by Philip Short
Marie-Louise had written to him regularly during the first months, even though she told her brother and her friends she thought her engagement might have been a mistake. She liked François immensely. But she realised she did not miss him. What she felt was not love but esteem. She tried to hide it in her letters, but by the beginning of 1941 he could see that her feelings were changing. That spring she fell in love, seriously in love for the first time, with a handsome young Polish count named Antoine Gordowski who was in Paris studying architecture. In June she became his mistress. In his far-off camp, Mitterrand sensed that something was broken. Through a fellow prisoner who was being repatriated he sent a letter to her father, André, asking for his help. It was extremely long, sometimes disjointed and in places almost incoherent. Every line breathed a terrible distress:
I have no illusions: my long absence explains everything . . . But if [she] is becoming more distant towards me, it is not just . . . because she is tired of waiting . . . [It is because] she is growing close to someone else. I sense it, and I suffer from it . . . It doesn’t mean that all is lost . . . But there are two conditions . . . That I return quickly, quickly. And that Marie-Louise has at least the patience to wait a little before embarking on a course which will prevent us ever coming together again.
I am trying to speak reasonably, sir, but believe me, I find it hard. I am too upset . . . to be able to look ahead to the coming days without terrible anxiety . . . I love [her] too much to put my own happiness before hers. Even if I am suffering atrociously, that . . . should be secondary . . . If I no longer have a place in her heart, we can do nothing. My worry is that she doesn’t know herself what she wants, where her love lies, and all this will end in a catastrophe of which she will be the victim . . . But what can I do – I who am so far from her? . . . My despair should not weigh in the balance; but I am so afraid she is going to ruin her life . . .
I am asking you for your support . . . At least let her be patient until my return . . . There is nothing I haven’t tried in order to be with her again . . . You cannot know how much effort I make every day . . . I love her and she is my whole life. You understand my distress. Everything was going well for me here, I glimpsed that wonderful moment when I was going to find her, never to leave her again – and then suddenly this revelation . . . Do you know what liberation means to us, all that that word contains of repressed affection, friendship . . . joy? And me, I won’t even have my poor joy. I do not wish to sway you, but truly our plight is hard. Our youth will have known the glory of being crushed, beaten, derided and enduring a lamentable defeat . . . Yet it would still all be fine if our return were marked by a [new] happiness beginning. But me, I will have none of that . . . I love Marie-Louise. You cannot know how much.16
André Terrasse was aghast. But when he confronted Marie-Louise, she fought back: did her parents want her to marry a man she did not love? Her mother, Marthe, called her ‘a mad little girl who has been too spoiled’. All André was able to extract from her was a promise that she would take no decision before her fiancé’s release.
For Mitterrand, it had been an infernal series of events, each worse than the one before: he had tried, and failed, to escape; he had spent three weeks in the punishment cells; and now his fiancée, his great love, was slipping from his grasp. Despondently, he clutched at straws. He hoped for repatriation as a medical orderly, and, when that failed, as a veteran of the First World War (having faked his identity papers to make it appear he was fifteen years older).17 He convinced himself that Marie-Louise was misunderstood. ‘She needs my support,’ he wrote to André. ‘She is suffering deeply. We must not add to her pain by . . . doubting her loyalty and the nobility of her feelings.’ He asked his brother, Robert, whose regiment had been far from the front when the invasion occurred and was now back in civilian life, to see her and assure her that he would soon be back. Other friends in Paris passed on similar messages.
At Ziegenhain, most of his comrades knew that he had a fiancée and that he chafed at their separation. ‘François used to pace up and down the barrack room,’ Jacques Biget remembered. ‘It drove him crazy when he did not hear from her.’ But it was not something he ever discussed. The child who had never felt the need to open himself to others had become a man who locked it all inside. Some of his editorials for L’Ephémère offered hints of his state of mind, but always in elliptical terms. ‘Those we love are growing up, getting older, far away from us,’ he wrote in August. ‘Over our joys and our loves oblivion spreads.’ Three months later, he returned to the same theme: ‘as month follows month our disappointments pile up, the burdens of absence grow heavier, each of us is thrown back into the rigid path of his own solitude.’
