Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  Thus it was to a country on the verge of collapse that the prisoners began to return. Henri Frenay had hoped for an orderly repatriation, spread over several months. But the Allies had no way to feed those released from the camps and sent them back as fast as they could. At the peak, 40,000 a day were arriving in France, a million by the end of May. The FNPG, through the Aid Centres, played a key role and the migration took place more smoothly than anyone had dared hope. But the penury with which the prisoners were confronted, after five years in the Stalags, meant feelings were running high. Matters were made worse by the Communists, who, with victory assured, saw no reason for restraint. Frenay, a notorious anti-communist, became their scapegoat for everything the government was doing wrong.

  Mitterrand initially defended him.8 But his margin for manoeuvre was limited. The two men were known to be close. To take the Minister’s side against his own members, whose grievances were real, would have been suicidal. At the end of May, Mitterrand penned a blistering attack on the government for its failure to act decisively, focussing on the issue which angered the returnees more than any other:

  The government is not known . . . for the sin of excessive weakness . . . But it is disturbing to see that [its members], who were fierce and implacable against the enemy without, are so timid when it comes to confronting that adversary within, which goes by the name of black market. Journalists have been shot; yesterday a general, 75 years old, was sentenced to death. But it seems we have to believe that the skins of these traffickers and spivs are too precious to go before a firing squad. You should remember this advice: if you execute 15 of them in public – and they are not hard to find – you will have solved in large part a problem which is exercising too many experts and too few honest men.9

  The violence of Mitterrand’s broadside was designed to show his prisoner constituency that he was leading the charge on their behalf, and that he was doing so against the government as a whole rather than Frenay alone.

  The Communists saw through it and denounced the article as a fraud. They wished to concentrate on Frenay. He was the man the prisoners blamed for their troubles, and the more the Communists attacked him, the more support they would get. Defamatory posters, accusing the Minister of wasting resources, delaying the prisoners’ return and discriminating against Jews and Leftists, were plastered all over Paris. On Sunday, June 2, the Communists called for mass demonstrations. Mitterrand and the rest of the FNPG Committee decided they had no choice but to go along lest they be disavowed by their base. That afternoon, 50,000 people marched up the Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe, where Mitterrand and two others laid a wreath. The procession continued to Frenay’s Ministry, on the nearby Avenue Foch, where a group of rowdies, shouting, ‘Frenay to the gallows!’, tried to break through police lines.

  It was then announced that de Gaulle would receive a delegation and the demonstrators dispersed.

  Two days later, Mitterrand and another FNPG leader, Jean Cornuau, accompanied by Georges Thevenin, representing the Communists, were ushered into de Gaulle’s presence. The General was in a foul mood. He accused Mitterrand of ‘pissing vinegar’ on Frenay, who deserved better, and refused to listen when Mitterrand explained that he and his companions had ‘done no more than express the returnees’ feelings, which it was in the government’s interests to know and to take into account’. When Cornuau expressed astonishment that de Gaulle, who had been a prisoner himself in the First War, showed so little understanding of the PoWs’ difficulties, he provoked another tirade. De Gaulle, Cornuau said afterwards, had been ‘irate and arrogant’ and the 30-minute meeting, ‘painful and difficult’. It did, though, have some beneficial effects. Money was found to provide the prisoners with emergency aid, and the Ministry discovered supplies of cloth, of which it had previously claimed ignorance, which were used to make them clothes.

  The Communists wound down their campaign. Mitterrand and Frenay patched up their relationship. By July, the repatriations were complete. Three months later, Frenay stepped down. The Ministry’s task was over and when the next government was formed, he was not replaced.

  Danielle had resigned herself to living on her own. Her husband’s behaviour on their wedding day turned out to be the shape of things to come. She said later that ‘he had learned bad habits’, meaning that he was never there. She hated Auteuil, a ‘soulless place, no street life, no animation’, where she had no friends. The Muniers had returned to Dijon and the Finifters had moved to Toulouse. Patrice Pelat had also left. Three days before they were to marry, Christine learnt that he was having an affair with a ballerina and broke off the engagement. François worked frantically all that winter, nursing the FNPG into existence and writing for Libres (‘Free’), as the movement’s newspaper was now called, having become its managing editor after communist print workers had forced the resignation of his colleagues, Charles Moulin and Marcel Haedrich, for allegedly being too soft on Vichy.

