by Philip Short
That did not mean he had been celibate. At Vichy he had a long-running affair with his cousin, Marie-Claire Sarrazin, which helped him through his loss. ‘I am not suffering,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘I am now able to love someone else.’ In Algiers he found consolation in the arms of a young nurse, Louquette, the daughter of a senior Gaullist officer. But as Jacques put it, ‘he wasn’t yet cured’. For that, he needed to fall in love, or at least – here a nuance is necessary – to find a girl he could love and marry.
In wartime, when each day may be the last, emotions become more intense. Jean Munier and Mitterrand’s secretary, Ginette, had married in February 1944 and Bernard Finifter soon after. Patrice Pelat was having a rapturous affair with Christine Gouze, whose apartment served as a meeting place for Mitterrand and members of his movement. It was there, in March, not long after his return from London, that he noticed on the piano a framed photograph of a young woman, Christine’s sister, Danielle, then nineteen years old. Family legend has it that he declared forthwith, ‘I shall marry her’.1 Like most legends, it need not be taken literally, but it reflected an underlying truth: François was captivated by ‘this girl with cat’s eyes’, as he called her, and, for the first time since breaking up with Marie-Louise, felt seriously attracted.
Danielle was quite different from his ex-fiancée. She was prettier, less sophisticated and, above all, wide-eyed and ingenuous. Perhaps that was what he had wanted all along.
Christine, ten years older than her sister, saw at once what was in the wind. ‘I have a fiancé for you,’ she told Danielle and arranged for her to come to Paris in April, during the Easter holidays, to meet this dashing young man who appeared so smitten with her.
As had happened with Marie-Louise, the first meeting did not go well. Danielle was a gauche adolescent whose idea of fun was bicycle rides in the country and romps with her dog, a golden-haired Briard named Mario. Men were not something she understood. Refusing her sister’s entreaties to dress up and put on nylons for this first, supposedly romantic encounter, she wore her usual schoolgirl socks and, when François teased her, stammered, blushed, and, as she wrote later, ‘ended up like an offended hedgehog’. He was definitely ‘not the kind of boy to melt a teenage girl’s heart’.
However, that night, after she and Christine got back home, François phoned to say he was coming over. There was a crisis: a safe house had been raided. As she watched him, working through the night with Pelat, Finifter and Jean Munier, she started to see him in a different light: ‘totally in control of himself, a leader . . . All of them were amazingly calm, lucid, and efficient . . .’ She was impressed and, at the same time, apprehensive.
In June, when the Gestapo raided Robert Antelme’s apartment, among the documents they seized was Danielle’s photograph. Mitterrand sent a messenger who waited for her outside the high school in Lyon where she was taking her baccalaureate and took her to a place of safety. She never did pass her exams. Shortly afterwards, he visited her at Cluny, in Burgundy, where her parents lived, and in July they became engaged. ‘It was all at a hundred miles an hour,’ she wrote many years later. ‘During the lunch [to celebrate our engagement], I felt it was all beyond me . . . I was a young girl, emerging from a protected childhood, and already this man wanted to marry me . . . He was there, talking about our future family . . . and I knew hardly anything about him.’ Perceptively, she wondered whether he had been disappointed in love. Did he love her for herself or for her spontaneity and innocence?
That summer, after the Normandy landings, the local maquis had occupied Cluny. Danielle volunteered as a nurse at a field hospital for the wounded. Arms were parachuted in by the Allies and a German counter-attack beaten off with heavy loss of life on August 11. The Gouze family, along with many others, fled to the surrounding hills. When they returned, to find the area around the church flattened by German bombing, a familiar face was waiting for her. Jean Munier and his young wife, Ginette, had come 60 miles by bicycle from Dijon, the county seat, to take her back with them to his parents’ home, where François thought she would be safer until the fighting was over. A month later, when General de Lattre de Tassigny’s troops entered Dijon on their northward march from Provence, she watched from her window as an open car, with two young men inside, threaded its way among the tanks. François and Jean Munier had driven from Paris, criss-crossing enemy lines as the Germans retreated and the front moved slowly east.
