Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  In Paris that was the signal for a wave of strikes: over the next 72 hours, the staff of the metro, railwaymen, postmen, gendarmes and police stopped work. Newspapers ceased to appear. The German-controlled state radio fell silent.

  The city’s population sensed that after four years of occupation, freedom – and vengeance – were at hand. The atmosphere became electric. Alexandre Parodi, de Gaulle’s chief representative in France, who had come secretly to Paris from Algiers in April, worried that a premature insurrection would end in a bloodbath if the outnumbered but better-armed Germans used massive force against it – a Stalingrad in reverse, leaving the city in ruins before the Allied armies arrived. Although he did not know it, those were indeed Hitler’s orders, and an SS division had been despatched to ensure that they were carried out. On August 17, a Thursday, Parodi met the National Resistance Council to see whether they could hold off the uprising which was threatening to erupt on all sides. They realised that it was impossible. Paris was about to explode.

  The previous spring de Gaulle had decreed the formation of a provisional government to take charge until the members of the National Liberation Committee could arrive from Algiers. At Frenay’s suggestion he had named Mitterrand secretary-general for Prisoners of War and Deportees. On Friday afternoon, the fifteen members of this new body were summoned to receive Parodi’s instructions.72 But events were already running ahead of them. That morning a general strike had been proclaimed. Without waiting for instructions, Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, the regional chief of Franc-Tireurs et Partisans, whom Parodi had appointed to lead the insurrection, plastered the city with posters calling for general mobilisation.

  Mitterrand and the others were told not to take control of their ministries, still staffed by Vichy officials, until the uprising began.

  But on Saturday morning they heard machine-gun fire coming from the Place de la Concorde. Without waiting for the signal, a group of partisans had occupied the Préfecture de Police. Men in shirtsleeves wielding axes cut the trees lining the boulevards to erect barricades against German tanks.

  In the afternoon, the Germans counter-attacked. Mitterrand and Jean Munier were caught in crossfire in the Latin Quarter when a German troop transport tried to force a roadblock on the Boulevard St Michel. Soon afterwards, four of Munier’s men were captured by the Germans in a firefight and taken to the Gare du Nord to be shot. Three managed to escape; the fourth was executed. That evening an MNPGD detachment occupied the Prisoners’ Bureau in the Place de Clichy in the north-west of Paris, which Mitterrand made his temporary headquarters.

  The following day, Sunday, they took over half a dozen other buildings which had been used as offices by the Vichy Commissariat of Prisoners of War and therefore fell under Mitterrand’s responsibility, including the Commissariat itself, in the rue Meyerbeer, a side street next to the Opera. André Pernin, a print worker who accompanied Mitterrand to the Commissioner’s first-floor office, remembered him entering with a drawn pistol. The incumbent, Robert Moreau, a civil servant of the old school who had reluctantly accepted the job after Masson’s resignation, ‘stood up politely and asked how he could help. “You can go,” Mitterrand replied. The Commissioner, very calmly, tried to open a negotiation. “Sir, there is nothing to talk about,” Mitterrand told him. “This is the revolution! You will have to give up your place.”’

  The Commissariat was a hundred yards from the Kommandantur, the German Military Command headquarters, which was protected by rolls of barbed wire, spiked wooden barriers and several tanks stationed outside. Munier posted six well-armed men outside and Mitterrand started work as a minister with two boxes of Molotov cocktails on the floor beside his desk in case the building should be attacked.

  For several days, the situation remained on a knife-edge. Unknown to the insurrection’s leaders, Eisenhower and General Omar Bradley had decided to bypass Paris in order not to slow down their advance. The recapture of the city was not planned until October. Parodi sent couriers to Mitterrand and the other secretaries-general, telling them to do nothing which might draw the Germans’ attention to the buildings they were occupying. When the insurrectional government met at the Prime Minister’s office, the Hôtel Matignon, he issued a formal instruction that they should lie low until the security situation clarified.

  Mitterrand went to the ministry on his bicycle each day. Even as the skirmishes continued, normality returned:

  You saw the Germans in the streets. Tanks went by. From time to time shots rang out. It didn’t stop people doing their shopping, there were queues for milk and bread. Then suddenly someone would open fire . . . People threw themselves on the ground. After a while life went on as before. In other quarters of Paris, not far away, you were not even aware there was fighting.73

  Help came from an unlikely quarter. The Swedish consul, Raoul Nordling, persuaded the new German Military Governor, General von Choltitz, to agree to a truce. It was honoured only sporadically but allowed the Resistance to regroup and rearm. Von Choltitz knew that the war was lost, and when Hitler renewed his orders to blow the bridges across the Seine and unleash the maximum of destruction on the city, he ignored them. Even so, by the time the insurrection ended, some 2,800 Frenchmen and more than 3,000 Germans had been killed.

  Meanwhile, on Tuesday morning, August 22, Colonel Rol-Tanguy sent emissaries to the Allies at Argentan, south of Caen, to say that more than half of Paris had been liberated, but without help the uprising might collapse.

  While Eisenhower and Bradley hesitated, General Henri Leclerc, the French Commander of the 2nd Armoured Division, decided to force their hand. Eisenhower had promised de Gaulle that French troops would be the first to enter Paris. Without seeking authorisation from his American superior, General Gerow, Leclerc despatched a reconnaissance unit which covered the 150 miles to the capital in 48 hours, linking up with the Resistance and, on Thursday evening, occupying a position in front of the City Hall, where the National Resistance Council had established its base. Next morning, Leclerc’s main force arrived to an ecstatic welcome from the beleaguered population, and in the afternoon von Choltitz signed the surrender at Montparnasse railway station.

  In other ways, too, normal life was resuming. Patrice Pelat, at the head of a battalion of irregulars, commandeered the offices of a collaborationist journal and printing press. On Tuesday they had put out the first openly published issue of the MNPGD’s clandestine newspaper, l’Homme libre. In a front-page editorial, Mitterrand set out his conception of the role which the prisoners had played:

  For three days, Paris has been fighting. For three days an army raised from each quarter, each street, has been hunting the invader and winning back the right to live . . . Victory . . . belongs to all those who pay for it, and pay dearly with their pain and their blood . . . In Germany, as in France, the PoWs have waged a struggle without mercy . . . They have made illustrious the word ‘prisoner’, which from this time on will never again mean giving up the fight. We must proclaim that from the rooftops . . . All over France, the prisoners of war, united in the same movement, have given meaning to the coming triumph. Captive sons of a captive country, dogs that people believed were being taken for a whipping, they are proving that when freedom is fiercely guarded as an inalienable right in the very depths of one’s being, it contains in itself all victories.74

  This was not mere rhetoric. Mitterrand understood, as did de Gaulle, who had been a prisoner in the First War, that the 1.5 million PoWs would assume national importance once the war was over. To most French people they were an embarrassment, a living reminder of a defeat which the country desperately wished to forget. To empower them, Mitterrand realised, it was necessary to change their image from that of agents of defeat to agents of victory.

  Philippe Dechartre wrote admiringly later: ‘He saw it straight off . . . If the mass of PoWs were absolved of their captivity by their [actions in the] Resistance, they would represent a [huge] political stake. To the rest of us, that never even crossed
our minds . . . A handful of men who fought for the Resistance gave value to [the prisoners] as a whole. It gave [them] moral value.’ By the end of the war, according to figures compiled by the Free French, the MNPGD armed detachments numbered 22,000 men, operating from command centres in Paris, Rouen in Normandy, Neussargues in the Massif Central and Nancy in the north-east. These men, Mitterrand wrote later, won citations for valour ‘for slowing the Germans’ withdrawal into Normandy; . . . for freeing a large part of the Aveyron [in the south of the Massif Central]; for fighting on the Plateau de Glières [in Savoy]; for conquering several valleys [above Nice] and in the Hautes Alpes [around Montmaur]’. The prisoners, he insisted, had been condemned for a military debacle that was not of their making. In August 1944, he was certain that his future would be bound up with theirs.

