by Philip Short
All through that summer, the drumbeat of bad news continued.
Italy occupied Albania. Mussolini and Hitler signed the ‘Pact of Steel’, under which each undertook to aid the other in the event of war. On August 23, the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin – alarmed at the failure of Britain and France to honour their treaty commitments; isolated by American neutralism, and by the anti-Comintern Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan – signed a non-aggression treaty with Berlin. A week later German troops invaded Poland.
Britain and France had no choice. On September 3 1939, the Second World War began.
For the next eight months, life continued much as before. The ‘phoney war’, as it was called, meant that François Mitterrand, together with other young Frenchmen, was mobilised and sent to live under canvas at the front. But for the moment Hitler was busy with Poland and then Denmark and Norway, and Stalin with the Winter War in Finland. Along the Maginot line, a supposedly impregnable barrier of fortified blockhouses which ran the length of the French–German border, 120 British and French divisions remained immobile in the face of 23 from the Wehrmacht, numbed by cold and boredom. Chamberlain and Daladier were still in power. Promises of a major offensive to take the pressure off the Poles were quietly forgotten.
Before leaving, François had ridden out by motorbike to the Terrasses’ country house at Valmondois, north of Paris, to say goodbye to Marie-Louise and her parents. Despite her decision to end the relationship, they had remained in occasional contact. This time she found him ‘sad . . . as though he did not expect to return’. A few days later, just after her 16th birthday, she took a lover. The affair, about which she told no one, lasted only a week, but that was long enough for the young man, a friend of her brother, to fall madly in love with her. History was repeating itself. For her it had been just an adventure; for him it became a passion. But the experience gave her pause for thought, and in October, for the first time since the spring, she wrote to François to enquire how he was. It was the opening he had been waiting for.
The correspondence they now resumed was different from before. Instead of endlessly droning on about love, he told her about life at the front. ‘[I live] with my feet in the mud, wet clothes and cold up to my neck . . . Everything here is so brutal, inexorable . . .’ His section of eleven men, all from different parts of France, among them a Parisian ‘who is splendid: a real lout, an anti-militarist with an impossible character’, was at a front-line post at Bitche, about three miles from the border, between Sarreguemines and Hagenau in northern Alsace. ‘I get on very well with them, even if they are difficult to lead . . . All of them are more or less “moaners”, but they work hard. I believe – and I find it touching – that I can count on them. Some class feeling undoubtedly remains [in them], but the devil take class struggle!’ In another letter he predicted that he would come through the war feeling ‘revolutionary and positive’.
To Marie-Louise’s father, André, he wrote that ‘apart from the snow which follows the rain, the mud which follows the mud . . . and the fact that, ill-shaven, soaked to the skin, my hands slashed and my body full of aches and pains, I am not living up to the image that the cinema gives of a warrior’, everything was going well. Writing to his own family, he was more truthful: ‘Beyond the Maginot line,’ he told Robert, ‘I have seen villages that have been abandoned and pillaged [by our own soldiers]. That story must be told one day.’ To Robert’s fiancée, Édith, he wrote, ‘I am well, but not completely so, for a uniform wounds a person who loves life.’ What would be awful, he declared, would be ‘to die for values (anti-values) in which I do not believe’. That was why he had decided not to die but to live, to put up with it all and in so doing, to pay a debt: ‘What debt? That of idiocy!’ Whose idiocy he did not say, but nor did he need to: it was the idiocy of the political and military leaders whose short-sightedness and arrogance had placed France on the road to certain defeat.
Disillusionment with the ruling elite was one more element causing the young François Mitterrand to question the superiority of his own class. Not everyone reacted that way. His brothers, Jacques and Robert, also saw that France was unprepared for war and knew the reasons why, but both remained solidly right-wing. If François was different, it was because he asked more questions and was less willing to accept the conventional explanations with which those from his milieu reassured themselves.
