by Philip Short
‘I am lying in wait for the future,’ he exulted in a letter to Marie-Claire Sarrazin. ‘I am getting ready, body and soul, to make my entrance into the century . . . There are men who believe in me, and I am afraid for them. I believe in no one, and that makes me afraid for myself. But the path is inspiring.’ To André Bettencourt, whom he met shortly afterwards in Paris, he spoke of the need to ‘get oneself credentials’ so as to be able to ‘do something once the war is over’.43 It was one of a series of remarks that summer and autumn which suggested that his political ambitions were becoming keener. He evidently saw the journey to meet de Gaulle as a step in that direction.
At that moment, however, other more urgent concerns intervened.
That weekend the Gestapo raided the workshop producing false papers which had been set up in Vichy eighteen months earlier by Barrois and Roussel. Neither was present, but four other members of the group were arrested and sent to Germany, where two died in concentration camps. A week later, on November 11, the Gestapo made a second raid, this time on the house in the rue Nationale where Mitterrand had been living. The landlord, Jean Renaud, and Pol Pilven, who was occupying Mitterrand’s room while he was away, were both arrested and deported. Renaud died in a camp; Pilven survived. Jean Munier, who was also there when the Germans arrived, climbed out of a second-floor window, slid down a drainpipe and fled through a neighbour’s courtyard. Ginette, the secretary, hid in a cupboard which no one bothered to search. Munier warned his colleagues in the ORA, and Colonel Pfister’s wife, Fanny, hurried to the station where Mitterrand was arriving from Paris that afternoon. On the platform, the Gestapo, too, were waiting. ‘I was just getting out of my carriage when I recognised [her],’ Mitterrand remembered. ‘She pretended to bump into me and pushed me back inside. “Don’t get out, don’t get out!”, she whispered. “The Gestapo are here.”’44
On the night of Monday, November 15 1943, accompanied by Colonel Pierre du Passage, the head of ORA liaison between the Southern and Northern Zones, Mitterrand took off in a single-engined Lysander from a pick-up point, which the RAF had code-named ‘Indigestion’, in a field in the commune of Soucelles, near Angers, 200 miles west of Paris. Before leaving he had had two meetings with General Revers, now the ORA supremo following the arrest of General Frère. For both of them, the overriding question was how the Giraudists and their allies would fit into the new scheme of things, now that de Gaulle was in sole charge.
When they landed at Tangmere in Kent, Mitterrand and du Passage were met by Captain Lejeune of the ORA, with whom they stayed at his residence-cum-office in Devonshire Close, a quiet mews between Regent’s Park and Broadcasting House, the headquarters of the BBC.45 After initial debriefings, they were received on November 23 by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, the legendary head of the French section of the SOE, who noted on his report that they were both from ‘a Giraudist organisation in France’. Mitterrand was described as being ‘concerned with the military aspect of the organisation and also with . . . prisoners of war’. According to the minutes,
He did not say much during the interrogation, as [du Passage] answered most of the questions . . . However, he travelled a great deal both in the [Northern] Zone and in the [Southern] Zone, living intermittently at Vichy. He changed his address frequently, staying at one place only a day and never longer than a week [so that] . . . the Germans would never catch up with him. A week ago, the Gestapo visited the address he had just left . . . He . . . cannot give any specific reason why . . . The Gestapo know his real name, but he hopes they have not got his description. He states that all regular officers and NCOs [among the PoWs] are at the disposal of the clandestine army and may be sent to whichever group requires them at any moment.46
Part of the interrogation was taken up with discussion of the relations between Giraudists and Gaullists. Du Passage, speaking for both of them, assured Buckmaster that their movement was loyal to Giraud not in person but as the French army’s commander-in-chief, and ‘if de Gaulle were to become C-in-C tomorrow, it would be to him that they would give their allegiance’.
Mitterrand was more forthcoming at a meeting at the end of that week with Jean Warisse, the London representative of Henri Frenay, whom de Gaulle had recently appointed as Commissioner for Prisoners of War and Deportees.
