichy. After flirting with the far Right, he entered parliament with the backing of conservatives and the Catholic Church before becoming the undisputed leader of the Left. As president he brought the French Communists into the government the better to destroy them. And all the while he managed to find time for an extraordinarily complicated private life.

  This is a human as much as a political biography, and a captivating portrait of a life that mirrored Mitterrand’s times.

  About the Author

  PHILIP SHORT is the author of acclaimed biographies of Pol Pot and Mao Zedong. He worked for ten years as the BBC’s Paris correspondent and lives in France.

  ALSO BY PHILIP SHORT

  Banda

  The Dragon and the Bear: Inside China and Russia Today

  Mao: A Life

  Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare

  For Ging

  who made it possible

  Mitterrand

  A Study in Ambiguity

  Philip Short

  Prologue

  OTHER NATIONS HAVE scandals. The French have affairs.

  From the Dreyfus Affair, before the Great War, when the country was at loggerheads with itself over the supposed treason of a Jewish officer; to the Stavisky Affair in the 1930s, in which a politically well-connected embezzler ‘committed suicide with a bullet which someone fired at him at point-blank range’, as one newspaper gleefully put it, bringing down the government of the day; the Bazooka Affair in the 1950s, when Michel Debré, a close aide to France’s wartime leader, General Charles de Gaulle, was suspected of complicity in the attempted murder of the French army commander in Algeria; the Affair of Bokassa’s Diamonds, in the 1970s, which helped end the re-election hopes of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing; and the Clearstream Affair, twenty years later, when another French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, threatened to hang a rival ‘from a butcher’s hook’, affairs have punctuated the rhythms of French political life.

  They are never fully elucidated, never satisfactorily explained, and leave an odour of malfeasance which continues to haunt the protagonists for the rest of their political careers.

  Few affairs in modern French history have been as enduring and insidious as the Observatory Affair, so called because it took place near the gardens of that name in the Latin Quarter of Paris. That year, 1959, the Algerian war of independence was raging. De Gaulle had been called out of retirement by French army commanders who, infuriated by the reluctance of the civilian government to crack down decisively on a rebellion in what was then still officially part of metropolitan France, had threatened a coup d’état. He had been given emergency powers and, the previous September, a new constitution had been approved, enshrining presidential rule. The Fourth Republic, with its fragile and ephemeral parliamentary governments, was gone. France found itself catapulted into a new era of republican monarchy.

  Among the few mainstream politicians who had voted against de Gaulle’s return was François Mitterrand, then among the leaders of the non-communist opposition. Mitterrand was not exactly a rising star, having held government office a dozen times since 1944, when he had become the youngest French minister since the Second Empire of Napoleon III, almost a century earlier. A gifted orator, his devastating put-downs, deceptively casual and often slightly tongue in cheek, masked an innate shyness which he went to great lengths to conceal.

  Until de Gaulle’s recall, Mitterrand had been regarded, not least by himself, as a Prime Minister in waiting. Subsequently he had been marginalised as the fault line in French politics shifted. Instead of dividing Left from Right, it now separated those who wanted negotiations in Algeria from those who favoured a military solution. To diehard conservatives, who had championed the General’s return but had afterwards come to distrust his intentions, Mitterrand epitomised the decadence of the weak civilian leaderships which had sold out French Indochina and seemed to be preparing to do the same in the one imperial stronghold France had left: North Africa. His opponents attacked him as ‘anti-national’, parliamentary language for a traitor.

  That autumn, Paris was alive with rumours of right-wing assassination squads being sent from Algiers by extremist settler organisations to execute political moderates. Louis Mermaz, later Speaker of the National Assembly, remembered it as ‘a sulphurous time, threats flying in all directions’. Albin Chalandon, the Gaullist party Secretary-General, spoke of a plot to overthrow the government. Certain politicians, who were judged to be particularly vulnerable, including the former Prime Minister, Pierre Mendès France, were given round-the-clock police protection. In October, one of Mitterrand’s closest friends informed him that death lists were circulating in Oran, Algeria’s second city: ‘Mitterrand’s name was listed first and Michelet (the Gaullist Justice Minister) second’. In the summer, plastic explosives were placed outside the door of his apartment but failed to detonate.1 His wife, Danielle, at home alone with two young children, started getting telephone calls late at night. ‘A voice would say, “Does black suit you? I hope so because soon you will wear it for your husband.” I told François, but he wouldn’t take it seriously. He said it was just cranks.’

  Nevertheless, on October 14, Mitterrand asked a trusted friend, Bernard Finifter, to find him a bulletproof jacket. Finifter approached the Director of National Security at the Interior Ministry, Jean Verdier. ‘It’s a matter of life and death,’ he pleaded. But he refused to explain why he wanted it and Verdier turned him down.

