by Philip Short
At l’Echo de Paris, where he became chief of the literary section, he argued that style was as important as the message it conveyed. The result, as his French biographer, Jean Lacouture, has written, was a series of articles that were ‘truly mediocre, somewhere between dull and pretentious’. His teacher at Angoulême had been right. For François, at this stage, writing with clarity was a struggle.
These activities left little time for study. François Dalle maintained that he was chronically idle.24 Nonetheless, at Sciences-Po, where he was admitted in the autumn of 1935, he was awarded his diploma with a mention bien, equivalent to an upper second in Britain or magna cum laude in the US. In the same year, 1938, he obtained his law and literature degrees, the former also with distinction.25
There was a lighter side too. For all François’s fulminating against the decline of his beloved Latin Quarter, he played a prominent part in the coterie around Ferdinand Lop, an eccentric Jewish writer in his forties with a shock of reddish hair and a signature broad-rimmed hat, who was part of the folklore of the area. Lop campaigned repeatedly for the French presidency on a platform including the prohibition of poverty after ten o’clock at night; nationalising brothels so as to give whores the status of public servants; extending the main thoroughfare, the Boulevard St Michel, as far north as the English Channel; reducing pregnancy from nine months to seven; and moving Paris to the countryside so that the inhabitants could breathe clean air. François became his Prefect of Police and later his Prime Minister.
Mardi Gras, when he paraded in a mask with a pig’s snout; the University Rag; and the Feast of Sainte Barbe, the patron saint of firemen, on December 4, were other highlights of the year. But almost every weekend there were dances at the houses of friends, lunch parties, art exhibitions, evenings at the theatre or the opera, and afternoons at literary salons.
His brother, Robert, loved the social whirl and made a point of introducing him to the leading names of Parisian society. They attended musical evenings on Wednesdays at the home of André Levy-Despas, the founder of Monoprix, whose uncle had been in partnership with Papa Jules. In the spring their father came from Jarnac to present his borzoi, who rejoiced in the name of Orloff, at the Paris dog show. Once a year they accompanied Jacques, who had enrolled at the Saint-Cyr military academy, to the President’s ball at the Elysée Palace. ‘They needed students from the grandes écoles to act as escorts for the young ladies,’ Jacques recalled. ‘We did not stay long. But we had a free dinner!’
In 1936, François’s mother died after a long and painful illness. Papa Jules followed, eighteen months later. But neither affected him as much as the death of his grandmother five years before. ‘I grieved,’ he wrote later, ‘but it was more in the natural order of things.’
On January 28 1938, a Friday, François attended a ball at Normale Sup’, one of the most prestigious of the grandes écoles, where academics – including a string of Nobel prize-winners – and top civil servants were trained. He had not originally intended to go. But he had had a depressing day and he thought it would cheer him up. It did.
‘I saw a blonde girl standing with her back to me,’ he told a friend later. ‘She turned round. I was rooted to the spot . . . I invited her to dance. I was crazy about her.’ The object of his passion refused to tell him her name and left with a friend soon after. But she did say that she was seventeen and a half and was studying at the Lycée Fenelon, not far from the Sorbonne. That was enough. After several days discreetly staking out the school entrance at the close of classes, his patience was rewarded and, keeping at a distance, he was able to follow her home.
Beatrice, as he decided to call her, after the heroine of Dante’s Vita Nuova, who eats her lover’s heart surrounded by a cloud of flame, lived with her parents and two brothers in an apartment on the Avenue d’Orléans, beyond the Observatory Gardens at the southern end of the Latin Quarter. He soon discovered that she took a tram to school in the morning, and walked back with a classmate each afternoon. Two weeks later, bringing with him François Dalle and Georges Dayan to provide moral support, he waited at the terrace of a café in the Boulevard St Michel. As she walked by, he jumped up and reminded her that they had met at the Normale Sup’ ball the previous month. Would she and her friend join them for some pancakes? With some hesitation – she had obviously made a vastly greater impression on François than he had made on her; moreover her mother had made her promise not to talk to young men – she allowed herself to be persuaded. She told them her name was Marie-Louise and repeated that she was ‘nearly eighteen’, but gave away little more. Nonetheless, the ice was broken. His friends found her as bewitching as he did. For the next three months, François would meet her two or three times a week after school and walk with her through the Luxembourg Gardens until they neared her home.
Gradually he learnt more about her. Her name was Marie-Louise Terrasse.26 Her father, André, was private secretary to Pierre-Etienne Flandin, a leading Centre-Right politician who had once briefly served as Prime Minister. But there could be no question of telling her parents. For despite her sophisticated looks, Marie-Louise was only fourteen years old.
