by Philip Short
But the age of innocence was about to end. In 1929, Papa Jules sold Touvent. The Great Depression was looming, he was growing old and he sensed that it was time to put his affairs in order. That was the year he finally let his son-in-law take over the vinegar business. It marked the passing of an era. Years later, François remembered:
It was my first bereavement. Truly, a bereavement, like the loss of a loved one. They had already started to take the furniture away. My grandmother sat in an armchair in the corner of an empty room. Her eyes were red from crying, and I stood beside her with a feeling of despair. Soon after that [in August, 1931] . . . she died. My childhood was upended . . . It was the first time [death] had touched the circle of those I loved . . . I grieved all the more because I felt that one day, I wouldn’t grieve as much. I thought that time would do its work, life would make me forget, and in that way I would be betraying her. [Emphasis added]15
The words are revealing. At fourteen, he was already looking inward, questioning his own reactions, treating with a certain distance even those events which touched him most closely. In the college boy at Angoulême, François Mitterrand, the introspective, complicated, sometimes convoluted thinker, who would be nicknamed ‘the Florentine’ in an allusion to Machiavelli and Lorenzo de Medici, was beginning to emerge.
His intellectual gifts were not immediately reflected in his school reports. But he did not let that bother him – or, at least, he did not allow it to show. Robert, who was a brilliant student, told their parents that François was not working properly and had come ninth out of nineteen in essay-writing, but that when he had urged his brother to do better, the younger boy had retorted that he was ‘quite happy with the place he had’. By his own account François was best at history, geography and French, but paradoxically less good at Latin, which he loved. ‘I learnt by heart whole passages from Horace and from Virgil . . . All my books were scrawled over with horizontal and vertical lines to mark the rhythm of the prosody.’ In philosophy, his teacher reported, he was ‘intelligent . . . though sometimes lacking clarity’. Despite his shyness, he was an accomplished debater, winning the college prize for eloquence and going through to the regional final at Bordeaux.16 But maths and science did not interest him and he remained a dunce at English. Partly in consequence, he was forced to repeat a year, a setback which wounded his vanity and which he never afterwards mentioned.17
In the autumn of 1934, at the age of eighteen, having finally, to his parents’ relief, obtained his baccalaureate, François Mitterrand set out for Paris to begin his higher education. Once again his big brother, Robert, was there to give him a helping hand. But this time he found the adjustment more difficult: ‘I felt lost, as though I were very small, at the foot of a mountain which I had to climb. I had no identity.’ He compared himself to Eugène de Rastignac, the hero of Balzac’s great novel, Père Goriot, who had come to Paris a century earlier, also from the Charente, determined to make his fortune. But unlike Balzac’s hero, he did not see Paris spread out at his feet.
Mitterrand spent the next four years living with other students from the provinces in a hostel in the Latin Quarter run by priests of the Society of Mary, a Catholic denomination from Lyon, who described themselves as ‘social Christians’. It was a long, terraced four-storey stone building, dating from the 1860s, when Baron Haussmann had redesigned the city. He enrolled both at the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Letters, at the Sorbonne, while also studying for admission to the diplomatic section of Sciences-Po, the Institute (or as it was then called, the Free School) of Political Sciences.fn3 It was not unusual at that time to take more than one degree, but literature, law and politics were a high-powered combination. ‘He was a bit out of the ordinary,’ his friend, Jacques Bénet remembered. ‘Those who did that were a kind of elite . . . Not as much as those who were preparing the examinations for one of the grandes écoles [like Polytechnique] . . . but a good level all the same’. François Dalle, with whom he went to the Law Faculty library each morning, was less impressed. ‘Mitterrand didn’t work much,’ he remembered. ‘Instead of studying legal problems in the library, he used to read the newspapers. Then in the afternoon he went to the Sorbonne.’ But Dalle, too, recognised that the young Mitterrand had something else. He had ‘unbelievable culture . . . he stood out from all the rest’.
Politics intrigued him. ‘Another phase of my life was beginning,’ he said later. ‘I opened my eyes to other things, I became interested in the problems of grown-ups.’
