by Philip Short
The farmhouse, built on a rise, looking out over the plain, had neither electricity nor running water, unlike their home at Jarnac, where electric light replaced candles and oil lamps when François was five years old. The nearest neighbour was two miles away. Papa Jules and his wife had a cook and a coachman, a nurse for the younger children and a generous helping of maids. When the family drove from Touvent to church on Sundays, they used a carriage-and-four. But for the journey from Jarnac, Joseph had a motor car, in the early days an ancient Chenard & Walcker, which suffered constant punctures, and later on a Ford.
Robert remembered Touvent as ‘an enchanted domain’, where he and François would roam over the hillsides, hunt for mushrooms, fight mock battles with their sisters and cousins, and spend lazy afternoons by the river where an old mill, invaded by greenery, was on the brink of ruin. ‘There I learnt the meaning of the hours, the contours of the days, the seasons,’ François said later. ‘I accumulated sensations, the feel of the wind, the air, the water, the country roads, the animals.’ At Touvent he felt at one with nature, ‘going from wonder to wonder . . . The world was being born alongside me. My head was full of the music of natural things . . . Each hour had its scent.’ It was a childhood such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky described in nineteenth-century Russia, a hymn to nature from a time when mechanical inventions had yet to come between man and the soil. It left François with an enduring love of the countryside, of trees, and of long walks in the forest, communing with the world around him.
At Touvent, as at Jarnac, the house was always full. When the family sat down at table, they were rarely fewer than a dozen and often fifteen or twenty. Papa Jules presided. He was the uncontested master of a clan sufficient unto itself, a family circle to which outsiders were rarely admitted and then with a certain suspicion, ‘as though they were breaking and entering’, as François later put it. All the children knew that Papa Jules was the dominant figure in the family. François remembered him as a man who ‘sparkled’. Strongly built and bursting with ideas, he was a talented storyteller who, when the mood was upon him, would recite ribald fables, inspired by La Fontaine, in the local dialect, saintongeais, making the men of the family chuckle and the women blush.
Joseph Mitterrand lived for years in the old man’s shadow, and his example made his sons determined never to be put in that position themselves. Not only had he had to wait ten years before Papa Jules, at the age of 76, consented at last to hand over the reins of the vinegar business for which he had given up his career on the railways, but much earlier, when he was in his twenties, his own father had made him abandon his dream of becoming a writer in favour of a ‘public service’ career, where he had had to work his way up from the bottom, spending the first year with a team of workers pushing freight wagons. Joseph sought solace for his frustrations in religion, his piety exceeded only by that of his wife, Yvonne, who went to Mass at 6 a.m. each day, summer and winter alike, and had resolved as a young woman to ‘raise her heart to God four times every hour’.
Beneath his strait-laced exterior, Joseph was a free spirit, ‘one of the freest people I have ever known’, François would write later. ‘He would have loved the bustle of the towns, the movement of ideas. Instead his companions were silence and solitude.’ Life had made him ‘very introverted, rather cold, sometimes glacial’. His freedoms he kept to himself, taking refuge in a world of reflection which others could not share.
François asked him once what he thought about when they went fishing together. Life is like a river, his father replied. ‘At first sight, nothing happens there. The hours follow each other . . . the days . . . and in turn the seasons. But if you look more closely, with eyes which by dint of seeing . . . have been opened, you learn that everything is changing.’