In mid-November, his section was ordered back to the second defence line, about 30 miles from the Luxembourg border, where, he told Marie-Louise, he had ‘a real mattress with sheets, and even a candle to read by’. His run of good luck continued. In December, when Robert married Édith Cahier, François managed to get leave. Marie-Louise was in Paris. He waited for her outside the Church of St Dominique after midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and told her he was still passionately in love with her. This time, she did not reject him. Next day, he took her to meet Édith, a vivacious eighteen-year-old to whom she took an instant liking. The two girls became firm friends. Marie-Louise’s resistance began to crumble. That night, with André’s permission, François took her to Montmartre where they danced until three o’clock in the morning and walked home together in the rain. This time he knew he was winning. Marie-Louise said later that even though she still felt afraid of him, François had dazzled her and her fickleness towards him made her ashamed. François Dalle thought she came round ‘because she was forced to. He exerted such pressure of persuasion that in good faith she couldn’t do otherwise.’ Whatever the reason, by the time he returned to his regiment, they had decided to become engaged.
That winter was brutal. The thermometer fell to – 20 degrees centigrade. The wine ration froze in the soldiers’ metal canteens. Mitterrand’s section was set to digging trenches, ‘a job,’ he wrote to Georges Dayan, ‘which resembles the punishments inflicted on criminals or those who subvert public order’. When a captain reprimanded him because his boots were not properly polished, he retorted: ‘The difference between you and me is that I often have to get mine dirty.’
Years later he still bristled at the memory: ‘Those officers who were so full of themselves and spent their days playing cards infuriated us.’
On March 3 1940, François proposed and placed on Marie-Louise’s finger a diamond engagement ring. That night André and Marthe hosted an engagement party in their apartment in the Avenue d’Orléans with François’s father, Joseph, and most of his brothers and sisters in attendance. Marthe worried that the Mitterrands were above their station. ‘François . . . is wealthy . . .’ she wrote to her cousin. ‘What a gulf there is between his family and ours! [Marie-Louise] will live differently [from us], she will have luxury and ease.’ Her intuition was not wrong. François’s sisters looked askance at what they saw as Marthe’s lack of refinement. And when he gave Marie-Louise a bottle of expensive perfume – it must have cost a fortune, Marthe exclaimed – and sent a bouquet of flowers on the third of each month to mark the day they became engaged, her joy at her future son-in-law’s thoughtfulness was mixed with a vague unease.
Had she been able to read her daughter’s heart, she would have been more alarmed still. Marie-Louise was radiant. She told her girlfriends how happy she was. When François took her briefly to Jarnac at the end of his ten-day leave, she wrote to her father: ‘You can’t imagine how good everyone is to me . . . They pamper me like a baby . . . The house is marvellous and the atmosphere extremely nice.’ But to her elder brother she confided that she still had doubts. When he asked what they were, she said merely that she still felt very young. But deep down she continued to dream of a man who would set her heart on fire. François was sensible, charming, everything a girl should want. In his letters, he poured out his love: ‘How have you bound me so tightly to you? I used to think I was master of my feelings . . . that I was independent, a rebel, and I still am towards everything that is not you . . . Do you realise your power over me? . . . I love you, I love you, I love you.’ On the one hand it was what she wanted to hear; on
the other, it was exactly what he should not have said.
In April, François’s section was transferred to a forward position near the Belgian border, ‘not the very front line,’ he wrote to Marthe, ‘but this time I think it is serious’. Despite efforts to get himself promoted, he was still a sergeant. Georges Dayan had left to join an officers’ training course, but his own application had been rejected. He asked Marie-Louise’s father, André, who had a post on the General Staff, whether he could help. ‘The surest way to get a commission (and perhaps the only one),’ he wrote, ‘is to have support from high up . . . [Otherwise] it will be intercepted at the middle levels . . . and there everything goes to the highest bidder.’ But to his dismay, his failure at Saumur meant he was once again turned down. ‘I shall try to envisage the outcome with serenity,’ he told his prospective father-in-law, ‘although the position of an NCO in the infantry is scarcely a matter for rejoicing . . . The obscure role of a border guard is so thankless and empty that it is hard to think of notions of duty.’