He told Warisse that he was in London on behalf of ‘a movement directed solely at escaped and repatriated prisoners of war’. It was led by a ‘Committee of Five’, comprising himself; his deputy, Marcel Barrois; Maurice Pinot, who ‘having broken off all contact with Vichy is now living in hiding in Paris’; Jacques Bénet, in charge of propaganda in the Northern Zone; and Jean Munier, who dealt with arms and parachute drops.47 They had groups in fifty-two départements – including 300 men in Nice, 350 in Clermont-Ferrand, 75 in the Ardèche – and were in contact with twenty PoW camps in Germany. Besides opposing attempts by Vichy to take control of the prisoners’ movement, he said, all its members were ‘at the disposal of the Resistance’.
As in his account to Buckmaster, Mitterrand gilded the truth. But de Gaulle’s staff in London was accustomed to Resistance envoys embellishing their activities when they came to seek recognition and support. Michel Cailliau had done the same three months earlier and had trashed Mitterrand personally for good measure. Mitterrand did not respond ad hominem, but told Warisse that Cailliau’s movement ‘was based only on an overactive imagination’, which was unfair – Cailliau’s movement, despite the eccentricities of its leader, was a serious organisation with networks in several parts of France – but less unfair than the invective which Cailliau had levelled at ‘Pin’–Mitt’. Mitterrand said he wanted to go to Algiers to allow Frenay to verify his claims and to ‘resolve the question of the Charette Network’ because ‘there is no room in France for two prisoners’ movements, the more so since there is only one which exists in reality’.48 He added that his own movement had no wish to become politicised. It had decided to join the Resistance ‘without asking whether that Resistance depended on de Gaulle, on Giraud or whichever other leader’.
On Saturday, November 27, the same day that Mitterrand met Warisse, de Gaulle issued a decree in Algiers ordering the Giraudist and Gaullist special services to merge. Colonel Passy remained head of the BCRA, now renamed the BRAL, the London Bureau for Intelligence and Action, which henceforth incorporated Lejeune’s operation. Mitterrand, who had held the Giraudist rank of commandant, found himself promoted, through no effort of his own, as a Gaullist chargé de mission, 1st class (equivalent to captain).49 Two days later, at Frenay’s request, Passy gave instructions for him to proceed to Algiers, where he arrived on December 3. Shortly afterwards – neither he nor Frenay could remember the exact date – the new Commissioner for Prisoners of War escorted him into the presence of de Gaulle. Mitterrand left divergent accounts of the meeting. But the one he wished to be remembered was given a few months before his death:
I can see him now, seated in his chair, his big hands hanging down as though he did not know what to do with them. He stood up, greeted me without formality, rather relaxed, even affable. His first remark took me aback a little: ‘So you came aboard an English plane’ . . . We talked about the prisoners of war. De Gaulle attached great importance to propaganda in the PoW camps and to the action of those who escaped once they returned to France. The return of one and a half million prisoners [when the war ended] would pose problems which needed to be studied without delay. The priority, in his view, was to unify the three rival [prisoners’] movements: my movement, the RNPG . . . Cailliau’s movement, the MRPGD . . . and the [communist] CNPG, the National Committee for Prisoners of War . . . It was he who first revealed to me the existence of a communist organisation . . . I pointed out to him that a movement like the one I was leading, made up entirely of escaped prisoners, knew the Germans better than others and was the only one which was properly structured . . . I told him that in my view, Michel Cailliau was not able to take charge of something of this importance . . . He wouldn�
�t listen to my arguments and told me in conclusion: ‘You have to accept. Our parachute drops, financial aid, military aid, everything depends on that.’ [I said that] I accepted unity, but not the designation of [Cailliau] as leader.50
In retrospect it is clear that de Gaulle was testing him. At one point, like d’Astier and Bourdet earlier, he asked Mitterrand, ‘Why a resistance movement for prisoners? Why not for hairdressers or cooks?’ But he already knew the answer, and in any case his main concern was that there be not three prisoners’ movements but one. Frenay, who had been won over by Mitterrand’s intelligence, had paved the way. Now the General, too, recognised that this young man was leadership material – tricky, no doubt; difficult to control; and no more subservient than he was himself, but leadership material all the same. The fact that Mitterrand was a Giraudist was not the disadvantage it might seem, for the Giraudists were precisely the people that the General wanted to win to his side. Nor was he blind to the defects of his nephew, Michel Cailliau, for a man who hated his rivals so fiercely would never be able to unite them. Cailliau in the end was hoist by his own petard: he had so vilified Mitterrand that he put himself out of the race.