  The following day, a Thursday, brought more ominous developments.

  The right-wing evening newspaper, Paris-Presse, led its front page with a melodramatic warning: ‘A tragedy is in the making . . . It could be for tomorrow. Already groups of killers have crossed the border from Spain. Those to be executed have been chosen . . . 18 months after [de Gaulle’s return to power], we risk seeing the outbreak of a fratricidal internal conflict.’ It had been written by a prominent Gaullist MP, who s
aid later that his information had come from two concordant sources in Algeria and that the head of the French counter-espionage service, the DST, had confirmed it.

  Mitterrand dined at home that night with Danielle and a group of friends. Afterwards with three companions, he drove to the Champs-Elysées, the great thoroughfare that points like an arrow into the heart of Paris, descending from the Arc de Triomphe to the Tuileries Gardens and the Louvre. They bought Paris-Presse at a news-stand and stopped at a café, the Pam Pam, to discuss the story over a drink. ‘It seems things are coming to a head,’ Mitterrand murmured. At his suggestion they drove back to St Germain des Prés on the Left Bank, not far from his home, to have a nightcap at the Brasserie Lipp.

  Lipp was, and remains today, a Parisian institution, a meeting place for politicians, philosophers, actresses and bishops, writers and celebrities, from Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre to Verlaine and Chagall.2 Its wood-panelled façade, belle époque floral ceramics, painted Veronese-style ceilings, and mirrors subtly tilted so that its habitués can both see and be seen, have witnessed more than a century of copious Alsatian cuisine, foaming jugs of beer (of which Marcel Proust, when not nibbling madeleines, was said to have been a devotee), flirtatious dalliances and political and literary intrigues.

  Mitterrand was a regular. But on this occasion, after greeting a few acquaintances, he told his companions he felt tired and left. Within minutes, he said later, he sensed that he was being followed. Two men in a light green Renault Dauphine kept steadily behind his car. To be sure that his imagination was not playing tricks, he changed his usual route, turning left at the Senate to drive down the eastern side of the Luxembourg Gardens, past the rise that leads to the Pantheon, then southward towards the Observatory, founded in 1667 by the Sun King, Louis XIV. Whenever he slowed down, the Renault did the same.

  Abruptly I turned right into the rue Auguste Comte, accelerating as I did so . . . The other car did the same and started gaining on me. It would be hard for me to explain what was going through my head at that moment, but I knew that whatever happened I had to escape my pursuers. I was familiar with the area and instinctively I veered across the road, jamming on the brakes and coming to a halt between two parked cars. I literally flew out of my seat, raced towards the [Observatory] gardens and jumped the fence, throwing myself face-down in a flower-bed. A volley of shots rang out . . . Then I saw them drive off . . . I had the impression that they gave up trying to kill me when they saw me jump out and run. They shot up the empty car in order to be able to say to their bosses, ‘We did it. But there were unforeseen circumstances.’3

  Mitterrand’s car, a blue Peugeot saloon, had seven bullet holes, which the police established had been fired from a Sten gun.

  When he finally got back to his apartment, long after midnight, Danielle found him ‘shattered . . . He was always reserved – not the kind of man to throw himself into his wife’s arms, announcing “I’ve just escaped death!” . . . But that night he was completely closed in on himself. I couldn’t even talk to him. He just stayed in his room.’

  Expressions of sympathy poured in from all sides. To many it was a sign that the ultras, as the diehard nationalists were called, were losing patience with de Gaulle’s regime.4 Mitterrand had been targeted not because of his liberal views but as a shot across the bows of the government, a warning to the administration that the French settlers in Algeria and their extremist leaders would not sit idly by if the authorities tried to abandon them.

  A week later came the coup de théâtre.

  On October 22, a former MP named Robert Pesquet, who had represented an extreme right-wing party in parliament until the year before, informed the investigating magistrate that the assassination attempt had been faked.

  Mitterrand, he said, had approached him earlier that month with a proposal that he simulate an attack ‘in order to provoke the destruction of the ultras and their organisations’. In return, Mitterrand had promised to help him relaunch his political career. Pesquet said he had played along with the subterfuge because, as a supporter of French rule in Algeria, he wanted to expose Mitterrand as a liar in order to discredit him, and all those like him, who favoured negotiating with the rebels. He had staged the shooting himself with an accomplice, he added, but in such a way as to ensure that nobody would be hurt.

  Summoned by the magistrate to explain himself, Mitterrand denied everything. He said he had encountered Pesquet by chance two weeks earlier and the latter had repeatedly telephoned, asking to see him again. When eventually he agreed to a meeting, on October 14, Pesquet told him that he was linked to a terrorist group which had put Mitterrand on a blacklist to be killed. The former MP had sworn him to secrecy, saying that if his associates learnt that he had betrayed them his own life and the lives of his family would be in danger. He had come to warn Mitterrand, he added, because, whatever their differences about Algeria, he wanted no part in murder. The following afternoon, Mitterrand told the magistrate, Pesquet had contacted him again to tell him the attack was imminent and promising that if he had more information, he would wait for Mitterrand at Lipp that night. But there had been no sign of Pesquet at the brasserie and the next thing he knew his car was being followed.