Like many others, he felt that France had turned its back on its prisoners and wished only to forget them:
Even though the material conditions of camp life respect international conventions . . . what power, what benevolence, will ever be able to dispel . . . the vision of days dying and carrying off our youth – that youth of which our only experience will have been the taste of bitterness? Surely they are taking care of us! . . . Committees, associations, charitable works . . . Oh yes, they are taking care of us! But for every admirable letter from a mother, a wife, a faithful friend . . . how much forgetfulness, silence and neglect, how much lost tenderness? . . . I am afraid that they speak of the prisoners as one speaks of the dead: by singing their praises, speaking highly of them, while thinking that their most important quality is that, above all else, they no longer bother the living.18
Adding to the sense of abandonment, to Marie-Louise’s infidelity, to war-weariness and the calling into question of long-held social assumptions, in the middle of 1941 Mitterrand underwent a crisis of religious faith. As a student, when many of his friends were questioning their beliefs, his faith had not wavered. But in the camp, when others were taking refuge in religion, he began to doubt.19
The priority, however, remained his fiancée. He had to get back to France.
On the afternoon of Sunday, November 28 1941, when the camp guards were allowed to receive visits from relatives outside and security was slightly more relaxed, Mitterrand and two others concealed themselves in a storeroom in the area reserved for the camp administration. When night fell, they crawled out along a roof-beam which projected over an open-air latrine. ‘Mitterrand was astride the beam,’ one of his companions wrote later, ‘when a German soldier, singing and whistling, came in and lowered his pants three feet away. We feared the worst. Mitterrand didn’t move. He couldn’t even breathe . . . Still whistling, the intruder departed.’ They then made their way to a section of the 14-foot-high barbed-wire fence where a newly installed transformer obscured the view from the watchtowers. Wearing stolen German raincoats, they crossed on a wooden ladder laid against the wires and dropped into the ditch beyond. Mitterrand went last. There were guards every hundred metres and frequent patrols. Once safely on the other side, they tried to blend in with the visitors making their way home. One of the three, Pierre Barrin, was spotted. ‘The soldiers arrested [him] at gunpoint . . . They started coming towards me. I decided to act as if nothing were happening, dug my hands deep in my pockets and stopped and looked at him as they passed. Our eyes met. He didn’t turn a hair.’20
When they realised that two other prisoners were missing, the Germans sent motorbike patrols and dog teams in pursuit. Mitterrand hid under a bridge for an hour, with water up to his knees, to throw them off the scent. Then he made his way to the nearest railway station and bought a ticket to Metz, in Lorraine, which Germany had annexed, using money which his brother Robert had sent to him hidden in cigarette packets. He tried twice to cross the border but each time was foiled by German patrols. The second night, half-dead with cold, he took a room in a small hotel. The French couple who owned the place denounced him. He was arrested and sent to a transit camp at Boulay, a country town 15 miles to the east, to await return to Ziegenhain or, perhaps, far worse, to a disciplinary camp
in Poland. At Boulay he volunteered to carry boxes to the adjoining German barracks. Early on the morning of December 10, under cover of darkness, he vaulted the barracks fence and ran towards the town centre, where a fellow prisoner had told him he would find a newspaper shop whose owner, a woman, would help him. As he arrived, out of breath, she was just opening the metal shutter. She hid him for two days and then accompanied him to Metz, where he was put aboard a train for the border village of Sainte-Marie-aux-Chênes. As the train slowed, he decided to jump. Ahead of him was a small railway station. When he reached it, he found that he was in France.