The issue of Mitterrand’s attitude to Vichy, which Cailliau had made his main angle of attack, turned out not to be a problem. De Gaulle had already accepted into his ranks other men who had been far more deeply involved in the Pétainist regime than Mitterrand ever was. At the end of 1943 he was starting to look ahead to the time, once the war was over, when national reconciliation and healing would be the order of the day. Frenay would write later that winter:
[As regards Mitterrand’s] sentiments towards the policies of Vichy . . . he himself saw General de Gaulle and . . . had a long and extremely frank discussion with him. The latter . . . was perfectly informed about Mitterrand’s conduct . . . I will sum up [Mitterrand’s] position, which is also my own. The whole drama of France has been that, for a time, honest men, with no ulterior motive, believed in Marshal Pétain and placed their confidence in him. No doubt they were deceived, but they were deceived sincerely, and if they were mistaken, one cannot hold that against them as a crime . . . As [we all] know, the immense majority of French people put their confidence in Pétain at one time or another. Systematically rejecting them will lead only in the final analysis to [our own] isolation.51
Nonetheless, it was a bruising encounter. De Gaulle was twice Mitterrand’s age. When he had flown to London from France three and a half years before, he had had nothing but the clothes he stood up in and his own indomitable will. From that he had created a movement which would ensure that France had a place among the victorious allies and the status, after the war ended, of one of the world’s five great powers. It was an astonishing achievement, which had required standing up to the combined pressures of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. Small wonder that Mitterrand said afterwards that he had found de Gaulle’s demeanour chilling.
The upshot was that the General, with Frenay’s encouragement, came down on Mitterrand’s side. Cailliau was informed in January 1944 that he had been named, together with Mitterrand and Bénet, to a three-man collegial leadership which would bring the prisoners’ movements into a single unified organisation. Since Mitterrand, with Bénet’s backing, had the majority, he would hold power. The same month, as an imprimatur of de Gaulle’s approval, his spokesman, Maurice Schumann, broadcast on the BBC a glowing account of Mitterrand’s intervention against Masson at the Salle Wagram the previous summer, which, without naming him, described him as a ‘valiant patriot’ who had exemplified the ‘prisoner spirit’ against ‘the minister of Anti-France’.52
This first meeting between Mitterrand and de Gaulle left traces on both sides.
If de Gaulle was already thinking of post-war France and what would need to be done there, so was Mitterrand. ‘There is a country to be remade,’ he enthused to his friend, Georges Dayan, whom he had met again in Algiers that winter.53 The General was too good a judge of men not to recognise the younger man’s ambition.
Mitterrand, for his part, had mixed feelings about the leader of the Free French. Later he would acknowledge having felt deep admiration for de Gaulle’s courage at that time: ‘His tenacity in resisting the domination of Churchill and Roosevelt and preserving the rights of France has remained for me the model of political firmness. This was the moment at which he was greatest.’
However, he resented bitterly the way de Gaulle had seized control of the Resistance, and claimed to have told him at their meeting that those fighting inside France had their own rules and did not ‘simply carry out orders from outside’. One may wonder whether he actually said that to the General’s face but he certainly thought it. Like Frenay, he felt that the major part of de Gaulle’s influence outside France came from the Resistance, which the General had played no part in initiating and from which he was now trying to appropriate credit and prestige.fn4 Frenay had given up trying to maintain his movement’s independence and rallied to the General’s side, as had Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie. In November, the two most turbulent, and politically threatening, non-communist Resistance chiefs had both been given posts as Commissioners, which meant they were safely in Algiers under de Gaulle’s watchful eye – ‘neutralised’, as Mitterrand put it. He did not wish to be in that position himself.54 For decades afterwards, he grumbled about the way de Gaulle had hijacked the Resistance for his own ends.55
Our resistance, on French territory, in ceaseless contact with torture and death, was of a different order to the resistance from outside. I did not accept the pre-eminence that the latter arrogated to itself. I did not agree that the term, Resistance, should be applied to the battle waged from London and Algiers, which was an episode of traditional warfare . . . I was proud of a combat whose glory . . . has been confiscated from the people of whom I was one.
In 1981, when he finally came to power, he said he wanted to make it a priority to set the record straight. Others demurred, pointing out that there were more pressing tasks, and he did not insist. But it continued to rankle with him until the end of his life.
De Gaulle had decided that Mitterrand was the most capable leader for a new, united prisoners’ movement. Frenay had made clear his personal support, telling colleagues that ‘without [Mitterrand] the tasks given me by the National Liberation Committee risk not being fulfilled’. But when it came to getting him back to France, none of that seemed to help.
Whether because of the residual paranoia between Gaullists and Giraudists, or the venom distilled by Michel Cailliau, who continued to believe that he could sabotage Mitterrand’s ascendancy, or, more likely, a combination of both, he found it impossible to obtain a place on a plane out of Algiers. Subverting government directives is not uniquely a French pastime, but, even in times of war, French officials take a delight in it which puts other nations to shame. Cailliau had urged his uncle to find Mitterrand a post in the army, so as to keep him away from France. Cailliau’s friends on the General’s staff imagined sending him to the Italian front. But no instruction came from de Gaulle and the plan was abandoned.56 Mitterrand told a British journalist, Alastair Forbes of the Daily Mail, with whom he struck up an acquaintance, that he was ‘disgusted by the idiotic witch-hunts and sectarianism’ which he found in North Africa and could not wait to get home because there, at least, the word ‘Gaullist’ simply meant a good Frenchman, not ‘an appellation contrôlée’ with all kinds of purity tests.
In desperation, a few days after Christmas, Mitterrand sought help from a family friend, Commandant Ernoul de la Chénelière, who was a member of Giraud’s staff. As he was explaining his predicament, Giraud himself walked in.
He had a justified reputation as a magnificent warrior [Mitterrand wrote] . . . but once you took away the heroic images of . . . his escape from Koenigstein, suspended from a 12-metre rope,. . . his falsetto voice and tapering moustache, which seemed to be stuck on with glue, gave him the quaint, almost unreal, look of a soldier out of an illustrated magaz
ine from before 1914.57
On learning of his visitor’s difficulties, Giraud exclaimed: ‘I’m not surprised. The only thing those people from London understand is playing politics.’ Mitterrand thanked him. But if he had had any lingering doubts, he knew now that ‘this cavalry officer, whose horse thought more clearly than he did’ would never be a match for de Gaulle.
Next day, with Giraud’s help, he was on a flight to Marrakesh. There he stayed with the music hall star, Josephine Baker, who had been attached since the outbreak of the war to the Giraudist special services under Colonel Paillole. She lived in a fairy-tale palace, furnished in Moorish style with richly decorated cedar-wood ceilings, which belonged to Sidi Mohamed ben Mennebi, the son of the former Grand Vizier. Paillole’s people had good relations with the SOE, and on New Year’s Day Mitterrand found himself aboard an RAF plane taking General Montgomery back to Britain, where, after his victory over Rommel at El Alamein, he was to take command of Allied ground forces for the invasion of Normandy the following summer.58
In London Mitterrand stayed once more with Captain Lejeune at the old Giraudist headquarters in Devonshire Close, before moving in February to the Mount Royal Hotel, a palatial art deco building in Bryanston Street near Marble Arch, where Frenay usually put up. He was provided with a 7.65mm automatic and trained in its use at an SOE firing range in Baker Street. He also took lessons in parachute jumping in case the British should send him back that way. But nothing seemed to help: his return was blocked. In the middle of the month, Frenay flew from Algiers to join him. While Mitterrand spent his evenings playing bridge with Colonel Passy and other Gaullist luminaries, Frenay fretted that his protégé had been kicking his heels for six weeks when he should have been at work in France. ‘I ask you to do everything possible,’ he told d’Astier’s representative in London, ‘so that [Mitterrand’s] departure be given priority.’ Still nothing happened. Cailliau was fighting to stave off the inevitable and his friends in London were doing what they could to help.