  To the magistrate’s inevitable question, ‘Why didn’t you go to the police?’, Mitterrand replied that he had given his word and did not intend to break it.fn1 5

  There matters might have rested. Pesquet had a history of shady deals that had caused him earlier brushes with the law. Mitterrand kept repeating to his friends, ‘It’s his word against mine.’

  But Pesquet had been cunning.

  Six hours before the attack, he had sent a letter to himself at a poste restante address describing in detail what was to happen. A bailiff accompanied him when he collected it and attested to the time on the postmark. For the press and for public opinion, it followed that Pesquet must be telling the truth. The only possible explanation was that he and Mitterrand had concocted the whole thing together. Overnight, from having been a hero, Mitterrand became a bad joke; at best a naïve dupe, at worst an incompetent trickster whose machinations had come unstuck, deserving, as one newspaper put it, ‘not hate, but a certain contempt’.

  The trap, for trap it was, had been diabolically set.

  Mitterrand in the late 1950s was a savvy, seasoned politician with a national reputation. A serial seducer, with countless conquests to his name, a mark in France not of inconstancy but of virility and savoir-faire, he was controversial, charismatic and secretive. That he could have been bamboozled by an adventurer like Pesquet seemed totally out of character. André Bettencourt, who had known him since they were students together, was quoted in the press describing his ‘instinctive distrustfulness and sang-froid’. Mitterrand normally weighed to a nicety the pros and cons of every step he took. Yet he had walked blindly into an ambush which even a neophyte should have seen.

  André Rousselet, a long-time member of Mitterrand’s inner circle, felt that in the days after Pesquet’s revelations, he was close to suicide. François Dalle, a friend since the 1930s, thought the same: ‘for a week I spent every day with him, because I wanted to avoid a disaster’. Georges Beauchamp, a colleague from the Resistance, feared a repeat of the Salengro Affair, when, in 1936, a minister in the Popular Front government had killed himself after a campaign of calumny. ‘Salengro was on all our minds,’ said Roland Dumas, later French Foreign Minister. ‘With hindsight, I don’t think he would have done it . . . But back then I wasn’t so sure.’

  Mitterrand believed that his career was finished and that he would never recover. ‘He was convinced of it,’ a colleague recalled. ‘I remember going out for a walk with him. He thought it was all over.’ That weekend was his forty-third birthday. Danielle, for the first time since their marriage, saw him weakened. ‘I discovered that he was human that day. He was staring into an abyss. For nights on end he paced up and down in the apartment, trying to figure out what to do. It became an obsession.’ Years later
he spoke of feeling ‘as though I were at the bottom of a well’.

  Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, who edited the progressive weekly, l’Express, remembered a meeting in his office where Mitterrand, normally the most private and unemotional of men, ‘broke down and cried like a baby’. With a handful of exceptions, Servan-Schreiber among them, his political friends abandoned him. Even Henri Frenay, a wartime Gaullist minister who was godfather to Mitterrand’s son, Gilbert, told Danielle when she sought his help that he ‘didn’t want to get involved’.

  Salvation, of a kind, came in November, when it was disclosed that, during the summer, Pesquet had approached Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury, a Centre-Right leader and former Prime Minister whose views on Algeria were more conservative than Mitterrand’s, with a similar claim that he was to be targeted for assassination. Bourgès, two years older and a more down-to-earth, phlegmatic character, had wisely refused to have anything to do with him. De Gaulle’s government had known this for weeks but had kept quiet so as to cause Mitterrand the maximum political damage.6

  The disclosure fatally undermined his opponents’ case against him. If Pesquet had tried earlier to ensnare others, Mitterrand could no longer be accused of having initiated the plot himself. Like a soufflé that collapses once the hot air inside cools, the Observatory Affair began to look like the political silliness it was. Who after all could seriously believe that Mitterrand would turn to a virtual unknown, a political opponent to boot, to simulate an attempt on his life, in which real bullets would be used, at the risk of getting himself killed?fn2 Had he wished to fake a murder attempt, he had plenty of trusted friends from the Resistance who would have been only too glad to help him.

  Yet Pesquet’s letter, describing exactly how the attack would be mounted, was impossible to explain away. In parliament, Mitterrand insisted ‘there was nothing he could not have known or guessed . . . If its contents had not conformed to the use that he wished to make of it, it would never have been divulged.’ It was a good try, but it fell short. The letter included details which could only have been agreed in advance.7