By then, the architects of appeasement were retiring from the stage.
Édouard Daladier had resigned in March. On May 10, it was the turn of Chamberlain, who was replaced by Churchill. The previous night, German forces had occupied Luxembourg, followed by Holland, which capitulated five days later, and Belgium. German armoured columns started crossing the Ardennes in such strength that the resulting tank jam took two weeks to clear. Instead of seizing the advantage, the French General Staff disbelieved its own intelligence. That night François and his comrades heard a continuous, lugubrious rumbling as waves of German planes passed overhead. Next morning, from his observation post on a hillside overlooking the River Chiers, he watched French and Belgian units fleeing before the German advance. Sedan fell on the 14th. Ten days later Marthe told her cousin that she had had news from him. He was ‘just back from the front, after a week under machine-gun attack and artillery. They were hand to hand with the Germans . . . The fighting was furious. His regiment has been cited for valour, although 15 of them are going to be punished [for cowardice].’ In fact, François’s regiment was one of the few which retreated in good order and continued to do so up to the Armistice. At the beginning of June, he was promoted to the rank of staff sergeant, cited in divisional despatches for bravery and awarded the Croix de guerre (Military Cross). ‘The only one who has really fought is my daughter’s fiancé,’ Marthe wrote. ‘He had to withdraw 200 metres under enemy fire. He [says he] doesn’t know how he managed it; he lost everything except his skin and that without so much as a scratch.’ By then, at François’s urging Marie-Louise had left Paris to join his family in Jarnac. In early June she received a letter from him complaining that he had been wearing ‘the same shirt and socks for a month’. She imagined he must have a beard like a fireman.
On Monday, June 10, the French front collapsed. Marthe left Paris next morning to follow her daughter. It was the beginning of a chaotic exodus which sent millions of people fleeing from the capital, abandoning their possessions as they went. Two days later the Germans were on the Champs-Elysées.
On 14 June, at Hill 304 near Verdun, where some of the deadliest fighting of the First World War had occurred, François was wounded by shrapnel from an artillery shell, which entered near his spine and lodged in his right shoulder. He remembered it as though in a film:
I was sleeping in a shell-hole . . . Suddenly at 5 a.m., machine-guns and artillery opened fire with a long barrage aimed in our direction . . . The Germans marched towards us, singing . . . Our commander [Édouard Morot-Sir, a philosophy professor in civilian life] ordered us to move towards Dead Man’s Hill. The weather was wonderful, and as though in tribute to the splendour of that month of June . . . the assault troops paused for a moment. Morot-Sir and I had only to stretch out our hands to pick the wild strawberries that carpeted the hillside. Then a shell exploded above our heads . . . I was knocked out by the explosion. Morot-Sir was wounded in the knee.36
Having survived five weeks of combat unscathed, he could not believe that he had been hit. ‘The victim acts out a drama,’ he said later. ‘When I collapsed, bleeding, bruised and in shock . . . I continued to be an actor. There was a Mitterrand who was whole and safe, who was watching, with desperation and distress, another Mitterrand who was wounded. I didn’t manage to understand how such a thing could have happened to me! To me! It choked me, I was so offended . . .’ For three days he was moved from one field clinic to another. At first a medical orderly pushed him on a stretcher, but the roads were jammed with refugees, ‘whole families, fleeing they knew not where’.They had carts loaded with ‘everything they could take out of their houses . . . sheets, mattresses, wardrobes, chairs, piles of things spilling out’, pulled by horses and donkeys.