His journey was not yet quite over. It was German-occupied territory. The railway workers fed him and put him on a bus to Nancy, where he obtained false papers. From there he took a train to Besançon, further south, jumped again and crossed the demarcation line to what was called the ‘Free Zone’, controlled by Marshal Pétain’s government in Vichy. That night a farmer let him sleep in a hayloft. Still heading south, he made his way towards Lons-le-Saunier, 100 miles north of Lyon, where he had been told he could get his demobilisation papers. On the way he noticed a sign for Mantry and remembered that the family home of his cousin, Marie-Claire Sarrazin, was nearby. When he arrived, she was giving a Latin lesson to a group of local schoolchildren. ‘He looked awful,’ she recalled. ‘The poor man was pale and exhausted, and scared of being caught again.’ She and her sister gave him honey and goat’s-milk cheese, vegetables from the garden and warm clothes. It was December 15 1941.21
* * *
fn1 André Rousselet, speaking of Mitterrand’s relationship with Pelat and Finifter, used the analogy of a spiral staircase: ‘When you talked to François Mitterrand,’ he said, ‘he was always one step above you.’ They alone escaped this rule. Throughout Mitterrand’s life, they were always one step above him. ‘The Stalag was like a primi-tive society,’ Rousselet explained. ‘Only force and authority counted. And he wasn’t yet equipped for things like that. So they took him under their protection and for ever after there was this one step between them . . . It was like that to the end.’
fn2 The night Mitterrand arrived, he heard a familiar voice outside his cell: ‘Is that you, François?’ It was Finifter, who had escaped shortly after him and had also been recaptured. ‘Next morning,’ Mitterrand recalled, ‘we found ourselves in the washroom and were able to talk. He told me: “Tonight, you will have a mattress.” And that night, a German soldier came in with a mattress and threw it into my cell. The following day, I questioned Bernard. He told me how, after obtaining a cigarette through the indulgence of his guard, he had grabbed the man’s wrist and hissed, looking him straight in the eye, “Now, I’m going to denounce you.” The poor fellow saw himself . . . being sent off to the front. He agreed to [Finifter’s] conditions: a packet of cigarettes (renewable) and two mattresses, one for himself and the other for me . . . This was at the height of Hitler’s power, and . . . the master of the situation was a Jew!’ Small wonder that until his dying day Mitterrand regarded Finifter and Pelat as superior beings.
fn3 In 1941, 16,000 French prisoners, one in every hundred, escaped from Germany. For every successful attempt, it was estimated that twenty failed.
3
Schisms of War
THE FRANCE TO which Mitterrand had returned was, in his own word, ‘confused’. Not only was the country physically divided – the Germans in the North; the Vichy administration in the South – but there were rival claimants to the role of national saviour: Pétain and de Gaulle.
Marshal Pétain was a First World War hero who, in 1916, had halted the German offensive at Verdun. At the age of 84, when France was once more crumbling before a German attack, he had been called to serve again and, on June 22 1940, approved the signing of an Armistice in the same railway carriage at Compiègne, in Picardy, where the German High Command had surrendered in November 1918. It allowed German troops to occupy Paris and all of northern France as well as the western seaboard as far south as the Spanish border. The remaining third of the country, known as the Free Zone, was to be administered by the French themselves. In theory sovereignty remained French; in practice the Germans had passed on much of the effort and cost of administering the conquered territory to the conquered people themselves. It was one of Hitler’s better ideas.
On July 10, parliament had voted Pétain emergency powers. The following day he had proclaimed himself Head of State, notionally over the whole of France but in reality over the area controlled by the rump government which he set up at Vichy, 80 miles west of Lyon.
In 1941 and 1942, the overwhelming majority of French people revered Pétain, both for his wartime role at Verdun and as the man who they believed would preserve whatever was left to be preserved from the cataclysm of defeat. Mitterrand was of that view too. Pétain’s device, ‘Work, Family, Motherland’, copied from the Croix de Feu, came from a monarchist tradition stretching back at least to the 1870s, and his ‘National Revolution’ promised new institutions which would serve France better than the unworkable parliamentary democracy of the discredited Third Republic.