Joseph Mitterrand spoke rarely. When he did, ‘he threw out words as though he was casting bait’. Locally he was well-liked and respected, becoming President of the French vinegar-makers’ association and a member of the municipal council. But with his children he was reserved, a taciturn, undemonstrative man, who loved them but was too inhibited to show his affection. One of his grandchildren remembered him as ‘very severe . . . He kept everything inside’. François had much in common with him:
There were a lot of us . . . eight children and two cousins, all brought up together . . . [but] I was able to set aside for myself moments of solitude, because that was what I liked. [Outside the family], I didn’t have many friends of my own age. I was shy . . . I loved words . . . but I wasn’t talkative. [When I was upset], I would walk in the countryside, or go up into the loft . . . and make [imagined] speeches to an invisible crowd within . . . They used to say I was withdrawn, that I found it difficult to communicate. In fact I have never felt the need to open myself to other people . . . I was very calm, very quiet, poking fun at others rather than being naughty myself . . . I wasn’t a child who laughed a lot or was particularly gay . . .1
Something else may also have been at work. As a small child, his brother, Robert, had fallen seriously ill. The eldest son, born after a succession of girls, Robert was the apple of his mother’s eye. Fifty years afterwards, François still talked about how, at that time, ‘everyone could only think of my brother and I was left alone in my corner’. Some in his family felt that he had ‘an abandoned child complex’, which explained why, as an adult, he would never abandon a friend.
But that was only one side of his character. His brothers recalled a different François, who slid down banisters; fidgeted so much in church that he caused a scandal by falling off his chair; and stubbornly held his finger a millimetre away from an object he had been forbidden to touch, insisting that he was not disobedient and was doing nothing wrong.
What he remembered was a self-image, a recollection of childhood from which, he once wrote, he would draw strength all his life.
All the Mitterrand siblings had absorbed the values their parents and grandparents taught them. Robert and Jacques, who was born a year after François, both remembered the family rules: ‘Be discreet and, in all circumstances, endeavour to control your emotions. Always remain master of yourself without ever showing your feelings.’ Money was taboo as a subject of conversation, a vulgar thing which in polite company was not to be discussed.
Yet behind the decorous, old-fashioned façade, it was in some ways a rather modern household. No child was ever beaten. They could go to bed when they liked and, apart from mealtimes, when the whole family ate together, attendance at school and church and other sundry obligations, were free to spend their days as they wished. It was noisy and boisterous, and if a child wanted to read, he had to learn to shut out the din all around him. ‘It wasn’t rigorous at all,’ Jacques insisted, ‘there were a few rules we had to follow, but it was the opposite of strict.’ François remembered, ‘there was a great deal of freedom . . . I never had to rebel.’
The Mitterrands were different in other ways too. In later life, François would describe his family as being from the petite bourgeoisie. They were not. As a teenager in the 1870s, Papa Jules had been sent to Britain to perfect his English, later establishing his own marque of cognac, in partnership with Louis Despas, whose family would subsequently amass a fortune at the head of the Monoprix supermarket chain. Joseph Mitterrand was a classicist, who read both Latin and Greek. His wife, Yvonne, adored reading and gave François his love of books, of which the house was full. Their children went on to careers that other families might envy. Robert entered Polytechnique, the French equivalent of Oxbridge or Harvard; Jacques passed through Saint-Cyr, the country’s top military academy. The family was markedly right-wing, but more monarchist than reactionary, nostalgic for the Empire yet open-minded by the standards of the time. François later found one of his mother’s early diaries, in which she had expressed disgust at the vilification of Captain Dreyfus. ‘Such hatred is not Christian,’ she had written, ‘Christ and the Virgin Mary were both Jews’ – hardly a typical right-wing response to one of the watershed i
ssues of the day.2 Papa Jules even found merit in the Cartel des Gauches, a left-wing coalition which took office in 1924. None of them supported the extreme anti-Semitic nationalism being propagated by men like Charles Maurras, whose movement, Action Française, then a leading force in French political debate, they regarded as anti-clerical.