Then Italian aircraft appeared and machine-gunned the column. Everyone threw themselves down the banks and into the fields, including my companion, who left me [lying on my stretcher] with the comforting words, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back!’ I remained there, immobile, looking up at the sky, watching the planes punching holes in the road with a rosary of bullets. The alert over, we resumed our wandering. Everywhere we went, there were wounded . . . At Esnes-en-Argonne, surgeons were operating in a cave, amputating arms and legs. I wasn’t keen [on that], so we pressed on . . . At Vittel, the civilian doctors had all fled. There were just groans, cries of pain, the smell of blood and pus . . .37
Finally Mitterrand was put on a train for the wounded and taken to Bruyères, where his injuries were treated. The whole region was already encircled. After the war he learnt he had been awarded a second Croix de guerre, this time for ‘magnificent morale and total devotion . . . putting his life on the line from the start of the campaign and, by the force of his example, contributing to the maintenance of the ardour of his section’. On June 21, he was taken prisoner and moved to Lunéville, near the French city of Nancy, where he remained in hospital for a month. Local girls were serving as volunteer nurses. He gave one of them his camera and the photographs he had taken near the front of ‘bits of human bodies that had been blown into the trees’. Through her, he was able to get word to his family, and to Marie-Louise, that he had been wounded and captured but was safe. For a time he hoped that he might be demobilised and sent home on the grounds that he was needed in ‘industry’ (his father’s vinegar manufacture), industrial workers being among the categories exempted from deportation. But the subterfuge was too obvious. He and another wounded prisoner began making plans to escape. Before they could do so, they were moved to a transit camp and, at the beginning of August, to Germany.38
* * *
fn1 When he was President, this showed through in a certain petulance toward members of his government who spoke English on official occasions, supposedly because they were failing to uphold the use of French but actually because he was irritated that he could not do it himself. He only ever pronounced four words of English in public: ‘Happy Birthday, Miss Liberty!’, at the centenary celebrations in New York of the Statue of Liberty, which he attended on July 4 1986 at the invitation of Ronald Reagan. The statue was designed and built in France and had been renovated with the help of French technicians.
fn2 A ‘lark mirror’ or miroir aux alouettes was a wooden board shaped like a bird with outstretched wings, in which pieces of mirror were encrusted, placed on a stake and rotated when a flock of larks was seen, so as to attract them to fly into the hunters’ nets. The season lasted from October to mid-November.
fn3 In France, then as now, students who obtain the baccalaureate may either go straight to university or spend an additional two years studying for the competitive examinations which determine admission to one of the grandes écoles, the top tier of the French educational system where only the brightest students are accepted. Sciences-Po had a status midway between the two. In Mitterrand’s time, a one-year preparatory course was required before students could attempt the entrance exam. Today they are selected directly after the baccalaureate.
fn4 At that time Mussolini enjoyed widespread sympathy in France, where he was seen as a strong, nationalist statesman who had rescued Italy from the chaos that threatened after the First War. French attitudes began to change after 1937, when Italy increased its support for Franco in the Spanish Civil War and began to align itself more closely with Hitler’s Germany. But at the time of the Jèze affair, at least in the minds of the French Right, he was the respected and respectable leader of a friendly neighbouring state.
fn5 I doubt that there exists a British schoolboy in the first half of the last century and even the 1960s who did not at some point gleefully chant, ‘Wogs begin at Calais!’
2
The Captive
IN SIX WEEKS, four-fifths of the French army deployed against Germany was taken prisoner. More than a defeat, it was a moral and physical collapse which only the French word, débâcle, adequately describes: 1.8 million soldiers were captured, more than half of them, like François Mitterrand, in the five days between June 17, when the government, which had fled to Bordeaux, called on the troops to lay down their arms, and June 22, when the Armistice came into effect.
Most were so demoralised that they did not even try to escape from the poorly guarded transit camps set up in France to hold them. ‘As good psychologists,’ Mitterrand said later, ‘the Germans . . . kept us . . . believing that peace was about to be signed and we would soon be sent home. There is no surer prison than hope for the morrow.’ Instead, they were sent to PoW camps inside Germany, where they worked as labourers to replace the young Germans who had been drafted into Hitler’s war machine. For many it would be five years before they saw their homes again. Only the details of their journey differed: how many days it lasted, how many prisoners were crammed into each freight wagon. Mitterrand’s description could have applied to a million others: