by Philip Short
On January 4 1942, Mitterrand arrived in Paris. He had telephoned ahead for Marie-Louise to meet him and they walked together through the Luxembourg Gardens, where it had all begun, four years earlier. She told him that she admired him, but did not love him and did not want to be his wife. When they reached the Seine, she gave him back her engagement ring. He took it and swung his arm as if to hurl it away, as though to show that since she did not want it, the current could take it, and him, where it would. She thought – wrongly as it turned out – that he had thrown it into the river. She burst into tears and fled.
At Vichy Mitterrand found Robert’s father-in-law, Captain (now Colonel) Cahier, who had also been a prisoner in Germany but had been released on the grounds of ill health, and Jacques le Corbeiller, a friend of his sister Colette’s husband, Pierre Landry. With their help he obtained a clerical job in a documentation service attached to the Légion Française des Combattants (French War Veterans’ Legion). It was not much, but it paid 2,100 francs a month (equivalent at the time to about £11 or US $45), which was more than the lump sum of 300 francs that he had been given as demobilisation pay, and it allowed him to rent a room at a modest boarding house, the Pension Vincent, near the river.3
The town was, and remains today, a genteel, slightly faded spa where the bourgeoisie of pre-war days came to take the waters. Mitterrand loathed it:
Vichy is a dreadful place (not disagreeable, not boring, but ugly) [he wrote to one of his cousins]. There is nothing to attract the eye – bloated, jowly hotels, built in ridiculous straight lines, pretentious villas planted here and there to accord with the doubtful taste of fat women. These watering places should be razed, [otherwise] our imbecile grandchildren will think they are beautiful just because they are old.4
His boss, Jacques Favre de Thierrens, was a First World War flying ace – ‘original, complicated and jovial, intelligent and cultivated’ and above all, ‘extremely colourful’, as Mitterrand described him – who served as an agent for the French army’s counter-intelligence service, the Bureaux for Anti-National Activities, and, at the same time, as an ‘honourable correspondent’ for British intelligence. Like so much in Vichy, the Bureaux had an ambiguous role. Officially they were charged by Pétain’s government, with German approval, with tracking down Gaullists, Communists and other hostile elements. But they also served as cover for a clandestine operation to launch the first military resistance networks. Mitterrand’s job was to compile deliberately misleading dossiers on potential suspects. ‘It was all doctored,’ he said. ‘Favre . . . told me . . . “I want you to falsify everything” . . . So we wrote complete rubbish.’
It was his introduction to the world of smoke and mirrors in which he would spend the next two and a half years.
The Legion had been set up to merge the various veterans’ movements in existence before the war into a vehicle for supporting Pétain. In April 1942, it was taken over by pro-German elements and a year later provided the manpower for the Milice, a collaborationist militia which worked closely with the Gestapo and employed the same methods. Unsurprisingly, given its subsequent reputation, Mitterrand would later insist that he had never worked there.5
His first months in Vichy were a time for reflection and self-questioning. In March he moved into a small apartment near the city centre. He read widely, not literature as in the past but books on European history. He told a friend: ‘I am taking lessons in English and German . . . There are so many things that I don’t know . . . I won’t find it all in books, [but] I am trying to give myself a solid foundation.’
In an article later that year, recounting his experiences as a PoW, he offered some tentative conclusions. The defeat in 1940, he wrote, was not just the fruit of ‘a regime that was collapsing, men who were useless and institutions emptied of their substance’, although all that was true. Its roots went deeper. Germany had been created by a French Emperor, Napoleon, who had welded the principalities into a modern state. France was now paying the price for a century of self-aggrandisement when it had lost touch with reality – ‘shedding its blood outside its borders’ in 1870 and 1914 – in a misconceived quest for glory that was beyond its means. The result had been a historical cycle of mutual aggression for which France as well as Germany was responsible. He recalled the German carpenter for whom he had worked at Schaala. The man had been wounded at Verdun in 1916 and was an avid collector of Napoleonic memorabilia. ‘All the things which united us,’ Mitterrand realised, ‘were memories of struggle and combat. Napoleon and Verdun formed between us that link of blood which brings nations together instead of separating them.’6
That he could formulate such ideas in the middle of the war was all the more striking because, in other ways, he was viscerally anti-German. It was as though he put his long-term vision and the day-to-day reality of living under the Occupation into separate, sealed boxes. At one level he fumed that ‘their accent irritated me more than their tanks’; that they were upstarts, ‘a nation not even 200 years old’; and that their presence in France was ‘a rape [which] seemed to me blasphemous’. At another he understood that something would have to be done to break the nexus which bound the two countries’ fates in an endless secular tragedy.