  General de Gaulle had arrived in Normandy the previous weekend. He reached Paris on the afternoon of Friday, August 25, shortly after von Choltitz had signed the German surrender. That night, in a speech broadcast throughout France, he addressed the crowds gathered in front of the City Hall:

  Why should we hide the emotion that is catching at our throats, men and women, here in our own home, in Paris which today stands tall? . . .

  Paris! Paris abused! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris freed! Freed by its own efforts, freed by its people working together with the armies of France, with the support and assistance of the whole of France, of the France which fights, the only France, the true France, the eternal France . . .

  The enemy is tottering but not yet beaten . . . It will not be enough for us to have . . . chased him off our land . . . We want to enter his territory as we should, as victors . . . It is for that revenge, that vengeance and that justice that we will continue to fight until . . . complete and final victory.75

  Mitterrand and two colleagues, together with other ministers and members of the National Resistance Council, led by Moulin’s successor, Georges Bidault, stood behind him as he spoke. At one point, the crush in the room was such that de Gaulle, saluting the crowd from a balcony, was about to lose his balance. ‘Stop pushing, stop pushing, for God’s sake,’ he cried. Mitterrand and Pierre de Chevigné, who later became Defence Minister, grabbed hold of the great man’s legs and pulled him back inside.76

  The General’s speech that night offered a blueprint for the country’s future. Between the lines, he was making two essential points: France would fight alongside its allies in order to have a place at the table when the victors divided the spoils; and the ‘France that fights, the only France, the true France’ would be the country’s image once the war was over.

  In this Gaullist reading of history, Vichy had been just a bad dream. The new priorities were reconciliation and national unity. When Georges Bidault suggested that he proclaim the restoration of the Republic, de Gaulle replied: ‘The Republic never ceased to exist . . . Vichy was and remains null and void.’ That was also Mitterrand’s view. For the rest of his life, like de Gaulle, he rejected any suggestion that France should be held responsible for the misdeeds of the Vichy regime. It was a fiction, but a convenient one, and it enabled the country to move on, not being seriously questioned until those who had lived through those years had given place to a younger generation of leaders.

  The following afternoon, de Gaulle went to the Arc de Triomphe to light the flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Then, accompanied by the leaders of the Resistance and members of the provisional government, he walked down the Champs-Elysées, acclaimed by delirious crowds.

  On Sunday morning, August 27, the General chaired the one and only Cabinet meeting held before the arrival of the titular government from Algiers. Alexandre Parodi presented the fifteen acting ministers lined up to greet him – Mitterrand, as the youngest, coming last. ‘You again!’ said de Gaulle, which, given that he was the one who had named him, was either a backhanded compliment or an ironic recognition that this minister was not like the others. That, at least, was how Mitterrand took it.77 Years later, he recalled his feelings when de Gaulle began to speak:

  I still have in my ears his monologue that day. I was listening, watching, admiring . . . Now that I have lived through other historic days, I have learnt to economise emotions of that kind. But then I was 27 years old, I had depths of enthusiasm and a propensity to magnify events. And I had reason to be wide-eyed: it was the beginning of an epoch, and it was General de Gaulle . . . Nobody spoke as he did the language of the State . . . De Gaulle didn’t put matters in terms [of right or wrong]. He existed. His deeds created him . . . [To him] the motherland was a mystical soil, drawn by the hand of God and inhabited by a worker-soldier people. In its hours of peril, this land, made for that people, would naturally give forth the hero that it needed. This time, the hero was him.78

  Henri Frenay and his colleagues arrived in Paris a week later.79 It was a moment to which Mitterrand had not been looking forward. ‘He had been hoping,’ Frenay wrote later, ‘that I would be appointed to other government functions and that he could become Minister for Prisoners, Deportees and Refugees . . . Obviously that hope was disappointed.’ His first experience as a member of the government had lasted all of fifteen days. Frenay offered him the post of secretary-general at the ministry, which would have made him the top permanent official, but he declined. François Mitterrand, Frenay grumbled afterwards, harboured grander ambitions.80

  * * *

  fn1 This attitude was well described in Pierre Boulle’s novel, The Bridge on the River Kwai, which was the basis for a classic war film, directed by David Lean. In it a British officer, Colonel Nicholson, orders his men to work for the authorities of a Japanese PoW camp in order to maintain morale.

