Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  5

  The Staircase of Power

  THE NEW FOURTH Republic, whose constitution had been approved in a referendum in October 1946, a month before Mitterrand’s election, had a bicameral parliament, a President who was largely, but not entirely, a figurehead, and a Prime Minister whose powers, or so it was hoped, would counterbalance those of parliament, ensuring governments which would last. Mitterrand had voted against it, arguing that it was a prescription for all the same weaknesses that had made the Third Republic unworkable.

  Until then, the system of tripartite government had survived because the three main parties – the Christian Democrats, the Communists and the Socialists – all wanted a say in the drafting. Once the constitution was in place, that was no longer the case. The legacy of the war and their shared opposition to German reconstruction, which had helped to bring them together, also became less important. Instead a new conflict emerged: the Cold War, which intensified the antagonism between the Communists and their partners at a time when the French were losing patience with the government’s inability to stamp out the black market, hold down prices and provide a decent standard of living. Within a few months, the Communists would be forced out of government, opening the way to a new configuration, which would determine the shape of Fourth Republic politics for the next five years. ‘Third Force’ governments, as subsequent administrations would be called, drew support from all the parties occupying the middle ground of French politics while the two extremes, the Communists on the Left and the Gaullists on the Right, were both excluded from power.

  The outcome might have been different had de Gaulle been more willing to compromise. Many, including Mitterrand, had hoped for a strong, authoritarian State with a single national party. But the General ruled that out. It carried too many echoes of fascism and, in any case, as he spelt out in a landmark speech in Bayeux in June 1946, he wished to remain ‘above parties’, heading a presidential system in which he would represent the whole nation. Others had urged a Westminster-style democracy. But the pre-war parties, which had regained legitimacy since the General had brought them into the National Resistance Council in 1943, were steadfastly opposed and he himself did not support it. For de Gaulle it was a presidential system or nothing. By the time he realised that he would have to be more flexible, creating the RPF (‘Rally of the French People’) early in 1947 to provide political support, it was too late. The window of opportunity had closed and would not reopen for another eleven years.

  That left a remodelled version of the Third Republic as the only choice. No one was enthusiastic and when, eventually, after nearly two years of discussion, the constitution was passed, a record number chose not to participate. Barely a third of the electorate voted in favour.

  On December 16, the new National Assembly met for the first time to vote on the investiture of the veteran Socialist, Léon Blum, as head of an interim government pending the election of a Head of State.1 Mitterrand, like all freshman MPs, was appointed to a parliamentary commission, or in his case, to two, Communications and Press.2 He registered as an independent but affiliated to the UDSR parliamentary group, that being the party which seemed best to represent his somewhat fluctuating political allegiance.

  The nomination of a leading figure from the Third Republic as interim Premier augured ill for the choices that would follow. A month later, the two houses of parliament, meeting in joint session at Versailles, chose Vincent Auriol, also a Socialist and a Third Republic luminary, as President. The heads of the National Assembly and the Senate were likewise prominent Third Republic figures. When Auriol designated the new Prime Minister, his choice fell on yet another Third Republic stalwart, Paul Ramadier, who had been a member of Blum’s Popular Front government in 1936.

  It may be argued that there was no other option. The former leaders of the Third Republic were all that was available. But the effect was to restore the tawdry, time-worn practices which had been the undoing of the French State a decade earlier. France was back in the bad old days of which Neville Chamberlain had written before the war: ‘As a friend she has two faults which destroy half her value: she can never keep a secret for more than half an hour or a government for more than nine months.’3

  Ramadier, a large, expansive figure with a warm southern accent, a goatee beard and a reputation for good living, delivered the coup de grâce. Convinced that, in a parliamentary democracy, parliament should be supreme, he sought parliamentary approval of his government not once but twice: firstly of himself as Prime Minister and then of the members of his Cabinet. It set a fatal precedent, which all subsequent prime ministers felt obliged to follow. This double investiture, which was not required by the constitution, meant that the choice of ministers was determined not by the head of government but by horse-trading among the party leaders. Accordingly the twenty-seven ministers Ramadier appointed were drawn from six different parties, their numbers calibrated to reflect their parliamentary strengths: the Socialists had ten portfolios; the Christian Democrats and the Communists five each; the Radicals three; the UDSR and a small party representing the traditional right wing, two each.