In the spring of 1942, however, he had a more immediate and egotistic concern. What part in this immense drama should he, François Mitterrand, attempt to play? In letters to Marie-Claire Sarrazin, he pondered his future:
When I think of my destiny, all I find there is uncertainty. The only thing I know is to live outside the usual run of things and as intensely as I can . . . I will go [wherever] I find the taste for risk, but I would not want [my life] to be useless or in vain . . .
It’s better to die while doing something, acting at a moment’s notice, accepting all the risks, than to wait for death to come and find you . . . These are stirring times. I do not wish to watch them pass from my window (even if that might be the wisest course . . .)7
Mitterrand’s sense of being fated to assume an exceptional role was not new. His companions at Ziegenhain remembered him as ‘ambitious and proud. He already felt that he stood out from the mass.’ In captivity he had daydreamed about ways ‘to arouse France not from the outside, but from within’, even though he had ‘neither the age nor the authority to achieve that’. Now, he told Marie-Claire, he needed to give himself the means ‘to satisfy that ambition’. The question, he explained to her, was: ‘How can we set France back on its feet?’
That spring he saw two possible ways forward. The first was through Pétain, to whom he was drawn by his right-wing upbringing and his circle of friends and acquaintances. The second was through the growing number of PoWs who had either been repatriated to France or, like himself, had escaped.
He had seen the old Marshal one afternoon at a theatre and had been impressed, he told Marie-Claire, by his ‘magnificent bearing and face like a marble statue’. He wanted Pétain to succeed. The ending of parliamentary government, he thought, was not a bad thing. France needed new institutions, ‘something different [from] the old political parties’.8 But the ‘National Revolution’, which was to give France back its pride and strength, was ‘unfortunately a combination of two words emptied of their meaning’. The Marshal was surrounded by ‘the Right of yesteryear’, which had rallied to him for its own purposes and ‘will inevitably cause us to fail’.
The PoWs offered a very different perspective.
In Paris in January he had run into a friend from his student days, Jacques Bénet, who had also escaped from a German camp. They found they shared a ‘PoW mentality’, Bénet remembered. Both felt that the prisoners had been forgotten and that they had a ‘primordial duty . . . towards them’ which made them want to stay in France, rather than going to London to join de Gaulle, whose priorities lay elsewhere. Although Mitterrand never claimed that he went to Vichy in order to promote the PoW cause, it may well have played a part in his decision. Certainly from the moment of his arrival the prisoners were a common thr
ead in much of what he did. Not only was the French Legion, for which he worked, charged with aiding the PoWs, but in March he gave a series of talks on French radio about conditions in the camps. Later that month, he attended a meeting in a café with some forty other escaped prisoners, among them Max Varenne, who had been with him at Schaala, and Jean-Albert Roussel, who worked with Marcel Barrois at the Labour Ministry finding jobs for PoW returnees.
It was with Roussel, at the beginning of April, that he undertook his first act, if not of resistance, then at least of defiance against the Germans. Together with another ex-prisoner, Guy Fric, they disrupted a meeting in Clermont-Ferrand, the chief city of the region, 30 miles to the south, at which a French scientist named Georges Claude, a notorious Nazi sympathiser, spoke in favour of collaboration.
For the next year, Mitterrand’s life would run on twin tracks: on one, an official career, surrounded by right-wing friends; on the other, an unofficial and increasingly clandestine existence, working with other ex-prisoners against the Germans and their French allies.
The contrasts were sometimes flagrant. In the same month that he demonstrated against Claude, he wrote to his cousin, Marie-Claire, praising the Service d’Ordre Légionnaire, a pro-Nazi militia set up by Joseph Darnand. Its members, he wrote, were ‘carefully chosen, and bound by an oath founded on the same convictions of the heart’.
Was he keeping a foot in both camps? Or, as he maintained later, using his official persona as a cover for resistance activities? The truth is simpler: he was horribly confused. There were moments when he despised Vichy, and others when he came dangerously close to embracing the collaborationists’ cause. In the latter vein he justified the return to office of Pierre Laval, Pétain’s collaborationist Prime Minister. ‘If we think [Laval’s] methods are bad, do we really know what they are?’ he asked. ‘If they allow us to endure, they are good.’ What was needed, he thought, was an elite – ‘a gathering of men united by the same faith’ – to hold the country together. ‘Whether Germany or Russia wins, so long as our will is strong, they will handle us carefully.’
The last line is revealing. In the spring of 1942, the Allies’ situation appeared desperate. France had been knocked out; all of Europe was occupied or neutral, apart from Britain which was fighting on alone; America had still not sent troops and German armies were in the heart of Russia. It was not necessary to be pro-Nazi to envisage the possibility that Germany would win the war and to wonder what would happen if it did.
In mid-April 1942, Mitterrand resigned from Favre de Thierrens’s service, having decided that his presence there served no purpose. After working out his notice he was free by the beginning of May – but not idle. At the Labour Ministry, Barrois had set up a clandestine workshop manufacturing false papers, which were sent to the camps hidden in food parcels. Half a dozen people helped him, all ex-PoWs, including Jean-Albert Roussel, Guy Fric, and Serge Miller, a Lithuanian who was for a time Mitterrand’s flatmate. Mitterrand soon joined them, contributing the counterfeiting skills he had learnt at Ziegenhain.9
In May a man arrived in Vichy who would exert a decisive influence over Mitterrand’s future. Antoine Mauduit was the scion of a wealthy Parisian family who had given up a comfortable way of life to return to the soil as a peasant. A charismatic, mystical figure, he later joined the Foreign Legion and spent eighteen months in an Oflag, where he vowed that on his return, he would establish a Christian phalanstery to serve as a refuge for escaped PoWs and a centre of resistance against German Occupation. At Vichy, Mauduit met Roussel, who was enthralled by his personality and enthusiastically supported his plan to base the refuge at the fifteenth-century Château de Montmaur, in the Hautes Alpes, 100 miles south-east of Lyon.
On Friday, June 12 Mitterrand and a score of others travelled to Montmaur to spend the next three days discussing how best to oppose the German Occupation. They were a very mixed bunch. Beside Barrois and Roussel, there were Marcel Haedrich and de Gaulle’s nephew, Michel Cailliau, who were trying to set up a prisoners’ resistance movement; Colonel Gonzales de Linares who was creating a military escape network; and Etienne Gagnaire, an ex-communist trades unionist, who, with Jacques de Montjoye, a factory-owner and follower of the Count of Paris, ran the Prisoners’ Action Centre in Lyon, a forum where returned prisoners could discuss the country’s political future. Most were meeting each other for the first time. Together the groups they represented comprised not more than a few hundred men.
No firm decisions were taken, but Mitterrand wrote on his return that ‘a group has been set up which I believe is destined to have an outstanding future’. He found Mauduit inspiring, ‘an extraordinary, engaging character, a man worth following’. Near the end of his life he would say: ‘I have not met five men who radiated such authority’.
The refuge which Mauduit created at Montmaur, which he called ‘the Chain’, attracted men of all classes and beliefs.10 Mitterrand remembered it as ‘a mixture of the Boy Scout mentality, the Christianity of the convent, a spirit of renunciation and militant patriotism.’ In the winter of 1942, it would become one of the first maquis, or armed resistance bases, in France.11
The Montmaur meeting and Mauduit’s example were powerful antidotes to whatever collaborationist temptations Mitterrand may have been entertaining earlier in the year. Nonetheless, the twin tracks continued. The day after he got back, he started work at the Vichy administration’s Commissariat for Prisoners of War as deputy head of press relations, in charge of the Free Zone.12 He did his job conscientiously, giving radio broadcasts, speaking at conferences, writing articles, editing a liaison bulletin and vetting everything that appeared about the PoWs in the Vichy-controlled press. ‘I like it pretty well,’ he wrote at the end of his first week there. ‘Either I am overwhelmed with work, which eats up my days, or I have nothing to do . . . so it’s balanced.’