  In France, out of an estimated 290,000 Jews before the war, 200,000 were stateless or foreign. Nearly 60 per cent survived, including 90 per cent of those who held French citizenship, a higher proportion than in any other occupied territory with the single exception of Denmark, which had a Jewish population of only 7,000. Apologists for Vichy have claimed that Pétain’s policy of collaboration was ‘a lesser evil’ which saved thousands of Jewish lives because, had the Germans administered France directly, Nazi policies would have prevailed from the start. Others argue that had the French police and administration not collaborated, the manpower of the German occupation force would have been stretched much more thinly and fewer deportations would have occurred. But history is not what might have been: the French State did collaborate and more than 40 per cent of the Jewish population died.

  fn2 In fact, they did not. The anti-Jewish decrees were enacted, with Pétain’s blessing, at the urging of French anti-Semites. In the summer of 1942, Pierre Laval authorised the deportation of Jewish children without the Germans having requested it. Mitterrand and Bénet may have believed that Vichy was simply anticipating German wishes, but that was not the same thing as having anti-Jewish measures ‘imposed’, as Bénet put it, by an outside force.

  fn3 The French philosopher, Edgar Morin, himself Jewish and a student at Toulouse in October 1940, said he was ‘not particularly struck’ by the Vichy statutes against the Jews. Morin went on to join the Resistance and one of his uncles died at Auschwitz. Nonetheless he had only a vague memory of the mass arrests of July 1942. ‘If I heard about them,’ he said, ‘it was some time afterwards.’ When nearly fifty former Resistance figures contributed to a lengthy compilation of memoirs of their wartime experiences, only three mentioned the persecution of Jews and just one, Pierre Merli, who was honoured by Israel as one of ‘the Righteous’, described working actively against it. The journalist, Pierre Péan, who undertook exhaustive researches into the period, noted that among more than a hundred contemporary figures whom he questioned, the subject of the Jews ‘was never brought up spontaneously, not even by those who had impeccable Resistance credentials’.

  fn4 Beginning in the summer of 1940, small resistance groups formed spontaneously in different parts of France. A year later, after Germany attacked Russia, communist networks d
eveloped. The British SOE provided the only outside support at first and remained the main source of finance and arms until France was liberated. De Gaulle’s Free French in London had little contact with the Resistance until the winter of 1941, when Jean Moulin was sent to France with a mandate to unify the movements under Gaullist leadership. Moulin faced considerable hostility. Most resistance fighters accepted de Gaulle as a symbol, even as a commander, but not as a political leader. The General’s aides made matters worse by trying to micromanage resistance activities from London. The first chief of the Armée Secrète, General Delestraint, was an orthodox soldier who, like de Gaulle himself, had little understanding of what running a resistance movement entailed. Moulin, in his efforts to impose London’s control, threatened to withhold weapons shipments and finance from recalcitrant organisations. Ill feeling was at a peak in the summer of 1943, when, in June, shortly after successfully establishing the National Resistance Council, Moulin was arrested by the Gestapo. He died two weeks later, having remained silent despite severe torture. It was never established whether he was betrayed by one of his opponents within the Resistance and, if so, by whom; by an informer with other motives; or whether his capture was the result of a successful German intelligence operation.

  fn5 Guerin nevertheless noted a detail suggesting a difference in attitude between Nazi interrogators and Americans in the same line of work sixty years later. When the ordeal was over, one of his torturers, ‘a fat fellow with a round face, said to me in German, “Well done. You didn’t talk.”, and gave me a glass of brandy and a packet of French cigarettes.’

  4

  Loose Ends, New Beginnings

  IN SEPTEMBER 1944, Mitterrand, then in his late twenties, was still a bachelor. That was in large part due to his mortification at the hands of Marie-Louise Terrasse, which would influence his relationships with women for the remainder of his life. His colleagues at Vichy remembered her photograph, prominently displayed in his room, and in the winter of 1943, when he went to Algiers, his brother Jacques was astonished to find that he still kept her engagement ring, which he had pretended to throw into the River Seine, in his breast pocket.