  Eugène Claudius-Petit, the President of the UDSR parliamentary group, had been offered the post of Minister for War Veterans but had refused, saying he ‘did not want to spend his time inaugurating war memorials’. Instead he proposed François Mitterrand.

  At first sight it was a surprising gesture. Claudius-Petit had met Mitterrand in 1943 when Frenay was trying vainly to make peace between him and de Gaulle’s nephew, Michel Cailliau. The encounter had not gone well. Claudius, as he was known in the Resistance, had started as a cabinet-maker’s apprentice at the age of sixteen, becoming a trade union organiser and later an art teacher. As a leader of Franc-Tireur, and later a founding member of the National Resistance Council, he regarded Vichy as little better than the Nazis. Mitterrand – always ready to see both sides of a question – had tried to persuade him that not everything in Pétain’s ‘National Revolution’ was bad. With experience he would learn that it was sometimes better to keep such ideas to himself.

  Nonetheless, Claudius-Petit recognised the younger man’s strengths, and he was a sufficiently astute politician to understand that if Mitterrand were a success as minister, he would bring to the UDSR the support of the prisoners’ movement which he used to lead. ‘He’s a young man who has shaken things up a lot among the PoWs,’ he told Ramadier. ‘If you want peace and quiet, take him.’4

  Mitterrand was ‘radiant with joy’ at his good fortune, a colleague remembered. Not only was he a minister after barely six weeks in parliament,5 but at the age of 30 he was the youngest member of the Cabinet since the French Revolution, 150 years earlier.6

  His new career got off to a bumpy start. The Ministry of War Veterans and Victims of War, which had been set up after de Gaulle’s resignation, had been headed for almost a year by a member of the Communist Party Central Committee named Laurent Casanova, who had transformed it into a communist stronghold. Not content with dismissing several hundred career civil servants for alleged incompetence and recruiting communist militants to replace them, he had requisitioned more than 300 lorries, formerly used to repatriate PoWs from Germany, to transport the party faithful to Communist Party rallies. When Léon Blum became Prime Minister, Casanova was replaced by a Socialist, who tried to undo the damage, returning the lorries to the Defence Ministry and, on the pretext of an austerity programme, issuing dismissal notices to more than a hundred of the new communist recruits. The response had been a ministry-wide strike.

  When Mitterrand arrived to take possession, he found the gates blocked by a picket line, leading one newspaper to surmise that he would begin his ministerial duties in the neighbourhood bistro. After all-night negotiations, the strikers agreed to let him enter in return for a pledge to suspend the dismissals pending a decision by a mediation committee. Once inside, he announced that all the department heads, who had joined the strike in violation of civil service rules, woul
d be replaced by officials of the prisoners’ movement, the FNPG.

  The strike leader, a communist trade unionist named Zimmermann, was a strong character. ‘He exerted such authority,’ one of Mitterrand’s aides remembered, ‘that when he entered a room full of civil servants, everyone stood up as though he were the Minister.’ Zimmermann demanded talks.

  Mitterrand’s brother, Robert, whom he had appointed his Chief of Staff,fn1 described what followed. After the communist delegation, more than a dozen strong, with Zimmermann at its head, had filed into the Minister’s office, Mitterrand invited them to state their case. ‘We have temporarily called off the strike,’ Zimmermann began, ‘but we won’t allow the Ministry to use that to terminate the benefits we have obtained. As for the dismissals, we demand . . .’

  At that point, Robert reported, the Minister interrupted: ‘Mr Zimmermann, as you know this is the first time I have been a minister, and perhaps I have too high an idea of what the function entails, but it is not at all in these terms that I conceive a dialogue between a minister and his staff. If you wish to finish your statement, I would ask you to change your language.’

