Mitterrand Read online

  Fifty years later, Mitterrand’s brother, Jacques, then dying of cancer, explained what had really happened. ‘He screwed himself completely,’ Jacques said. ‘It was a trap with many levels. He thought he could benefit from it, yes . . . he thought he could turn it to his own advantage. But in fact he trapped himself.’ Pesquet, he said, had begged Mitterrand to help him. He seemed terrified and claimed that he risked being killed if he did not show his bosses that he had at least attempted an attack. It was an approach well calculated to appeal to what André Rousselet called the ‘romanesque’ side of Mitterrand’s nature. When Pesquet insisted that to go to the police would put him in mortal danger, Mitterrand decided to play along. It was a gamble which, if it succeeded, would put him back in the forefront of French political life. ‘At that time,’ François Dalle remembered, ‘no one was talking about him. [De Gaulle was in the spotlight.] Mitterrand needed people to talk about him . . . He was no longer centre stage. So he committed this enormous, fantastic piece of stupidity.’

  The Observatory Affair would remain an albatross around François Mitterrand’s neck for the rest of his life and beyond. Most French people, on the Left as well as the Right, believe to this day that he instigated the attack himself. In later years, he refused point-blank to discuss it. The result, as Jacques acknowledged, was that he was not believed. ‘He never explained completely what had happened. Had he done so, the affair would have been over. But he didn’t.’ He did not because he could not without admitting that he had lied. That was the beauty of it. Once the trap had closed, there was no way he could ever escape.

  The autumn of 1959 was a watershed in Mitterrand’s career. As Danielle put it, shortly before her death, ‘there was “before” the Observatory, and “after”.’

  Until then, politically at least, he had had a charmed existence. While still in his thirties, he had held two of the highest posts in government as Interior and Justice Minister. After de Gaulle’s return, he and Mendès France had led the challenge from the Left. Now his career was in ruins: everything had to be rebuilt.

  The identity of those who had tried to frame him, manipulating Pesquet from behind the scenes, was never formally established. But the fetid whiff of intrigue, of conspiracies and cover-ups, lingered long after. Although Mitterrand was able, with difficulty, to retain a seat in parliament, he became the whipping boy of the Right, which excoriated him as a symbol of all that it despised. ‘Whenever he got up to speak,’ Rousselet recalled, ‘his opponents would chant, “Pesquet! Pesquet!” . . .’

  Old accusations, which he had thought long since laid to rest, were raked up anew. As a student in the 1930s, had he not joined a terrorist group, the Secret Organisation for Revolutionary Action, known as La Cagoule (The Hood)? His role in the Resistance was trashed. Had he not worked at Vichy for the government of Marshal Pétain, which collaborated with Hitler? Had not Pétain awarded him the francisque, the Marshal’s personal decoration?

  Mitterrand had ready answers: half the leaders of the Resistance had worked for Vichy at one time or another, as had many of de Gaulle’s own ministers; the francisque had been a cover approved by de Gaulle’s aides in London. The General himself had described Mitterrand as one of a handful of ‘our representatives’ responsible for keeping him informed about developments inside France.8 But that was not what his opponents wished to hear. The orthodox version of wartime history was written in black and white, with no place for shades of grey. It held that the majority of the French people had been patriots; Vichy, a nest of traitors. That the reality might have been more complicated has never been widely accepted in France. In the early 1960s, it was pointless even to try to discuss it.

  Politics, however, like other forms of human endeavour, has its arsenal of surprises.

  Six years later, in 1965, the same François Mitterrand whose name had been dragged through the mud and whose future had been written off by all but a tiny handful of loyalists, achieved a resounding triumph in the first direct presidential election of the new Fifth Republic. De Gaulle’s towering stature at that time meant there was never any possibility of an opposition victory. Mitterrand’s achievement was to force him into the humiliation of a run-off, in which the challenger received an unhoped-for 45 per cent of the vote. In 1981, he became France’s first popularly elected socialist president, going on to win a second term. By the time he completed his mandate, he had led the country for fourteen years, longer than any other French Head of State in modern times, establishing himself in the eyes of French people of all political persuasions as being with Charles de Gaulle one of the two defining leaders of twentieth-century France.