  The following spring, Danielle travelled to Jarnac for the first time to visit François’s father, then in the last stages of a long battle with prostate cancer. The town, like the family, made her claustrophobic. ‘It’s very pretty, Jarnac,’ she said later, ‘but . . . the walls are all ten feet high, you can’t see in anywhere . . . It’s totally opposed to my temperament.’ The shutters, latched against the sun so that only a single ray of light could enter, reflected a culture of ‘discretion, even secrecy, modesty and inwardness’.

  François felt at home there. She did not. But his father liked her and told her shortly before he died: ‘I feared your entry into our family; now I am happy for it.’ It was Joseph’s testament to her. In normal times, the Mitterrands concealed their feelings behind walls as impenetrable as those of the town. Danielle had not been brought up that way.

  She realised later, she wrote, that their backgrounds were different in every possible way. Her parents were openly affectionate with each other, agnostic, left-wing, and deeply committed to the principles of secular education; François’s were prudish, devoutly Roman Catholic, right-wing, and committed to church schooling. She had been brought up as an only child, both her siblings being much older; François’s childhood had been spent among a tribe of brothers and sisters and cousins. Her father was a high-school principal whom the Vichy administration had dismissed for refusing to divulge the names of his Jewish pupils, a man who had worked with the local maquis and had given shelter to leaders like Frenay; François’s owned a vinegar works and, under the Occupation, had accepted the status quo. Her family was radical; his, conservative.

  The differences were manageable. François dazzled her. She enchanted and amused him. But his overwhelming ambition meant they were rarely together. He had confiscated her youth, she complained, and now he was always away. He knew in his heart that was true. ‘I am cutting back,’ he wrote to Georges Dayan. ‘What is the point of working if you have no time for your private life?’ But saying it was one thing, doing it, another. By the summer of 1945, Danielle was deeply unhappy:

  Little by little, I learnt to stop asking questions . . . I learnt to bite my tongue every time I was going to ask, ‘what have you been doing?’ If you keep biting your tongue for fear of asking questions, you stop asking altogether and you finish . . . you finish by living in another way. It obliged me to become another person, to become someone else. I used to be an extrovert. I learnt to be introverted.10

  The one great joy in her life was that she was expecting a child. The baby, Pascal, was born in June. His mother took him to Cluny to spend August with her parents. Then tragedy struck. He died suddenly at the age of three months from infantile cholera,11 probably from unpasteurised milk, a common problem at a time when one infant in ten in Paris died before the age of one.

  For both of them, it was a horrible time. But Mitterrand had his work. Danielle had only emptiness. ‘It was a drama for him,’ she said later, ‘but not in the same way as it was for me. I was utterly distraught . . . He was caught up almost at once
in his professional activities again. I was twenty years old. I had carried [the baby] for nine months, and everything I had built up in my adolescent’s mind – because I was still an adolescent . . . it took away my reason to live.’ Pascal’s death left a scar which lasted the rest of her life. Friends remembered how, fifty years later, she would suddenly start talking about him and how old he would have been had he survived.

  She was desperate to get away from Auteuil. They moved briefly to the nearby suburb of Neuilly, another haunt of the upper middle classes which Danielle found equally repellent, before eventually François found a bourgeois apartment, with high stucco ceilings and spacious reception rooms, in the rue Guynemer, in the Latin Quarter, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens.12 There she tried to rebuild her life. Thinking that she might get closer to him if she became his secretary, she registered for a shorthand-typing course. ‘Bad idea,’ she wrote later. Having her control his agenda would have cramped his style. ‘You can never be my secretary,’ he told her, ‘let’s not mix family and work.’