The two couples returned together. Danielle and François moved into an apartment in an upper-class district at Auteuil, on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, in the same building where her sister, Christine, had set up house with Patrice Pelat. Five weeks later, on Saturday, October 28, they were married, with Christine, Pelat, Jean Munier and Henri Frenay as witnesses, at the Church of St Séverin, in the Latin Quarter, across the river from Notre Dame. The bride wore a couture wedding gown of white silk faille and a fine silk veil – obtained from heaven knows what privileged storehouse in those times of wartime penury – and carried a bouquet of edelweiss, which Christine had turned Paris upside down to find. When they came out after the ceremony, ‘Colonel’ Patrice’s men from the MNPGD irregulars were waiting, in their best uniforms, on either side of the red carpet, with drawn swords forming an arch.
François had turned 28 two days earlier. Danielle was one day short of her 20th birthday. They formed a radiant young couple. Only François’s brother, Jacques, wondered afterwards whether he had married on the rebound. That was too harsh. Danielle kept love letters from their courtship smudged with François’s tears. But, on his side, it would be a love based on complicity, shared memories and the familiarity and understanding that develops over time, rather than an exclusive, overwhelming passion. The François Mitterrand who married Danielle Gouze was a very different person from the lovelorn young man who had been putty in the hands of his ‘Beatrice’, Marie-Louise Terrasse, four years before, and he made that brutally clear from the start.
At the wedding reception, even before the cake had been cut, he began to look anxiously about him and asked a guest for the time. ‘I shall have to go,’ he whispered to her. ‘There’s a meeting of the MNPGD and they’re waiting for me.’ The scales fell from Danielle’s eyes. ‘Today! The day of our . . .’ But she was not easily fazed. ‘I’m coming too,’ she told him. So it was that François joined his colleagues in white tie and tails, accompanied by his wife in her wedding dress, for a rather boring, routine meeting.
That was how it would be all their lives. He would do as he pleased; she would find a way to deal with it. Somehow they kept enough common ground to be able to smile at the absurdity of it all. That night she made him promise that in future he would keep free the last week of October – the week of their two birthdays and their wedding – for just the two of them. It was one more promise he would break. The following week he vanished ‘on MNPGD business’, reappearing several days later, as though it were nothing unusual, after she had spent days frantically telephoning their friends to find out where he could be. She learnt to live with that and with much else besides.
Mitterrand was more than difficult as a husband: he was often impossible. He demanded absolute freedom and found the slightest constraint intolerable. Not long after the wedding, she asked him brightly, when he came home one evening, ‘How did your day go, darling?’ The reply drew blood: ‘I did not marry you under the regime of the Inquisition.’
She tried to explain his behaviour by telling herself that his obsessive need for personal liberty was the result of the months he had spent in captivity in Germany, his penchant for secrecy a holdover from working underground in the Resistance. In fact it was his character. He refused to wear a wristwatch, supposedly because every watch he tried stopped after a couple of days, but actually because he hated having to be on time. Ever since childhood he had been refractory to all discipline unless self-imposed, and now it had been made far worse by his experience with Marie-Louise Terrasse. The one occasion in his life when he
had voluntarily surrendered his liberty, offering it up as a sacrifice to the woman he loved, it had been thrown back in his face. He would never put himself in such a position of dependency again.
Before long, Danielle realised that she had married a ‘husband [who] excels in the practice of seduction directed at young women’. François was a Don Juan.2 The same instinct for conquest that had made him pursue so doggedly Marie-Louise, and later Danielle herself, and which would afterwards serve him so well in his political career, had found a new field for action. It was as though he had decided that since an exclusive, overwhelming commitment would not work for him, he would make his future relations with women as wide-ranging, uncommitted and pleasurable as possible. Even Marie-Louise, her marriage to the Polish count in ruins, eventually invited him into her bed.3 But their relationship had changed. François was now the one in control. The old demons had been exorcised and they became simply good friends.
