Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  It was a principle for which he would later pay dearly when allies and adversaries alike anathematised him for relationships which they held to be inexcusable – all the more incongruous in a man who normally held that principles, like ideology, were a straitjacket, a short cut to ready-made answers which rarely fitted the issues at hand. Like the philosopher, Gabriel Marcel, whom Mitterrand had read as a student in the 1930s, he viewed principles as an excuse for not thinking through the rights and wrongs of each particular situation.17 But in the case of friendship, such reasoning fell by the wayside. Where a friend was concerned, Mitterrand’s reputation for ambivalence, for devious manoeuvring, for intellectual finesse, no longer applied. He was not merely straightforward and loyal but pigheaded to the point of unreason.

  In the summer of 1945, Mitterrand had a wife, a baby and little visible means of support. Being Vice-President of the FNPG brought responsibilities and a great deal of work but no money. At Libres, where he received a small salary as managing editor, he faced a running battle with the communists. Marcel Haedrich’s departure had solved nothing. Mitterrand wanted to turn it into an evening newspaper with wide, popular appeal. At the end of the year, he and Georges Beauchamp relaunched the paper under a new title, Soir-Express (‘Evening Express’). It folded after six months.

  Mitterrand had always assumed that he had plenty of options. During the war he had talked of becoming a diplomat. Now he spoke of a career as a writer, or as an academic, teaching history and law.18 But nothing materialised. In the end, his friends from the Marian hostel, François Dalle and André Bettencourt, who both worked for the cosmetics company, l’Oréal, came to the rescue. Before the war, to promote its cosmetics sales, the company had published a women’s magazine, Votre Beauté (‘Your Beauty’), which it had been forced to close because of wartime paper shortages. Now it was to be revived and Mitterrand could have the job of Editor. It gave him a comfortable salary, an office and a secretary, enough time to write for Libres and, later, Soir-Express, and five months to prepare the first issue, which appeared in December 1945 under the title, ‘Your Beauty Notebooks’. His idea was to give a literary slant to women’s fashion concerns. It was a tall order. Three issues later, after heated discussions with the owners, Votre Beauté reverted to its traditional, pre-war, glossy format. Mitterrand’s days as a fashion editor were numbered.

  The only other possibility was politics.

  In the winter of 1944, immediately after France had been liberated, many non-communist Resistance leaders had dreamed of a political movement, different from the pre-war parties, which would carry forward the ‘Resistance spirit’ of self-sacrifice and social justice. Frenay wanted ‘a synthesis of socialism and freedom’ through a left-wing party, modelled on the Labour Party in Britain, which would challenge the Communists on their home ground. He asked de Gaulle to lead it, but the General, too proud at that stage to soil his hands with politics, haughtily refused. Mitterrand had hoped to build a party based on the prisoners’ movement. He extolled the spirit of unity and solidarity that the PoWs had shown in the camps and denounced ‘partisan spirit’ as the prime cause of France’s ills. But it quickly became clear that a prisoners’ party would not work.

  The PoWs are united by shared memories. They are not united by a doctrine. Could they be? No! . . . In one sense that’s a good thing. Uniformity of thought is the sign of human degradation . . . But if it is impossible to bind them to a doctrine, it is impossible to gather them into a single party.19

  Such a party was ‘a sentimental illusion which was bound to fail . . . Opposing interests arise, life resumes its course.’

  But if party politics was the only way forward, which party should he join?

  On October 21 1945, 20 million French men – and women, who were enfranchised for the first time – voted into office a new parliament in the first legislative elections for nearly ten years. The same day they decided by referendum to charge its members with elaborating a new constitution to replace the defunct Third Republic. De Gaulle was named Prime Minister at the head of a tripartite government comprising Socialists, Communists and Christian Democrats, each of which had obtained about a quarter of the popular vote, the remainder having gone to a sprinkling of small centrist parties.

  Mitterrand, like many others, found the outcome disheartening. It seemed that the war had changed nothing. French politics was still being made by men who would sell out their principles for a share of power.