  Life continued. She discovered a talent for bookbinding. In December 1946, a second son, Jean-Christophe, was born, followed two years later by Gilbert. But she was not at ease in her role as a mother. ‘My mind was often elsewhere,’ she wrote, ‘with others of my age, still students, whose company I enjoyed.’ She was a girl, not yet a woman, not because of her years – others, including François’s sisters, had married at a younger age – but because she resented the sacrifice of that ‘mad youthfulness’ which had attracted him in the first place and of which she was now deprived.

  Death wears the same habits whether it comes to a single child or to an entire people. But what France, and the rest of the world, discovered when the Nazi concentration camps were opened was an industrialisation of death unlike anything seen before or since. At the end of April 1945, de Gaulle, who made it a point of honour that France be associated with every Allied operation, despatched a delegation, comprising Mitterrand, Jacques Bénet and their communist colleague, Pierre Bugeaud, to join General John Lewis, the US Head of Mission for the European theatre, who had been charged with administering what were now known to have been death camps. They went first to Landsberg, which the Germans had claimed was a ‘place of convalescence’ for the sick. Bugeaud recounted what they found:

  On the parade ground, under piles of cut branches, were hundreds of bodies, burnt with flame-throwers. There was a cooking area which had never been used. Everyone there had starved to death. Further on was a sight which will stay forever in my memory: a common grave where corpses, discoloured by putrefaction, were washed by a powdery snow falling gently, stark against the red soil . . .13

  Mitterrand remembered the emptiness. ‘It was inconceivable, hallucinating . . . There was not a single survivor.’ Mass graves contained thousands of bodies, ‘tied together, three by three’.

  Next came Dachau. The railway line to the camp went straight through the town. ‘Bodies could be seen in the freight wagons and strewn beside the road,’ Bugeaud wrote. ‘I questioned a woman with her little girl. She said she knew nothing about any of that. It was less than a hundred yards from the entrance to the camp.’ Inside it was still worse. Mitterrand remembered:

  Death was everywhere. The gas ovens, people who had been hanged and shot. A typhus epidemic added to the torments of the survivors. I was present at the execution of German soldiers after the Americans’ arrival. At each volley, the inmates threw their hats in the air and shouted for joy. I watched two young Germans who had been shot being thrown into holes in the ground. I went closer. They were still breathing, whimpering. At that moment, somewhere in Germany, someone who loved them was praying for them. That person’s grief was surely nothing compared to the suffering of the inmates. But I couldn’t stop myself thinking about it.14

  Did he really think that at the time? One may be permitted to doubt it. Those words were written long after the event. There may have been a genuine confusion between what he thought then and what he thought afterwards. But much of his account was deliberate invention . . . or at least embellishment.

  De Gaulle did not, as Mitterrand claimed, choose him personally to represent France on the mission to the camps. The FNPG had been asked to provide a three-man delegation and he had been chosen as a member. The French group had not ‘taken possession with the Americans’ of Landsberg and Dachau, as he wrote later. It had arrived two days after their liberation by US troops.15 Mitterrand may have seen the bodies of dead SS guards – which perhaps inspired his reflections – but the executions had ended well before he reached Dachau.16 Even the one episode of the visit which was truly miraculous – their chance encounter with Robert Antelme, Marguerite Duras’s husband, who had been deported after the raid on the flat in the rue Dupin the previous June – was not quite as he said.

  As Mitterrand recounted it, they had been walking through a field of corpses when he heard a voice calling faintly, ‘François!’ It was Antelme, who had arrived four days earlier from Buchenwald after a thirteen-day journey without food, which only 800 out of 4,800 prisoners had survived, in the same train, gorged with corpses, that they had seen outside the camp. Bugeaud’s account was quite different. After leaving Mitterrand talking to the Americans, he had wandered off on his own. A prisoner had told him that Antelme was in the sanitary block and he had rushed back to tell Mitterrand and Bénet. They found Antelme, unrecognisable, trembling with fever, waiting with other prisoners to be deloused. He weighed barely five stone (70 lb), having survived the previous two weeks by drinking melted snow.