Danielle learnt to live with that, too. ‘As the years passed, I wasn’t affected so much. [I was] his wife . . . faithful at my post. He would see what I was made of.’ It was not the close, intimate relationship she had dreamed of, and there were times when she wondered whether she would have been happier married to one of the young students who had paid court to her as a schoolgirl. But she had chosen François Mitterrand, she wrote later, ‘for better and for worse’.4
Wars rarely have tidy endings. Paris had been liberated, but it would take four more months before the whole of France was free. During that time, those who had flocked to the Resistance in the final days, when it was certain who would win, sought to expiate their cowardice by wreaking vengeance on anyone they could accuse of having been baser than themselves. The easiest targets were women who had slept with Germans. Danielle remembered how, at Dijon, she and François had watched ‘women being stripped naked, having their heads shaved, being slapped about . . . It was bestial, unworthy.’ Even Mitterrand, as the leader of a resistance movement, was powerless to intervene. ‘If you’d tried, before you could prove you were from the Resistance, they would have killed you.’ Many of those paraded through the streets had swastikas painted on their bodies and placards hung round their necks, naming their supposed offence. For the overwhelming majority, the charge was what was termed ‘horizontal collaboration’. They included Frenchwomen married to Germans, or with German boyfriends; women who had worked in German households in order to support their families; and thousands of prostitutes, whose profession in France was legal. ‘My cunt is international, but my heart is French!’ one of them tearfully explained. The mob beat her anyway.
Some 20,000 women were treated in this way, and another 12,000 people were executed, fewer than two thousand of them after judicial process.5
Mitterrand approved one such killing, though whether he ordered it or assumed responsibility afterwards is not clear. An Italian accused of working for the Gestapo was executed in a garden behind the MNPGD headquarters. Afterwards it was said that the man was innocent and had been denounced by a jealous neighbour.
The movement’s armed detachments, under Patrice Pelat and Jean Munier, established a makeshift prison in a hotel near the central market, Les Halles, where alleged ‘collaborators and traitors’ were interrogated. Other Resistance groups did the same. At the beginning of September, Jacques Bourgeois, who had been suspected of betraying Jean Bertin and Robert Antelme to the Gestapo, was detained. Edgar Morin, who had earlier persuaded Mitterrand that Bourgeois and his colleague, Médina, would have to be liquidated, went to question him with Dionys Mascolo. Both were nauseated by ‘the bedrooms, turned into cells, prisoners who had been horribly beaten’ and the guards, who inflicted tortures because ‘when we were arrested, that’s what they did to us’. Morin recommended that the charges against the two men be dropped. ‘I said, “It’s over now . . . Let’s leave it. I don’t care any more . . .” In my moral code, you kill in wartime, but when the danger has passed, you spare.’ His colleague, Philippe Dechartre, on his return from North Africa, decided that Bourgeois was innocent and ordered his release. Soon afterwards the place was closed.
Mitterrand set out his views on the purge, or ‘cleansing’ as it was called, which swept across France in the wake of the German retreat, in an editorial in the movement’s newspaper, l’Homme libre, at the beginning of September:
The people of France are waiting for [Justice] to lift its sword and cut. That requires that the cleansing be efficient. There are heads to be cut off. Let them be cut off! But let us choose those who committed treason knowing full well what they were about. The others should be freed from [the strain of living under] a vague threat.6
The distinction was important. Those who had actively helped the Germans should be punished without mercy. Those who had merely gone along with the system, whether at Vichy or elsewhere, were in a different category. Here, in miniature, was the whole debate over Vichy and its role which would traumatise France through the 1940s and for decades beyond. With very few exceptions, the whole of France had ‘gone along with the system’. Mitterrand argued, like de Gaulle, that in the interests of national reconciliation, the unresisting majority had to be accepted back into the fold.
In the autumn of 1944, the General’s first priority was to re-establish control over the country he had won back.