François was head over heels in love and left her in no doubt of his feelings. She was charmed, fascinated, flattered, frightened by the earnestness of her suitor and not sure of her own sentiments at all. Nonetheless, in May, she allowed him a first kiss. Three weeks later he wrote to her, urging her to make their relationship official:
If we don’t impose our will on [your family] . . . we will lose each other. And that I do not want. Why should I not hold on to you, with my two hands and with all my soul, since I love you? . . . I know that you have always been a little bit afraid of me . . . I do not want those fears any more. Would I have stolen . . . your heart did I not firmly intend to keep it? . . . We must now envisage the future with clarity . . . It is essential to find a way to introduce me to your family . . . If you could explain to one of your brothers . . . then I could be introduced through him: that would be much more orthodox! [But whatever happens] the absolute minimum is for us to make sure that during the summer holidays we will be able to see and write to each other.27
It was the first of some two thousand love letters he would send her over the next three and a half years. Often he wrote several times a day. His friends became concerned for him. ‘He could talk of nothing else,’ François Dalle remembered, ‘I couldn’t take it any more!’ Dalle often carried letters between them. ‘I must have done that a hundred times! But I was his friend, and he was in such a state of dependence towards this love of his, he was crazy . . . It was mad.’
Every new obstacle which arose merely redoubled his ardour. Marie-Louise became an obsession, a citadel to be conquered. He had never been in love before. He paid court to her with a mixture of romantic yearning and the same dogged persistence that he would bring to a tennis tournament. It soon became overwhelming.
In June, half hoping that her parents would forbid her to see him again, Marie-Louise confided in her mother, Marthe, who was suitably scandalised and ordered her to end the relationship. But François refused to take no for an answer and Marie-Louise, touched, despite herself, by his evident devotion, relented and persuaded her mother to invite him to Sunday morning coffee. Marthe found him charming and gave his suit her blessing.
So began a long saga. Marie-Louise’s parents saw him as an ideal future son-in-law. Marie-Louise herself was torn. She recognised François’s qualities. But she was a spoiled little princess who adored flirting with boys and had been aware of her physical charms and the power they gave her over men since she was thirteen years old. He was a lovelorn supplicant but she did not feel that he was the man of her dreams. So she kept him at arm’s length – ‘far enough off to feel herself free; but not so far as to discourage him altogether’ – responding to his professions of ardour distantly or not at all. It was as though they were acting out a nineteenth-century novel: ‘He would take one step forward, she would go along
. He would try a second step . . . and then she would take fright.’
He teased her, often pointedly: ‘You deserve, my darling Beatrice, severe punishment. What shall it be? Copy out a hundred times, “I am an unsociable little girl who talks in class and won’t talk elsewhere . . .”’ Or on another occasion: ‘Disagreeable and most demanding Beatrice, you are making me your slave of the moment, your plaything of the hour!’ But above all he kept repeating that she alone gave meaning to his life, and complained piteously when she failed to write back: ‘If only you knew how much I look forward to your letters . . .’ A month later: ‘nothing from you again this morning. Why don’t you write? I can’t believe your feelings have changed – what can have stopped you sending me a few words?’
In the end his very reasonableness, the solicitude and understanding with which he bore her outbursts of ill temper, drove her to distraction. If only he would yell at her sometimes! But he did not. She realised she did not love him. When he suggested they should become engaged, she refused.28 In the spring of 1939, she told him that she did not wish to continue the relationship. He replied that he would wait.
Military tensions were rising. In 1934, Japan had occupied Manchuria. A year later, Hitler announced German rearmament in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Another year later, in March 1936, Germany reoccupied the Rhineland. Some of François Mitterrand’s contemporaries could already see the writing on the wall. For Pierre de Bénouville, two years his senior, ‘it was obvious that when the politicians led us to give back to the Germans the left bank of the Rhine, we signed off on Hitler’s victory . . . Germany had rearmed, and that made the process of war ineluctable.’
François did not see that until two years later. The Spanish Civil War; the Stalinist show trials in Russia; the Axis between Mussolini and Hitler; the German–Japanese anti-Comintern Pact; Italy’s punitive massacres in Ethiopia; the start of the Sino-Japanese war, all of which occurred in the following fifteen months, seemed to pass him by. Even his brother Robert, by then an officer-trainee at the School of Artillery, wrote that Paris was ‘chloroformed’ when it came to the outside world. Not until the Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria, in March 1938, did François finally sit up and take notice. Like de Bénouville, he then realised that appeasement was leading France to destruction. A month later he wrote in the Revue Montalembert:
In politics, only two attitudes are conceivable: total surrender or absolute force . . . Forgetting the axiom that the just must be stronger than the strong . . . the countries that won the Great War have rested on their laurels, falling asleep in the cardboard fortress erected by their treaties. Every time the opponent of yesteryear broke down one of their towers . . . they cried: ‘thus far, but no further!’ . . . But why should the one who is strong come so far if he does not intend to go further? . . . Each success demands another success . . . Every withdrawal is a battle lost. France [and] Britain . . . have ‘taken note’ of the Anschluss . . . They have more or less accepted it. ‘That’s enough,’ [they say]. ‘Don’t touch Europe again. Enough blackmail . . . Thus far and no further!’ It is what you call being in a bad mood. But a bad mood has never been a substitute for anger . . . When I see the triumphal arrival of the God of Bayreuth [Hitler] in the land of Mozart, I know what sacrilege is being prepared and, despite myself, I feel a kind of shame, as if I recognise that I am myself to blame.29
For a young man of 21 it was a perceptive analysis and ahead of its time, for it would be another year before the French government of Édouard Daladier and the British, under Neville Chamberlain, would reach the same conclusions. France, in 1938, was still wedded to the doctrine of ‘Plus jamais ça!’ (‘Never again!’). The memory of the butchery in the trenches was still too fresh and too terrible for people to imagine a new war.