The family did not belong to the grande bourgeoisie either. To the old aristocracy of Jarnac, they were outsiders – ‘immigrants’, as Jacques liked to say. Papa Jules’s family had arrived from Rouillac, all of 10 miles away, a mere half-century earlier. Joseph’s parents were from the Limousin, a hundred miles to the east. Still worse, the family was Catholic in a region dominated by Protestants where the wounds of the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion were still raw. The name, Jarnac, entered French history in 1547, when a local Protestant nobleman took the champion of the Dauphin by surprise in a duel.3 Twenty years later the Catholics took revenge and proceeded to commit such atrocities as the Protestants neither forgave nor forgot. Nearly 400 years afterwards, François Mitterrand wrote, ‘the fire of [those] wars was still smouldering under the ashes . . . Every Catholic [in Jarnac] felt he was suspected of [supporting] the revocation of the Edict of Nantes’ – a reference to the decision by Louis XIV, at the end of the seventeenth century, to outlaw the Protestant religion.4
So persistent was this legacy that when his older sisters tried to join the local tennis club, most of whose members were Protestants, the Calvinist pastor protested that it was ‘not right that Catholics be allowed to play there’. The Mitterrands responded in kind: ‘My grandmother [Papa Jules’s wife] never set foot in a Protestant house,’ Jacques remembered, ‘and no Protestant ever darkened her door.’5
Such conflicts fuelled the religious fervour that infused the Mitterrand household. ‘First and foremost, and before anything else,’ Robert wrote, ‘we had to practise our religion’ – benedicite before each meal, vespers every evening. On Sundays the boys sang in the choir and, when they were older, served Mass. Yvonne told her husband that she hoped François would take holy orders: Robert was bound for business or government; Jacques wanted to be a soldier; and Philippe, the youngest son, was set on becoming a farmer. All that was missing was a priest.
François did not discourage her: ‘When I was a child, I thought I would be pope or king.’6
There was another important matter that set the Mitterrands apart. In Jarnac at that time, the cognac business was what counted and 90 per cent of it was in the hands of Protestant families. Some were local aristocrats. Others, like Thomas Hine, today purveyors of cognac ‘by appointment to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’, whose cellars, in an elegant white stone mansion on the banks of the Charente, were only a few minutes’ walk from Papa Jules’s home, had settled in Jarnac in the eighteenth century. Papa Jules’s own attempt to break into the trade had failed, leading him to set up his vinegar manufacture. But the vinaigriers, as they were called, were a notch down the social scale from the cognacquiers, and there was little contact between them. ‘There were 25 families in Jarnac who made up the local bourgeoisie,’ Jacques recalled, ‘and only five of them were Catholic. With a few exceptions, the cognacquiers were Protestant. We were neither Protestant nor in the cognac trade. That made us different from the others. We were unclassifiable.’7 Édith Cahier, who married Robert, agreed. ‘In Jarnac,’ she said, ‘there were the Mitterrands. And then there was everyone else.’
Some of François’s family and friends,8 notably François Dalle, were convinced that these caste divisions had a lasting influence on his attitude to wealth and those who flaunted it:
He was exasperated in his youth . . . by those young cretins from the cognac families . . . They couldn’t pass their bac, they were hopeless, yet they lived like high-fliers . . . His father had a little vinegar manufacture, with a dozen employees . . . There was no comparison with the immense wealth of the cognac trade. But the intellectual superiority of the Mitterrands . . . was obvious . . . The fatuousness of the moneyed bourgeoisie [there] annoyed him, and he felt it more strongly as he got older.9
François himself wrote later of ‘the literally brahminical code which governed human relations [in Jarnac]’. He added, however: ‘I do not wish to paint in black [a time] that was sweetness and light.’
In September 1926, a few weeks before his 10th birthday, François left the family cocoon and enrolled as a boarder at St Paul’s College in Angoulême. At Jarnac the children had gone to a private parish school, which had only two classes, where they learnt the three Rs, and then attended the local elementary school. In the holidays, at Touvent, François studied Latin each Sunday after Mass, under the guidance of the village priest. But school had not been taken very seriously and François and Jacques were often absent. Now all that changed.
An imposing, solidly built, forbidding, grey stone edifice, perched on the ramparts of the old city, gazing out over the plains to the south, the college had some 200 boarders and half as many day boys and was staffed by diocesan priests appointed by the bishop.