The Commissioner, Maurice Pinot de Périgord de Villechenon, from a wealthy upper-class family of industrialists, had been taken prisoner on the Marne in June 1940 and repatriated after fourteen months in an Oflag. He was fiercely anti-German, harboured grave doubts about Pétain, detested the Vichy regime and tried to keep his department apolitical, concentrating on social issues and closing his eyes ‘when he did not encourage’ the ‘parallel activities’ of his staff.
In July 1942, Mitterrand spoke to Jacques Bénet about ‘launching a resistance movement, recruited among the PoWs’, and, with Pinot’s blessing, began developing a network of contacts in Prisoners’ Mutual Aid Centres, which the Commissariat had started creating in the Free Zone that summer to do social work among the returnees, many of whom found it difficult to re-enter normal life after their captivity.13 In August he and Marcel Barrois founded the Mutual Aid Centre for the département of the Allier, based in Vichy, intending to use it as a cover for future resistance activities.14
That month there was another meeting at Montmaur, with many of the same participants. Mitterrand would write later that it marked ‘the first organised appearance of the PoW resistance movement’. That was stretching the truth. The participants had appointed a steering committee consisting of himself, Mauduit and de Montjoye – the ‘three Ms’, as they were called – with a mandate to explore further ways to bring such a movement into being.15 But that was as far as it went. He was still in two minds about taking the plunge and so, it seems, were many of the others.
Earlier that summer Mitterrand had written: ‘If only I had a firm belief in something, nothing would be a sacrifice for me. But what can I do without solid ground beneath my feet before I jump?’
I recognise in myself a curious mixture of daring and prudence, which I am afraid may average out as what we call weakness. But I am still reluctant to commit myself . . . I think the three months to come will give me a direction, perhaps they will impose a choice . . . [My problem is that] I am faithful, and that is fatal . . . when one wants to get involved in politics. So I am mistrustful, I won’t commit myself unless forced to, because I know
that afterwards I won’t deviate from the course I have chosen . . .16
The three months passed. Nothing changed.
Mitterrand’s reluctance to break with Vichy would later be held against him by political opponents who claimed that he turned his coat only after it had become obvious that the Germans were going to lose. Today it is widely acknowledged that the German defeat at Stalingrad, announced by the Soviet High Command on the evening of February 2 1943, marked the crucial turning point of the war in Europe. But that was far from clear at the time. The BBC that night described the three-month-long battle as ‘one of the most horrific chapters of the war so far’, but neither then nor for months after did anyone speak of a turning point. The German advance had been halted before, outside Moscow in December 1941, only for the Wehrmacht to regain the initiative. A year later there was nothing to suggest that that could not happen again. Churchill himself had said in November 1942, after the victory at El Alamein: ‘It is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.’
In Mitterrand’s case, aside from his own anguished uncertainties, two sets of factors were at work.
Throughout 1942, he remained convinced that Pétain, despite his faults and the failings of those around him, offered the best hope of getting France through the war in a state to play an effective role when it ended. To do that would require authoritarian institutions and a powerful elite. Mitterrand had not forgotten the collapse of social barriers in the PoW camps and the uncommon courage of working-class men like Pelat and Finifter. The elite did not have to come from the traditional ruling classes. But to leave the country’s future to the common herd was unthinkable. After a visit to a rural district in the Auvergne, he wrote despairingly of the local peasants: ‘Poor, ugly little men . . . How can we put back some fire into them? What separates them from pigs, unless it be that they are failures?’ He quoted Mauduit as saying, ‘it is we, with our blood and heroism, who will [make] . . . sacrifices for the vast masses’.