In Jarnac, political events had never been a major topic of discussion. At college in Angoulême, François’s best friend, Pierre de Bénouville, had been an ardent supporter of the ultranationalist movement, Action Française, which had been outlawed by the Pope, who accused its founder, Charles Maurras, of placing the nation above religion. François was never tempted to join him. ‘I was brought up to think of Action Française with horror,’ he said later, ‘not because it was right-wing, but because it had been excommunicated.’18 In February 1934, when 30,000 right-wing demonstrators tried to storm parliament, leaving more than a dozen dead and many hundreds injured, his mother had written to Robert that Maurras’s supporters were as bad as the Communists.
That did not apply to the Croix de Feu (Fiery Cross) movement of Colonel François de la Rocque, which had been founded in the 1920s as a patriotic league of First World War veterans. Politically conservative but socially liberal, de la Rocque had nearly half a million followers and campaigned for national reconciliation and social progress, including a minimum wage, paid holidays for workers and women’s suffrage.19 The Croix de Feu opposed extremism, whether from Left or Right, and it was its refusal to join the attack on the National Assembly that had caused the failure of the insurrection which Action Française had attempted in February.
Soon after his arrival in Paris, François joined the National Volunteers, the league’s youth movement, attending meetings of their local chapter in a café on the Boulevard St Germain and, in November 1934, participating in his first street demonstration.
However it was a student protest, three months later, which won him wider attention. On February 1, the Faculty of Medicine staged a strike, ostensibly to protest against the admission of foreigners who, it was claimed, were occupying places which should have been available for French students. In fact, the protesters were being manipulated behind the scenes by Action Française in order to embarrass the government on the anniversary of the attack on parliament. They carried banners with what they viewed as patriotic slogans, including ‘France for the French!’, ‘Down with the Wogs!’, and ‘Strike against the Wog invasion!’. After a day and a night of mayhem, the agitation died down. But in the next morning’s papers, a photograph of François and his comrades, in the thick of the fray, was on every front page.
His old philosophy teacher at Angoulême, Abbé Jobit, who had also been his confessor, wrote in the college magazine that he had been ‘not a little astonished to see in the front rank of the rowdies the face of our friend François’. Yet it was in character. François Mitterrand always wanted to stand out. Moreover the anti-immigrant rhetoric reflected his ideas at the time. In an article for a right-wing newspaper, l’Echo de Paris, he complained that the Latin Quarter had lost its soul. ‘A virus has infected it,’ he wrote. ‘[It has become] a complex of colours and sounds so discordant that one has the impression of a Tower of Babel.’
In the winter of 1935 a campaign was launched against a law professor named Gaston Jèze. He was unpopular with the students because he was thought to be excessively strict. He was also one of the first French jurists to protest against anti-Jewish legislation being enacted in Nazi Germany. That alone would have gained him the hatred of the French Right. But Jèze compounded his offence by agreeing to act as legal adviser to Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, who was pressing the League of Nations to condemn Italian aggression. Ethiopia was then one of only two African states not under colonial rule, the other being Liberia. When cours
es resumed in January 1936, students linked to Action Française disrupted Jèze’s lectures and demanded that he resign. After a two-month stand-off, culminating in street battles with the police in early March, the university authorities caved in and announced that Jèze would be transferred elsewhere.
It was a foul campaign, typical of a time when fascism was rising in the West and Stalin’s purges were bloodying the East. The right-wing student journal, l’Étudiant français, denounced Jèze as a Jew and, in a reference to Britain’s opposition to Mussolini’s African ambitions, an ‘Anglo-Ethiopian . . . who prostituted his intelligence’. Not to be outdone, l’Echo de Paris called him a ‘Negroid’.
François would refer to this episode as ‘the glorious days of March’.
Did that make him a racist? Not by the standards of the 1930s. At the college in Angoulême, François had befriended African students from the French colonies, inviting them home to Jarnac at Christmas and Easter. Some would remain lifelong friends. Shortly after the Jèze affair, François wrote approvingly, after attending a lecture on Ethiopia, that it was useful ‘to know the history of peoples so different and yet so similar to others, for at bottom it is not a man’s colour or the look of his hair which give value to his soul’.
So in what way was the campaign against Jèze ‘glorious’?