  He had been tempted to stand for election as part of a list of moderate left-wing candidates in the Vosges, in eastern France. But voting was on the basis of proportional representation and he abandoned the idea when it became clear that he had no chance of winning a seat.20

  That Mitterrand should have leaned towards the Left was hardly a surprise. From the social Catholicism of his student days to his experiences as a PoW, when class was an irrelevance – from his months as an army NCO dealing with incompetent officers, to life in the Resistance, where everyone was equal – everything he had lived through since the late 1930s was calculated to turn him away from the traditional values with which he had grown up. All his closest friends were on the Left: Georges Dayan, Beauchamp, Finifter, Munier and Pelat, not to mention Antelme and Marguerite Duras and others further removed. Men like Maurice Pinot and Antoine Mauduit, at Montmaur, who had been his early mentors, had been strongly committed to social justice. His wife, Danielle, far from a negligible influence, was from a dyed-in-the-wool socialist family and had strong socialist convictions herself. Her father, Antoine, had impressed him as a man of rare probity and courage.

  In Libres his editorials rolled out a drumbeat of left-wing rhetoric, denouncing the moneyed classes, the bourgeoisie and exploiters of the working man. The bourgeoisie, he had written, had appeased Hitler at Munich in a vain attempt to halt the advance of communism. The result? ‘[In 1939] the Russians and Germans joined forces . . . and there was war as well.’ Five years later, during the liberation of Paris, while the bourgeoisie was still waiting to see which way the wind would blow, the prisoners’ armed detachments – all from working-class suburbs – were ‘poorly clothed, ill-equipped, dirty, and possessed astonishing nobility’. Money, he maintained, was at the root of all France’s ills, the object of a soulless pilgrimage to ‘a place of blasphemy’.

  The slave [is] not always who one thinks . . . Our great ancestors [the leaders of the French Revolution] dethroned kings . . . but did not understand that the most powerful king of all was still there taunting [them]. Money, the money-king! . . . No, we have not won our freedom! We may talk about democracy and tolerance, solidarity and brotherhood, but that will all crumble into dust if we fail to discern the enemy, which, under cover of those fine words, watches our every move. Facing the international of money stands our international [of prisoners]. In the camps I too was a slave. I am not so sure that I am not one still. Facing the international of money is the international of men, myself among them, which unites millions of human beings in chains.21

  In his first book, Les Prisonniers de guerre devant la politique (Prisoners of War Confronting Politics), published in November 1945, he returned to this theme: Social justice, he wrote, was threatened by ‘financial oligarchies’ and to impose it in France would require ‘revolutionary will’. Each former PoW would have to choose his own path, but for himself, he had already chosen: ‘[We are] enemies of a social structure where what is called “order” serves as a pretext for the exploitation of the labouring masses, [and] we . . . want a Revolution which conforms to the eternal aspirations of our people . . . [in] the revolutionary tradition . . . of freedom and justice.’

  Marx and Lenin could hardly have put it better.

  Yet Mitterrand was still very far from making up his mind where his loyalties would ultimately lie. Did that mean that his leftist rhetoric was no more than an opportunistic ploy, designed to curry favour with his PoW followers? Not entirely. Mitterrand’s loathing of the power of money and his beli
ef in social justice were constants throughout his long career. But the language in which he chose to express them would vary dramatically, depending on his audience and the circumstances of the time.

  In July 1945, he had written to Georges Dayan: ‘Politically, I’m really hesitating . . . I’d be quite willing to join the Socialists, but they are such old clots. The Communists are a pain and the others are all varlets and knaves.’