  Nothing daunted, his interlocutor ploughed on. ‘I will indeed finish,’ he said, ‘but I want to make clear that we find your decisions unacceptable and we demand . . .’ Mitterrand stood up and said, in the tone which officials employ when they have just concluded a satisfactory agreement: ‘Very good, I see that you persist in your vocabulary. I consider our meeting to be over. I will not receive you again. If you have any further problems . . . you will deal with my Chief of Staff.’ Whereupon he turned and left.

  In the end the two sides reached a discreet understanding. There was no more talk of strikes and, in return, some of the department heads who had been suspended were allowed to stay on. But over the next nine months, Mitterrand removed, one by one, the most intransigent among them.

  The anecdote is revealing not so much for the issues at stake, although one may wonder how many other 30-year-olds, finding themselves suddenly members of a government, would have been able to finesse such an unpromising situation, but rather for the light that it casts on Mitterrand’s approach. First he found a device – a mediation committee – to defuse the primary conflict. Next he seized the initiative by threatening the strike leaders with dismissal on the unassailable ground that they had violated government regulations. Finally, having moved the battle on to his own turf, he used the power of his office to outface his opponents.

  To Mitterrand, the reality of power was indissociable from its appearance. A minister who did not make himself respected could not influence those around him. ‘He exercised his responsibilities with authority, never deviating from the rigour which the duties of State imposed,’ Robert wrote later. ‘In consequence, many people found him cold and difficult to approach.’ It was not the first time others had remarked on his coldness. His comrades at Ziegenhain and his colleagues in the prisoners’ movement had often made the same observation. Robert thought it was ‘his way of protecting himself against the various interests which sought to influence his position’. In fact, it was his character. Mitterrand kept his distance. Robert’s successor, Pierre Nicolay, who worked with him for decades, found him ‘cold and correct, unsociable’. His friend, Charles Moulin, wrote of him at this time:

  He was very thin, lively and impassioned, bursting with energy, sometimes peremptory, sometimes impulsive, and skilful at charming others with words or the twinkle in his eye, authoritarian or affectionate. In general people like him, though some find him a bit distant, abrupt and disdainful . . . Too sure of himself, an ambitious rising star. The man is multiple and varied. He readily puckers his eyes but doesn’t succeed in hiding the sparkle of his inquisitive, restless gaze. He knows how to put on . . . the cold mask of a politician using language that is often dry and caustic. No doubt that is his reality, but it is also the façade of a man who has not yet lost the timidity of adolescence, a man who wants to make others forget that he is still very young . . . He knows what he wants and what he is worth . . . He weighs things up, reflects, fixes his line of conduct, and then against everyone and everything, follows it through to the end.7

  It was an attitude which won respect and which he respected in others. When the Cabinet met the following Wednesday, the veteran Communist Party leader, Maurice Thorez, then deputy Prime Minister, whom he had kept informed of his discussions with the strikers, came up to him and said: ‘I understand, there are things you have to do when you’re a minister. You did well!’8

  The basis of Mitterrand’s political strength as Minister for War Veterans was, as Claudius-Petit had anticipated, his influence in the prisoners’ movement. The main problems for the returned PoWs in 1947 were economic. Threatened by hyperinflation like that in Germany after the First War, the government had imposed a price and wage freeze. Industrial production was still barely 40 per cent of the pre-war level. Farmers had reverted to subsistence agriculture. One in five of the working population was making a living through the black market. A report to President Truman that spring warned bluntly that without help, Britain and France would be bankrupt by the end of the year. ‘Europe is steadily deteriorating . . . Millions of people in the cities are slowly starving . . . The modern system of division of labour has almost broken down . . . [The present situation] represents the absolute minimum . . . If it should be lowered, there will be revolution.’