The explanation lay in the image of colonialism in Europe in the 1930s. Hardly anyone then believed that African countries should be allowed, or were able, to run their own affairs. At the college in Angoulême, François and his brothers had listened to missionaries expounding on the dissemination of Christianity and the benefits of colonial rule for less developed peoples. ‘Not for a second,’ Robert wrote, ‘did it ever cross our minds to doubt the usefulness of such an enterprise or the merits of those carrying it out . . . [We felt] a sense of national pride . . . at the large expanses of pink [on the map]’. To Action Française and its allies on the far Right, the Jèze affair was an opportunity to destabilise the centrist government. The students saw it quite differently. ‘Since colonialism was thought to be a good thing,’ one of them explained, ‘we didn’t see why Mussolini should be stopped from taking Ethiopia.’fn4 Jacques Bénet, who later married one of François’s cousins, offered another reason. ‘Some [of us] took it badly that Britain was trying to tell Italy what to do, when Britain and France both already had their own splendid colonies . . . It seemed unfair, and we asked ourselves what this fellow [Jèze] was up to, trying to forbid Italy to expand.’ Nationalism and chauvinism were two sides of the same coin. Even the Marian fathers at the hostel saw nothing wrong in their students protesting against ‘wogs’.fn5
In later life, Mitterrand would be accused of having, as a student, been close to the extreme Right, which in pre-war France was profoundly anti-Semitic. But association is not a proof of guilt. That the young Mitterrand had anti-Semitic acquaintances is not in doubt – indeed, in Paris in the 1930s it was almost impossible not to, so widespread and so widely accepted was anti-Jewish feeling – but there is no evidence of his ever having been actively anti-Semitic himself. On the contrary, he and a friend intervened during a fracas at a café in the Latin Quarter to help a Jewish law student being taunted by a group of young toughs from Action Française. The student, Georges Dayan, eighteen months his senior, was from a long-established family of left-wing Jewish intellectuals from Oran, in French Algeria. He and François became fast friends. For the next forty years, Dayan would be Mitterrand’s alter ego.
The same was true of his supposed links to the Cagoule, a terrorist group created by hard-line elements of Action Française after the failure of the attack on parliament in 1934. For years after, opponents would claim that as a young man Mitterrand had been if not a member then at least a sympathiser and even, in the most exaggerated versions, a participant in Cagoulard bomb attacks against the political and financial establishment. The organisation’s membership was secret. François’s old friend from Angoulême, the turbulent Pierre de Bénouville, now enrolled at the Faculty of Letters and staying at the same Marian hostel, had played a prominent role in it.20 So had a young man named Jean Bouvyer, who in June 1937 acted as lookout when four other members of the group assassinated Carlo and Nello Rosselli, two Italian anti-fascists who had taken refuge in France. The Bouvyer family was close to the Mitterrands. They spent their holidays near Jarnac – the young people played tennis together and attended the same parties. Jean, some months younger than François, would later have a long affair with one of the Mitterrand sisters.21 His mother, Antoinette, a fanatical royalist who hated with equal vehemence communism and the Republic (which she regarded as essentially the same thing), had taken François under her wing when he had come to Paris to study and he was a frequent visitor to their home.
In January 1938, after learning that Jean had been arrested for his part in the Rosselli murders, François rushed round to offer help. ‘Jean Bouvyer . . . is one of my best friends,’ he explained to a relative. ‘I spent the day yesterday, feeling absolutely shattered, at Jean’s parents’ home, and accompanied his mother to see the police . . . As you can imagine, the family is distraught. They are bourgeois to the marrow and knew nothing of what was going on.’ The last line was true only to a point. Half the leaders of the Cagoule had been regular guests at Antoinette’s table, although she may not have known, or wished to know, what they represented.
To François, fidelity to friends, especially those whom everyone else had abandoned, was an article of faith, even when, as in this case, the man concerned was, he admitted, ‘a poor wretch, intelligent and cultivated but a terrible whiner, who tends to make a mess of everything he ever undertakes’. In public he maintained that Jean was innocent and visited him frequently in prison.
Soon afterwards he acquired yet another link to the Cagoule. In the spring of 1939, Robert became engaged to Édith Cahier, whose uncle by marriage was none other than the organisation’s leader, Eugène Deloncle.