  Six months later, he had got no further. ‘To join the Socialist Party would be a bore. Internal ructions; old and deficient cadres; anarchy in the [provincial] federations. If I went, I’d quickly be eaten and lost, and I’ve no intention of going into a party the way one enters into religion.’ Not ‘entering into religion’ was one of François Mitterrand’s favourite phrases at that time. In the winter of 1945, he was not about to commit himself blindly to anything. Neither to the Socialists nor to the Right.22

  With the Right, Mitterrand’s links were more tenuous. After the war ended, he had again been exposed to the influence of his family and right-wing friends. Notwithstanding his confrontation with de Gaulle over the prisoners’ demonstration in the summer of 1945 – the General, he said later, appreciated ‘those who stood up to him’ – he continued to admire him, comparing his ‘words of greatness’ with the mediocrity of France’s pre-war leaders and dismissing as improbable the fears then being expressed on the Left that de Gaulle would seize power and become a dictator. But the one moderate right-wing party which might have attracted him, the Christian Democrats, he found as antipathetic as the Socialists. ‘Joining the Christian Democrats would be a bore too,’ he told Dayan. ‘Their clientele is for the most part conservative, their leaders are rather nonentities, and their Catholic allegiance is embarrassing even to a Catholic like me.’

  The one thing he was certain of was his repudiation of communism. The battles he had fought with the Communists for control of the prisoners’ movement had left him respecting them as individuals but utterly repelled by their methods. ‘They are impossible,’ he told Dayan, ‘Their obedience is so rigid that they have no latitude for friendship or human [contact]. What does one do? Let them take you over, or fight them? I prefer the second.’ But even that was complicated. They had treated the prisoners’ movement as ‘a colony to be taken over and exploited’. But to reject them would have been ‘harmful, to the extent that we would have lost useful men . . . who represented a particularly living part of the Nation.’23

  Between the lines, here was a question which would be central to Mitterrand’s political strategy for the next forty years: how could the Communists be integrated into a larger left-wing grouping, which could not function effectively without them but which they would seek to dominate or, if that failed, to disrupt?

  On January 20 1946, de Gaulle announced his resignation, disgusted by the constant carping that parliamentary life entailed and increasingly at odds with the National Assembly over the shape of the future constitution. He was replaced by Félix Gouin, a Socialist who had been among the few pre-war MPs to have voted against Pétain.

  ‘When de Gaulle withdrew,’ Mitterrand wrote later, ‘I felt that part of France’s greatness had gone too.’ The General had been confident that the country would quickly call for his return. But the call did not come. Four months afterwards, the constitutional proposals were submitted to another referendum and narrowly rejected. Fresh elections were scheduled for June.

  Mitterrand reviewed his options yet again. He could not bring himself either to join the Socialists (‘sclerotic’) or the pre-war Radical Party (‘from another age’). There was a middle-of-the-road alternative, the UDSR, or Democratic Socialist Union of the Resistance, which Frenay and a group of colleagues had founded in June 1945.24 But it was a dog’s breakfast of a party, whose membership, as one writer put it, ranged ‘from the left of the Right to the right of the Left’. With some reluctance Mitterrand concluded that, notwithstanding his left-wing preferences, the easiest and probably the only way to win a parliamentary seat was to seek the support of the Right.

  With the help of Patrice Pelat, who had married the daughter of a wealthy Gaullist and was making a career in business, he obtained the backing of a group of right-wing parties in Neuilly,25 the affluent Parisian suburb which Danielle had detested almost as much as Auteuil. The group was led nationally by the former Prime Minister, Édouard Daladier, whom Mitterrand loathed. But if that was the price he had to pay in order to get elected, that was what he would do.

  In the event, the Right served him little better than the Left. His list came fifth, which meant he did not obtain a seat, although he won enough votes to give his main right-wing rival, Edmond Barrachin, a serious fright. Afterwards he wrote to Dayan that his loss was ‘only to have been expected’ and he would try again in the autumn, when a further constitutional referendum would trigger yet another round of elections, the third in just over a year.26

  Mitterrand calculated that he had acquired sufficient nuisance value to make it worthwhile for Barrachin to find him a place elsewhere – and that proved to be correct. When they met to discuss their respective positions, the older man suggested that he campaign in the Nièvre, an isolated, rural department in the Massif Central, 150 miles south-east of Paris. Mitterrand objected that he knew no one in that part of France. Barrachin smiled and told him that that was an advantage in politics: at least he had no enemies there. The strong point of the Nièvre, he explained, was that there was a Communist candidate who could be beaten and no obvious right-wing challenger since the Christian Democrats were tarnished by their association with the Communists in the tripartite government. He would therefore be well placed to win the support of anti-communists across the board.