  Despite Mitterrand’s entreaties that they be allowed to take Antelme back with them, the Americans refused, citing the typhoid epidemic raging in the camp. On his return, he gave Dionys Mascolo and Georges Beauchamp petrol coupons, uniforms and false papers showing them to be French officers, and sent them on a rescue mission. When they found Antelme, they dressed him in an officer’s uniform and smuggled him past a sentry post with the connivance of a communist guard, holding him up between them, pretending he was drunk. Beauchamp drove all day, and much of the night and next morning, until they reached Verdun. There they stopped for lunch at a restaurant.

  As they carried him inside, the room fell silent. It was the day after VE Day. At the sight of this dying, skeletal wraith – a vision of what might have been, had the Nazis won – everyone stood up and bowed.

  Mitterrand was waiting at the apartment with Marguerite when they arrived. When she saw Antelme, she screamed and fled. The doctors said he was so weak he could not last the night. But he did. Marguerite nursed him. Mitterrand and Mascolo visited him every day. A month later he was pronounced to be out of danger.

  In July 1945, Pétain was put on trial for treason. Mitterrand covered the case for Libres. He used the occasion for a vitriolic attack on Daladier, Neville Chamberlain’s partner in the policy of appeasement, and all the others who were now ‘beating their mea culpas on other people’s breasts’. It was, he said, ‘a treason trial in which so many small treasons are laid out that the heart grows weary’, with politicians condemning as criminals the military leaders they themselves had appointed. They should all be put ‘in the same basket, accusers and accused together, accomplices in the same cowardice or betrayal, accomplices in our misfortune’.

  Of Pétain himself, he said little, suggesting between the lines that the elderly Marshal was being used as a scapegoat for the actions of those who had made him a figurehead. De Gaulle thought much the same. ‘Old age,’ the General wrote, ‘is a shipwreck . . . and the old age of Marshal Pétain became identified with the shipwreck of France.’ Yet a scapegoat was what the country needed. De Gaulle commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment, but in later years refused the pleas of his supporters for his remains to be transferred to Verdun, the battlefield where his armies had triumphed.

  For the next four years the Special Court continued its work, pronouncing eighteen death sentences, of which three, including those against Laval and
Darnand, were carried out, while a host of lower-level Special Courts judged less prominent defendants. Like other Resistance leaders, Mitterrand was frequently solicited for testimonials on behalf of those accused of collaborating. Some, like Jean-Paul Martin, Bousquet’s aide at the police department at Vichy, had rendered sterling service to the Resistance and should never have been in court at all. Others were personal or family friends whose ‘missteps’ he thought merited indulgence: Gabriel Jeantet, who had edited the Pétainist magazine, France: revue de l’État nouveau, to which he had been a contributor; François Meténier, another ex-Cagoulard, who had saved the life of his sister, Colette; François Moreau, a childhood friend from Jarnac, who had headed a youth centre at Vichy; Yves Dautun, a cousin several times removed, who had worked with the French fascist leader, Jacques Doriot; and many others.

  For the most part, Mitterrand’s interventions could be justified. Meténier was an adventurer and a rogue, Jeantet a misguided intellectual, Moreau a nonentity.

  But the case of Jean Bouvyer, the ex-felon of the Cagoule, was fundamentally different. Bouvyer was spineless and amoral, and had spent three years working for the Commissariat for Jewish Questions, where his tasks included liaison with the Gestapo and assisting in the spoliation of Jewish-owned businesses. Mitterrand claimed afterwards that he had been unaware of Bouvyer’s anti-Jewish activities. That is hard to credit. His gesture on Bouvyer’s behalf seems rather to have been an example of a principle which throughout his life he erected into an article of faith: friendship, once given, should never be taken away. In this case the friendship was with Jean’s mother, Antoinette, who became godmother to his son, Jean-Christophe, and to whom both he and Danielle were extremely close.