  They were strange bedfellows.

  De Gaulle, the wartime hero, gave France back its pride after the Nazi Occupation, ended the war in Algeria and took the first, essential steps towards reconciliation with Germany and the making of post-war Europe. Mitterrand, in peacetime, transformed France into a modern democratic state, legitimised the Left as a responsible voice in the nation’s political affairs and, together with Helmut Kohl, pushed Europe towards political union, with a common currency and a reunified Germany anchored firmly in the West.

  One was an austere, granite monument of a man, the self-appointed guardian of French honour, as strict with others as with himself and displaying sovereign contempt for all whose moral standards did not meet his own exacting conception of how men should behave. The other was an enigma, a bourgeois intellectual from a solidly right-wing background capable of firing a left-wing crowd into a fervour of political enthusiasm, an introverted, inspiring figure who transcended his origins and culture to build a political career on the back of a working class with whom he had almost nothing in common.

  De Gaulle was a good Catholic, devoted husband and father (of a daughter with Down’s syndrome), the incarnation of respectability. Mitterrand was a lapsed Catholic who spent years in a ménage à trois and then maintained two homes and two families, one legitimate, the other adulterine.

  They were chalk and cheese and, not surprisingly, allergic to each other. But it was an antipathy based on respect. De Gaulle was twenty-five years older than Mitterrand, died twenty-five years before him and left no written record of how he viewed his young challenger. To Mitterrand, de Gaulle represented ‘mastery over oneself, which meant mastery over history’. After the General’s death, he compared him to Henri IV, the great sixteenth-century King who ended the Wars of Religion, and Cardinal Richelieu, Chief Minister to his son, Louis XIII, who laid the foundations of modern Western statecraft. It was an extraordinary tribute to a man who, for most of his career, had been his arch-enemy. Yet the panegyric was tempered by distance. Late in life he penned an appreciation of de Gaulle’s ‘astonishing sureness of judgement’:

  With him, one was in History. One lived it. One made it. I saw that and . . . I admired [him] for being able to rule like that. But I was not tempted to join him politically . . . I could have done so . . . But with de Gaulle there was a certain militarism, a tone which did not suit me . . .

  De Gaulle projected a vision of French grandeur. Mitterrand mirrored France in all its imperfections, its turpitudes and tragedies, its cowardice and glory, its weakness and its strength. Both men changed their country profoundly, but in profoundly different ways. De Gaulle reflected its ambitions; Mitterrand, its reality.

  They also had much in common. A generation apart, both had been taken prisoner: de Gaulle in the First World War, Mitterrand in the Second. De Gaulle tried repeatedly to escape, but each time was recaptured; Mitterrand succeeded. Both rebelled: de Gaulle against the military hierarchy, Mitterrand against his class; yet even there, the distinction was perhaps less than it seemed. ‘De Gaulle,’ Mitterrand wrote, ‘dared to deny his social class by an act of indiscipline, . . . by breaking with the established order on June 18 1940 . . . when that established order betrayed [his country]’.

  Both men radiated a natural authority over those around them. A fellow PoW wrote of de Gaulle in 1917:
‘Under a simple, sometimes familiar exterior, he knew how to maintain a distance. All the other [officers] used the informal “tu” when they talked among themselves. No one ever used “tu” to de Gaulle.’ The same could have been written of Mitterrand. No one used ‘tu’ to him either.9

  Both men had an inner solitude, a part of their being that was locked, inaccessible to others, which is one of the characteristics of uncommon leaders everywhere. De Gaulle was nicknamed the Connétable, or Supreme Commander; Mitterrand, the Sphinx. Both spent long years in the wilderness, de Gaulle in the 1950s, Mitterrand a decade later. Both used unhesitatingly every weapon in the political armoury. De Gaulle was portrayed as a model of political rectitude but employed a private army of thugs to intimidate opponents, special courts to stifle dissent and state controls on radio and television to inhibit democratic debate. Mitterrand ended those practices, but as President created an eavesdropping unit to spy on those rash enough to take an interest in his complicated private life.

  De Gaulle, like Mitterrand, was a master of the oracular phrase. In Algiers in June 1958, he famously assured French settlers, ‘Je vous ai compris!’ (‘I have understood you’), words greeted with tumultuous applause. By then he had already decided that the settlers had no future and would have to be abandoned. It would take them another year to realise that his meaning was not what they thought. For de Gaulle such ambiguity was discretionary. For Mitterrand it was systemic. Laurent Fabius, his Prime Minister in the 1980s, wrote perceptively that ‘the key to Mitterrand’s personality, to his extraordinary success, to his [political] longevity and his energy, the key to the fascination which he exerted on others . . . was his staggering and quite exceptional ambivalence . . . a deep-seated, metaphysical ambivalence which made him view everything as both itself and its opposite, every person as both good and bad, every situation as containing the seeds of both tragedy and hope’.

  The French statesman Mitterrand most admired was the seventeenth-century Cardinal Mazarin, preceptor and First Minister of Louis XIV, after whom he named his daughter, Mazarine. Much of what the cardinal wrote in his Breviary for Politicians could be taken as a vade mecum for Mitterrand himself:

  Be sparing with your gestures, walk with measured steps and maintain a posture at all times which is full of dignity . . . Each day . . . spend a moment studying how you should react to the events which might befall you . . . Know that how you will appear [to others] will be determined by the way you have fashioned your inner self beforehand. Always keep in mind these five precepts: Simulate; dissimulate; trust nobody; speak well of everyone; anticipate before you act . . . There is scant chance that people will put a good complexion on what you say or do. Rather they will twist it and think the worst of you.10

  However the saying which fitted him best he attributed to Mazarin’s rival, the Cardinal de Retz: ‘if you set aside ambiguity, it is always to your own detriment.’

  In Mitterrand’s later years, in the wake of the Observatory Affair, his secretiveness and mistrust grew more pronounced. Rousselet said the affair ‘armour-plated him’: he would never allow his instincts to trip him up again.

  His ambiguities had begun much earlier. In the 1940s Mitterrand was at Vichy and in the Resistance; in the 1950s he was elected to parliament by voters from both Left and Right. His personal friends ranged from communists to those who, before the war, had supported fascist groups. Even at his most doctrinaire, as head of the Socialist Party, he rejected ideological constraints. He believed in social justice, he said, which meant that he was on the Left. But he would not allow anyone else’s ‘-ism’ to dictate to him what he should think.

  Mitterrand’s ambiguity was both a strength and a weakness. The ability to see two sides of every issue prevented him from becoming sectarian and provided a framework for coexistence when, in the 1980s, the socialists lost their parliamentary majority and, for the first time in French history, a president from one political camp had to work with a legislature from another.

  De Gaulle would have resigned. Mitterrand’s predecessor, Giscard d’Estaing, had threatened to leave Paris and spend the rest of his term of office ‘inaugurating chrysanthemums’ at the Castle of Rambouillet. Mitterrand made the system work. Cohabitation, as it was called, became briefly the new norm. But the same mixture of agility and patience that allowed Mitterrand to fashion compromises and finesse domestic crises inspired in both allies and adversaries wariness and suspicion.

  Not least of the ironies of Mitterrand’s rule was that, having in opposition denounced the institutions of the Fifth Republic as a ‘permanent coup d’état’, and the manner in which de Gaulle utilised them as an abuse of personal power, he found, once in office himself, that they fitted him like a glove, and in the decade and a half he was President opposed any attempt to change them. They gave him greater powers over his own country than any other Western leader and, like his august predecessor, he used them to the full.

  In the mythology of contemporary France, de Gaulle was the man who said no: No to Pétain, No to NATO, No to Britain in the European Community. Mitterrand could say no, too: ‘no to de Gaulle, no to the Communists, no to his cancer, no to death,’ wrote Franz-Olivier Giesbert. But he said it differently. ‘Even as he battled against his final illness,’ Giesbert wrote, ‘he never lost the look of a mischievous child.’ Where de Gaulle had been a monolith, Mitterrand was a mystery. His doctor, in the last months of his life, told him he was a mixture of ‘Machiavelli, Don Corleone, Casanova and the Little Prince’. When Mitterrand enquired, ‘in what proportions?’, the physician replied prudently: ‘That depends on which day.’

  François Mitterrand was a sensualist, an aesthete, a bookworm, a quicksilver, complicated man, by turns reckless and prudent, passionate and withdrawn, calculating and intuitive, gifted with unusual intellect and political acumen. He loved literature as much as politics and at one time dreamed of becoming a writer, but had the good sense to recognise that his talents lay elsewhere. So he ‘wrote’ the story of his life in actions rather than words. It is a narrative which, like his character, is frequently opaque. De Gaulle took France by the scruff of the neck and, with a mixture of flattery and fetters, discipline and self-denial, welded it back together again. Georges Clemenceau, ‘the Tiger’, stiffened French spines during the First World War (and in company with Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson prepared the ground for the Second). Mitterrand did nothing comparable. His life mirrored the contradictions and compromises of the times in which he lived. Yet he changed the ground rules of French social and political debate in ways more far-reaching and fundamental than any other modern leader before him, setting the agenda for France, and helping to shape that of Europe, for a generation to come. It is an agenda to which the French, like other Europeans, are still learning to adjust.

  * * *

  fn1 In Mitterrand’s defence, Pierre Mendès France disclosed shortly afterwards that he had been placed in an identical dilemma two years earlier when, following an assassination attempt which injured his bodyguard, a member of the group responsible had come to warn him that another attempt was being planned. ‘I would have regarded it as utterly contemptible to put in danger the life of [that] man,’ he said. If Mitterrand was at fault for not alerting the authorities, Mendès said, he had been equally so, ‘and I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again’.

  fn2 Apart from two groups of neo-Grecian statuary on stone plinths in the centre of the gardens, the area offers no cover. When the police staged a reconstruction of the attack, Mitterrand offered to re-enact his role. The magistrate refused, saying that with live fire it was too dangerous.

  1

  A Family Apart

  FRANÇOIS MAURICE ADRIEN Marie Mitterrand entered the world, like most children in middle-class homes in those days, on his mother’s four-poster bed, with a midwife in attendance. It was four o’clock in the morning on October 26 1916, in the small town of Jarnac, in the Cognac country north of Bordeaux. His father, Joseph, had been appointed earlie
r that year to the post of stationmaster in Angoulême, the county seat, on the main line from Paris. But his wife, Yvonne, preferred to return to her parents’ home at Jarnac, 20 miles to the west, for her numerous confinements. François, like his brother, Robert, a year earlier, and like his three older sisters, was born in his maternal grandparents’ house and baptised in the local church. He spent the first years of his life in the family apartment above the station at Angoulême, listening to the puffing and whistling of steam engines as they clattered over the tracks.

  In the summer of 1919, Joseph was offered a more senior post with the railways in Paris but, not without regret, turned it down. Yvonne was reluctant to leave, and her father, Papa Jules, who owned a vinegar manufacture, was past retirement age and would one day need a successor. The family moved to Jarnac for good.

  Their new home was a spacious three-storey eighteenth-century house adjoining that of Yvonne’s parents. They shared a large interior courtyard and garden and faced on to the rue Abel Guy, a stone’s throw from the river which gives the département of the Charente its name. The town itself is a maze of narrow streets with high stone walls, surrounded by vineyards in rolling countryside, interspersed with wheat fields and woodland. It is far enough south to escape the worst of the northern winter, but not so far as to have to endure heatwaves in summer – an equable, temperate part of France where a month without rain is as rare as a snowstorm. In later life, Mitterrand looked back on ‘a luminous childhood’ at Jarnac and at Touvent, a hamlet in the depths of the countryside further to the south, where his grandparents had a farm and he stayed for months each year, on the pretext of ‘building up his strength’, as used to be said at the time, after a bout of peritonitis.