These ties were not fortuitous. François Mitterrand was not a member of the Cagoule or of Action Française, nor was he anti-Black or anti-Jewish. But his milieu and his family connections meant he had friends who were22 and he could live with that. He dealt with the diversity of his fellow human beings by appreciating their qualities and putting their faults in a box. It left him open to charges of lack of principle and it brought him some strange and ultimately regrettable friendships. But it enabled him to maintain an eclectic range of contacts with men and women whose ideas and attitudes were very different from his own.
Another strand in François’s character pulled in a contrary direction.
One of his uncles, Robert, who had died at the age of 20 from tuberculosis, had helped found a lay Catholic movement called Le Sillon (‘The Furrow’), which sought to make the Church a force for social justice.23 Robert had stayed at the same Marian hostel when he had been a student in Paris, thirty years earlier, and had left behind a luminous reputation. François saw himself as following in his footsteps. He joined the Catholic student movement, the JEC (Jeunesse Étudiante Chrétienne), participated in the week-long annual retreat which the Marian Fathers held at Clamart, and became President of the local section of the Society of St Vincent de Paul, of which his father had been a member at Jarnac, carrying out charitable work among the poor. ‘The way to teach those around us that Christianity alone can bring about a total renewal,’ he wrote to his old confessor, Abbé Jobit, ‘is by social action, linked to political action, bound together more and more closely.’ But he was not sure that charitable giving was the answer. All too often, he thought, those who set out to help the poor, telling themselves each week that they were making a noble sacrifice, were simply trying to atone for their own wealth and privilege.
The ‘social Catholic’ François had left-wing friends like Dayan and Louis Clayeux, who in later life became an art critic and a patron of the sculptor, Alberto Giacometti. He admired the Socialist leader, Léon Blum, for his oratory, while detesting his a
lliance with the Communists in the Popular Front, which ruled France for a year from June 1936, seeing it as a menace which would sap the little strength that remained in the moribund French polity. He was fascinated by the Jewish writer and thinker, Julian Benda, who lambasted French and German intellectuals on both Left and Right as apologists for nationalism, racism and war.
François the right-winger read the Courrier royal, the journal of the Count of Paris, the Pretender to the French throne, and in 1939, with several other students, paid a visit to the Count at his residence in Belgium. He listened to speeches by Jacques Doriot, a dissident Communist who had founded the PPF (French People’s Party), the closest France had to a fascist movement. Despite the Church’s edict against Maurras, he took an interest in the ideas of Action Française and attended a meeting where one of the movement’s leaders, Henri Massis, spoke of the need to oppose Germany while supporting Mussolini and the Portuguese dictator, Salazar. Maurras himself, he decided, even if politically beyond the pale, was a great intellectual, a ‘magical’ writer and ‘intransigent patriot’.
In short, at 21, François Mitterrand was still searching for his way. ‘Two thirds of my thinking reflected my milieu, which was right-wing,’ he said later. ‘On one side was the conformism of my family; on the other my own anti-conformism which sprang from a sort of instinct of opposition.’ Towards the end of his life, his brother, Jacques, endorsed that judgement. ‘The problem with François,’ he said disapprovingly, ‘was that he was always opposing something.’
Literature competed with politics for pride of place in Mitterrand’s affections during his student days and in 1937 and 1938 the former was in the ascendant. He loved the written word better than the spoken – his friend, Jacques Bénet, said later he had ‘the sensibility of a novelist’ – and maintained a voluminous correspondence with his family as well as contributing articles to l’Echo de Paris and to a student journal, the Revue Montalembert, often on literary topics. He was a voracious reader, both of the classics – Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and Chateaubriand – and of living writers – Mauriac, Gide, Hemingway, Faulkner and, later, Joyce, ‘who is so much better [than his contemporaries]’. At one point his favourite novel was The Brothers Karamazov; at another he preferred Tolstoy. His brother, Robert, remembered his room at the Marian hostel ‘filling up with books’. Friends whom he invited to stay at Jarnac during the holidays would find that he suddenly disappeared to re-emerge hours later having shut himself in his room to read.