Roosevelt had wanted to impose on France an American administration, the AMGOT, or Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories. French-speaking Americans had been recruited to run it and French currency notes printed, modelled on the dollar. That idea had bitten the dust when Leclerc’s troops had been the first to reach Paris. Even so, Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, withheld recognition of de Gaulle’s government until mid-October.
Once the Americans had been seen off, the next problem was the Communist Party. In the provinces, communist-led Liberation Committees refused to surrender authority to the administrators de Gaulle sent from Paris. For several weeks the country teetered on the brink of civil war. The stand-off ended only when the General brought Communist ministers into the government and proclaimed an amnesty for the Communist Party leader, Maurice Thorez, who then told his followers that their first priority was victory over Germany.
That left the non-communist Resistance, which wanted to fight on against the Germans while retaining its existing military formations. De Gaulle would have none of it. For him, the Resistance had done its job and must now disband. Starting in September, the irregulars were either demobilised or incorporated into Leclerc’s First French Army. Among them went several hundred men of the MNPGD battalion, which had been commanded by Patrice Pelat.
In the space of a few days, Mitterrand had lost both his troops and his government responsibilities. He was still de facto head of the MNPGD. But to play a role in the future, that would not be enough. He needed to bring together not merely the few thousand activists of the prisoners’ movement, nor even the few hundred thousand in the Aid Centres, but all those who would flood back from the camps once the war was over. Then he would be at the head of a formidable political force.
From the MNPGD’s new headquarters, in an aristocratic building near the Arc de Triomphe, at the top of the Champs-Elysées, Mitterrand set about creating a new organisation, the National Federation of Prisoners of War, or FNPG. It took him eight months. He learnt to play off the extremes, assuring the conservatives in the Aid Centres that they would hold the middle ground while promising the Communists that a merger would give them increased influence among the prisoners as a whole. Travelling constantly, he built up a network of friendships in the regional organisations which, Jean Védrine wrote later, ‘proved more solid and effective, when there were important decisions to be taken, than orthodox party channels’.
Not everyone was won over. ‘He was too self-assured, too humorous . . . too “political” not to attract criticism,’ Védrine noted. ‘To some he seemed individualistic and cold.’ His chronic lateness for appointments and meetings exasperated friends
and enemies alike. Subsequently he would insist that politics was not an art but a trade, to be learnt from the bottom up. The bargaining that winter and spring, and the debates at the founding congress that followed, were his apprenticeship.
The Federation, when it was established in April 1945, had more than a million members, making it the second-largest organisation in the country, outnumbered only by the communist trades union confederation, the CGT. Its President, Louis Devaux, was managing director of Cartier, the jewellers. He had headed the Aid Centres’ National Committee and had also worked for the Gaullist intelligence service, channelling part of Cartier’s profits to the Resistance during the war.7 Mitterrand was one of three Vice-Presidents and Jean Védrine, the Secretary. Among the original MNPGD leaders, Michel Cailliau’s group had been eliminated. The sole communist member of the board had to be co-opted because the congress refused to elect him. The others were all from Pin’–Mitt’ (the RNPG) or from the Aid Centres. The Federation soon became the government’s prime interlocutor on PoW issues. By the end of 1945, its membership reached almost two million.
Once the euphoria over Liberation and its new freedoms had died down, the French found themselves materially even worse off than during the Occupation. The winter of 1944 had been grim. Over the previous four years, three million buildings had been destroyed and 600,000 people killed, more than all the war dead of the United States and Britain combined. Two and a half million able-bodied men, prisoners and workers, were away in Germany. France had been bled white by war reparations to Berlin totalling 1.5 trillion francs (£4.5 billion or US $18 billion at the exchange rates of the time). Much of the country’s basic infrastructure, port facilities, more than 9,000 bridges and hundreds of miles of railways had been bombed; 80 per cent of its locomotives and 90 per cent of its road transport was out of action. As a result, despite a good harvest, there were acute food shortages in the towns. Industrial production was at 20 per cent of its pre-war level. The government printed money, fuelling inflation.