  The Radical Party leader, Henri Queuille, who had concluded an electoral pact with Barrachin’s party, gave him similar advice.27

  Much of rural France in the 1930s and ’40s still lived under the shadow of the ancien régime. The great lords might no longer control the lives of the peasantry as they had before 1789. But when election time came round, they were still able to get out the vote.

  Barrachin contacted the marquis de Roualle, a wealthy devotee of stag-hunting and a staunch opponent of the Left, who agreed to finance Mitterrand’s campaign. Jacques de Montjoye, who, with Mitterrand and Antoine Mauduit at Montmaur, had been the third of the ‘three Ms’ who had founded the prisoners’ movement, also promised to help through a friend, the marquis Denys de Champeaux, a leading figure in the maquis in the Nièvre and a relative of the duc de la Palisse, one of the peers of France.

  Having been parachuted in at the last moment – over the objections of the préfet (the government commissioner), who tried to have his candidature annulled – Mitterrand started campaigning two weeks before Election Day. Danielle, then seven and a half months pregnant with Jean-Christophe, remembered driving from village to village on country roads which went nowhere, getting so lost that one night they had to sleep in the car. ‘It wasn’t the Morvan [the eastern part of the Nièvre] like it is today,’ she recalled. ‘After seven o’clock at night in the villages all the shutters were closed as though there were brigands in the forest.’ The area was deeply conservative and steeped in tradition. Mitterrand had just turned 30. Danielle was 22 and looked younger, with a fringe and a floppy beret which gave her the appearance of an urchin. At one campaign stop, the local mayor took one look at her and told him: ‘You’ll never be elected here with a wife like that!’

  But the image of two innocents abroad was undercut by the rhetoric of the campaign.

  Mitterrand was backed by a coalition of five centrist and right-wing parties,28 on whose behalf he pledged to struggle against ‘bolshevisation’. He declared his opposition to ‘rules and regulations’ for farming and commerce, to bureaucracy, to the corporate State, to ‘muddle and failure’, and to nationalisation – one of the battle cries of the tripartite government, which had taken into state ownership the major banks and insurance companies, as well as air tran
sport, electricity, gas, mines, and the automobile manufacturer, Renault, seized for collaborating during the war. In his campaign statement, he urged that private property be respected (which pleased the landlords), and that educational freedoms and religious harmony be guaranteed (which delighted the clergy), and he called on the people of the Nièvre ‘to stand firm before the communist danger which the weakness of the Socialists and the disclaimers of the Christian Democrats have put comfortably in power. [The] three ruling parties, even if they fight among themselves for the brief space of an election campaign, have always been in agreement to install a political and economic directorate which is the forerunner of dictatorship.’

  In the context of the time, this was by no means extreme.

  The three partners in the tripartite government – the Christian Democrats, the Communists and the Socialists – had concluded an unnatural marriage of convenience whose sole purpose was to enable them to hold power. It was not necessary to be right-wing to view that as abhorrent. Nonetheless, Mitterrand’s opposition to nationalisation, his defence of private property and church schools, and his focus on the ‘communist danger’, made him a candidate the Right was happy to support. On November 10 1946, he was elected MP for the Nièvre by a wide margin.29 As he later acknowledged, it was the fruit of ‘a cocktail of votes ranging from diehard anti-Gaullists to Gaullists who were barking mad and dreaming already of a coup d’état’.

  What had happened to the man who had assured Georges Dayan a year earlier, ‘My ideal is the unity of the workers and [I] shall remain faithful to their taking power’? Compromise is the essence of politics. He was now a politician.