De Gaulle, by contrast, was almost unknown. Mitterrand had heard his name but little else. ‘I learnt in the camp at Lunéville . . . that he had refused to accept the defeat and had launched an appeal from London on the BBC . . . Later, at Schaala, we sometimes talked about [him]. It was enough for us to know that over there was an unknown, rebel general, who was addressing France . . . We were searching for a symbolic hero. We didn’t know there already was one.’
The prisoners, like most of their compatriots, considered that de Gaulle and Pétain were fighting for the same cause, albeit, as Mitterrand put it, ‘each in his own fashion’. While the Free French upheld the standard of revolt against Germany, Vichy, they believed, was trying to minimise the nation’s suffering and maintain morale at home. Together they formed the sword and shield which would get France through the war.
Afterwards history was reshaped to portray the Vichy administration and all who worked for it as dyed-in-the-wool collaborators, who had decided that the Nazis would win the war and were determined to ensure for France a place in the new European order by establishing a fascist state on German or Italian lines. That was not how it looked at the time. The United States, Australia, Canada and some thirty other countries recognised Pétain’s government. Even Britain maintained informal contacts. At the beginning of 1942, the regime was a melting pot. There were monarchists, churchmen, anti-republican intellectuals, Nazi sympathisers, bourgeois notables, fanatical anti-Semites, most of the defeated French officer corps ‘which paraded up and down as though it had won the war’, and, more numerous than all the rest, honest if misguided men and women who believed sincerely that they were doing what was best for France in a time of need. The one thing they all had in common was that they were solidly right-wing.
The country was ‘neither collaborating nor resisting’, Mitterrand wrote later. ‘It was wait-and-see.’ Vichy reflected the multiple schisms which had fractured French society after the defeat of 1940 and the collapse of parliamentary government that followed. It was ‘a little principality of a pseudo-military character that lived cut off from reality’,1 one official remembered. Pétain’s ministers were forbidden to visit the administration in Paris that they supposedly controlled without German permission, which was rarely given. To the majority of the population, the Marshal was a venerable figurehead and his government largely irrelevant.
Mitterrand decided to go there because, for an escaped prisoner, the Free Zone was the safest place to be and he had friends in Vichy who could help him find a job.
But what kind of country might emerge from the war, and what role he might play in it, he had no idea. At the PoW camp in Ziegenhain he had written that statism, collectivism and socialism were ‘just different ways of looking at the same problem: how to prevent (or perhaps encourage) a man to bite his fellows . . . Words ending in -ism solve nothing . . . The only way to improve society is by working
to improve oneself.’ That was fine in theory, but in practice it did not take him very far. The pre-war political leaders, led by Daladier, disgusted him. But who was to take their place? Pétain seemed the least bad option. Mitterrand regarded himself as a maréchaliste rather than a pétainiste, supporting the man rather than the regime. At Ziegenhain, as at other camps, there had been a ‘Pétainist Circle’. He had refused to join. His fellow prisoners remembered that when a collaborationist priest in the camp had argued that Vichy had preserved French sovereignty, he shot back: ‘What sovereignty, when two-thirds of France is occupied and there are two million prisoners? Those are just empty words.’
His closest friends in captivity, Finifter, Pelat and Munier, all had left-wing views. Where did he stand politically? He hardly knew. The schisms traversing France were mirrored within himself.
All the things he had believed in were being called into question – first among them, his relationship with Marie-Louise Terrasse. Robert had visited him at Mantry and tried gently to prepare him for the break which was now inevitable.
François was so thin and debilitated that his brother was able to persuade him to spend Christmas with their friends, the Levy-Despas, who had a house near the citadel in St Tropez, then a small fishing village that was home to a community of artists.2 But the moment the festivities were over and he could decently leave, he set out for Paris, travelling by way of Jarnac to see his father, his youngest brother, Philippe, and their sisters, who had gathered there for the holidays.
It was a quiet, understated homecoming, whose joy found expression in what was left unsaid. ‘When you think there is so much to say to each other,’ he wrote later, ‘freedom is . . . the silence which overcomes you because it is all too huge, because it is all beyond the understanding of a man. When all is said and done, freedom is perhaps for each of us no more than the possession of silence.’