The regime was austere.10 There was no heating in the dormitories, which contained long rows of iron-framed beds, and when the children were awakened at 5.45 a.m., in pitch darkness in winter, there would be ice in the long basin which, like a horse-trough, lined the length of the far wall. They washed quickly in cold water from old-fashioned copper taps, and then made for the chapel, where the angelus was said. Lessons took up eight hours a day, five or six days a week, with two hours for homework and, if the weather was bad, extra study on Sundays. Lunch began in silence, while a priest read an edifying text or pages from the scriptures. Only when the reading was over were the children allowed to talk. The day ended as it had begun, with prayer. Each term they took part in a three-day religious retreat for meditation and bible study.
Those who were disobedient, turbulent or simply lazy risked rustication. But most were brought back into line by the threat that if they persisted, they would be sent to a Jesuit college in the neighbouring Dordogne where conditions were rumoured to be harsher and the discipline still more severe. Apart from holidays and half-term, they were not permitted to leave the college precincts, and could see their parents only on visiting days in a reception room near the gate, which was often more upsetting than not seeing them at all.
For François, it ought to have been a traumatic experience. Apparently it was not.11 Robert, who had started a year earlier, was there to show him the ropes. He made friends, among them the future poet and polymath, Claude Roy, one year older than himself, of whom he later wrote: ‘His sense of literature was more developed than mine . . . What an awakening! What conversations we had! Thanks to him, I entered a . . . world where style was king.’ With Roy he discovered La Nouvelle Revue française, the literary monthly founded in 1908 by a group including André Gide, as well as more provocative and ambiguous literary figures: Arthur de Gobineau, whose essay on the inequality of races was seized on by the Wagnerians and later by Nazi theorists; and Jacques Chardonne, who later collaborated with the Nazis, but whose ‘concise, dyed-in-the-wool French style’ Mitterrand would admire all his life.12
Another boon companion was Pierre Guillain de Bénouville, the scion of an aristocratic family which had fallen on difficult times, who arrived at the college two years later, accompanied by his elder brother and, to the other boys’ amazement, an ecclesiastical tutor. He had the bed next to François and introduced him to the writings of Henry de Montherlant, who exalted manly pursuits and the comradeship of the trenches. Pierre was impetuous and obstinate, a boy who acted faster than he thought. François was contemplative, a dreamer, able to lose himself in a book for hours, offended when others teased him that his head was in the clouds. They became inseparable.
At the college the boys saw their first film, a silent black-and-white epic of the Wild West, in which, Robert noted, ‘everyone was either good or bad, never a mixture of the two’13 – a remark intended less as a criticism of simpleton America than to mark
the contrast with European novels, with their complex, often ambiguous heroes and labyrinthine plots. From Colette and Proust, Malraux and Mauriac, whom François was now reading at home, to an early Hollywood western was, after all, quite a leap. Much more daunting was the English language, which, to his chagrin, François never managed to learn, despite being sent to England to study during the holidays.fn1 He and Robert with their cousin, Lolotte, stayed as paying guests at the home of two middle-aged English ladies at Westgate-on-Sea, in Kent, about 20 miles north of Dover. They were won over by English breakfasts; intrigued by the whistling kettle, which signalled the approach of tea; and disheartened by lunch and dinner, ‘the indisputable proof twice a day that we had crossed a frontier’. They spent their days at the local tennis club, where they learnt to play on grass courts and marvelled at English good manners – ‘the exemplary fashion,’ as Robert put it, ‘in which the English address one another’ – but that was about the extent of their cultural immersion.14
François was goalkeeper in the college football team and represented St Paul’s in table-tennis tournaments, which he often won. The other boys looked up to him and he acquired a following.
Now that he was a boarder, he was allowed more independence during the holidays. He discovered the joys of bicycling and set out on long solitary rides from Touvent, to discover, as he put it, ‘the hidden face of the earth’. He and Robert fished in the Charente for tench and went rowing at a boat club, which had been established by the wealthy English owners of some of the nearby cognac houses. In autumn their father took them hunting for rabbits and for partridges and larks, trapped with the aid of a ‘lark mirror’ which one of the boys would rotate.fn2 François played chess with his grandfather and, to the old man’s delight, soon became a redoubtable opponent.