François may have been influenced by his father, Joseph, who even before the Anschluss was starting to ‘see the future in black’.30 Joseph Mitterrand had not fought in the First War, but his brother-in-law, Francis Sarrazin, who had been an army doctor, had died in 1917, leaving behind the two young cousins whom Joseph had brought up with his own children. He hated Nazi Germany and wrote to his son, Robert, that Hitler was ‘a brute . . . a coarse bastard . . . a beast which should be put down’ – terms which, Robert noted in his diary, he had never heard his father use before. When François met André Terrasse that spring, he found he held similar views but despaired of convincing his friends in government of the danger that was looming.
In France, unlike Britain and America, military service was compulsory and, in view of the deteriorating situation in Europe, had been extended from one year to two. After completing his degree, François had intended to join the navy and in January 1938 came fifth in the competitive examination to become an officer in the Merchant Marine. His plan had been to enrol at the College of Naval Administration at Brest.31 But then Marie-Louise entered his life. If he joined the navy he would be away at sea for two years and unable to see her. He abandoned the idea. Instead he and François Dalle entered the preparatory course for officer cadets at the military college at Saumur,32 from which they hoped to graduate as sub-lieutenants in the infantry. Both failed ignominiously: Dalle because his puttees came undone on parade and slipped around his ankles, Mitterrand because he botched a question about military theory. ‘I don’t know what they asked him,’ Dalle said later, ‘but he was furious.’ More than that, his vanity was wounded. Just as he always passed over in silence the year he had had to repeat at the college in Angoulême, so now he put it about that he had decided not to seek a commission, preferring to serve in the ranks.
Even François’s brother, Robert, to whom he was probably closer than any other member of his family, did not know that he had flunked Saumur.33 Nor did Robert know until almost a year later that François had fallen in love.34 His friends knew; his family did not. He was beginning to compartmentalise his life, organising his friends and relations into separate, overlapping circles. Some were closer, some more distant, some knew one thing, some, another, but only the person at the centre knew everything that each of them knew.
On October 1 1938, German troops occupied the Sudetenland, the German-populated regions of northern and western Czechoslovakia. France and Britain, abandoning their treaty obligations, decided not to oppose the invasion. The previous day, Neville Chamberlain had returned from a conference in Munich with Hitler and Mussolini, proclaiming ‘peace in our time!’ The French Prime Minister, Édouard Daladier, who had followed Chamberlain’s lead, flew back to Paris expecting an icy reception. When instead he was welcomed by rapturous crowds, he is said to have turned to Alexis Léger, the Secretary-General of the French Foreign Ministry, and muttered: ‘What fools!’
That month François was assigned to the 23rd Colonial Infantry Regiment at Ivry, just outside Paris. He began training as a private on November 4 and was eventually promoted to sergeant. His best friend, Georges Dayan, was in the same unit, and when they moved to a barracks near Port Royal, within the city proper, they rented a room together as a place to spend days off, becoming so inseparable that their friends nicknamed them Jallez and Jerphanion, after the two student heroes of a series of popular novels by Jules Romains.
Robert noted, with some understatement, that his brother had reservations about military life. Six years later, François explained why:
To know what you are talking about when you speak of the army, you need . . . to have seen it from the bottom rung of the ladder . . . To find yourself under the control of NCOs with minds as nimble as a battering ram does not make you particularly enthusiastic . . . We found that . . . the main occupation of our peaceable soldiers lay more in frequenting bars than in studying Clausewitz or even dismantling a Hotchkiss machine-gun. To be a soldier, for those of us who were called up in 1938, was to learn how a run-of-the-mill, honest citizen can grow accustomed, in a minimum of time, to filth, laziness, drink, brothels and sleep.35
The French army in the 1930s was made
in the image of the bourgeoisie which commanded it: cannon fodder on one side, the officer corps on the other. François’s brothers, Jacques and Robert, were naturally in the latter category. So were almost all his friends. François himself should have been too, but found himself by chance on the wrong side of the tracks. To François Dalle, it was one more factor, added to the arrogance of the cognacquiers in Jarnac, which would lead him later to break with the bourgeoisie. ‘His superiors [were] imbeciles,’ he recalled. ‘His experience of the army was dreadful, [and] made him furious . . . He could not stand the absurd, artificial authority of it.’
In the spring of 1939, attitudes in London and Paris were at last beginning to change. In January – the same month that Time magazine voted Hitler its ‘Man of the Year’ – there were rumours that Germany would invade Holland. Two months later it seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia. Appeasement was plainly not working. That Easter, during a furlough, François accompanied Dalle, his friend André Bettencourt and two other students on a motoring trip around the Low Countries. On the German side of the border river with Luxembourg, a giant stage had been erected and an orchestra played Beethoven. ‘The young Germans were stripped to the waist [and] dived in unison into the river,’ Dalle recalled. The exaltation of discipline troubled them.