  In this climate, finding money for former PoWs, tarred with the stigma of a defeat which their fellow citizens were trying hard to forget, required considerable ingenuity. Mitterrand was able to get increased pensions for war widows and orphans by threatening in parliament to block subsidies to other groups whose electoral weight was more important. But not all his efforts were as successful. Under the Geneva Conventions, the Germans had been required to pay officers and those who had worked in the kommandos. However on their return to France, they had had to surrender this money, which was in German marks. Pressed by Mitterrand to disburse the sums owed, the Finance Ministry argued that, since the currency had become worthless, no payment was due. When he protested, the Ministry replied that it was the same situation as for tourists who went on holiday abroad and brought back worthless banknotes: they had to take the loss themselves – an analogy which did not go down well with men who had just spent five years in prison camps because they had fought to defend their country.

  The other key demand was for a pension like that provided to veterans of the First War. In January 1948, after months of argument, Mitterrand was able to authorise the issuing to former PoWs of a war veterans card, conferring pension rights. The decision was hailed by the FNPG as a triumph. But it would take another two years and a violent demonstration by more than 100,000 prisoners, who invaded the Champs-Elysées, skirmishing with the police, before the measure was finally implemented.

  The political landscape changed dramatically during the year and a half that Mitterrand was in office. The departure of the Communists, whom Ramadier dismissed in May 1947 after they voted against the government’s policy in Indochina, set the stage for a massive house-cleaning. It was discovered that the Minister for Reconstruction, Charles Tillon, one of the founders of the communist resistance movement, Franc-Tireurs et Partisans, had put more than 1,500 communist militants on his ministry’s payroll, including, according to a government audit, ‘three cooks, seven head cooks, a kitchen manager, two laboratory assistants, a building worker, the headmistress of a girls’ school, the head of a sponsorship organisation, a museum director, three maîtres d’hôtel, four film projectionists, a darkroom assistant, telephone operators, accountants, unskilled workers, night watchmen . . . 150 chauffeurs and a number of contract workers serving as “bodyguards” for the minister.’ Other Communist ministers had done the same. The interlopers were fired and measures taken to curb the influence of ‘legitimate’ communist officials.

  No longer constrained by the presence of Communist ministers in the government, the CG
T, the Party-controlled trades’ union confederation, vowed to bring the regime to its knees. It marked the beginning of a long autumn of discontent. In October 1947, Paris was without public transport. The mines went on strike, then the steelworks, then the railways. There was widespread rioting. At one point three million workers were on the streets. Food shortages appeared: Paris received less than a tenth of its normal supply of flour and a quarter of its milk. Trains were derailed and arms caches found, raising fears of an insurrection.

  The confidential memorandum submitted to President Truman six months earlier, that France was in danger of tipping over into revolution, no longer seemed far-fetched. Troops were posted to guard parliament, and the government sought emergency powers to call up 80,000 reservists.

  Mitterrand supported the Christian Democrat Prime Minister, Robert Schuman, who by now had replaced Ramadier, in taking a tough line. He had kept his post as War Veterans Minister in the new administration and argued forcefully before the Cabinet that the government must stand firm. The Communists were exploiting the workers’ misery, he said, and ‘it was a matter of not letting them get away with it.’ For several weeks, the country teetered on the brink. Earlier that year, the US Under-Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, had warned the White House: ‘With communists infiltrating the administration, the factories and the army, and its economic problems getting constantly worse, France is ripe to fall into Moscow’s lap.’ Wild rumours circulated that the Russians would parachute in arms, as the Allies had to the Resistance during the war.

  Through four days and nights, from November 29 to December 3, 1947, the National Assembly sat continuously in a session whose verbal violence has not been equalled before or since. The Communists accused the government and its supporters, most of whom had fought in the Resistance, of being, among other things, ‘dogs, bastards, Hitlerites, bloodsuckers, followers of Goebbels, fascists and murderers’. Infuriated by the attacks on Schuman, Mitterrand accused the principal Communist orator, Jacques Duclos, of igniting a new Reichstag fire, to which a Communist MP retorted that the government to which he belonged was composed of ‘crooks and counterfeiters’.