Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  But support for the strike was waning, and a week after the parliamentary debate, the CGT abruptly announced that it would end. Four months later, amid recriminations about excessive politicisation, the confederation split, losing part of its membership to a newly formed socialist-led union federation, Force Ouvrière (‘Working Force’).

  That year marked the high point of Communist influence in France. Never again would the Party be able to imperil the fabric of the State. But the conflict had left the country bankrupt. Truman advanced $280 million in emergency aid, on condition that the Communists were kept out of government, and, in April 1948, the Marshall Plan, which provided American finance for the reconstruction of Europe, began to take effect. Another wave of strikes started that autumn, again in the mining regions. Forty-five thousand troops were brought back from Germany and given orders to fire on the strikers if attacked. After a month of violent clashes, the movement faltered.

  Twice the CGT had called the miners on to the streets and twice the government had stood firm. They would not come out again.

  The international situation had changed too. The Soviet Union, a wartime ally, was now increasingly perceived as a threat. Anti-communism became the glue that held the ‘Third Force’ together. Communist Party membership, which had reached a million at the war’s end, fell by four-fifths. The surge of enthusiasm which had followed Liberation, as people hoped for political renewal, was over. Other parties also saw their membership decline: the Socialists lost half their activists, the Christian Democrats, three-quarters. Even the Gaullist RPF, which had won 40 per cent of the vote in municipal elections in 1947, was beginning to run out of steam. The fervour was gone. After ten years of war, Occupation and political turmoil, France was returning to normal.

  Robert Schuman was the antithesis of Ramadier. An unflappable, slim, slightly stooped northerner, who ‘seemed to have been born old’, as one of his friends put it, he had grown up on the border of Luxembourg in an area which repeatedly changed hands between France and Germany. He would later become one of the founders of the European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner of the European Union. In September 1948, after just six weeks out of power, he was asked to form a new government and proposed François Mitterrand, then aged 31, for the post of Interior Minister, one of the two or three most important jobs in the Cabinet. For so young a man, it would have been a highly unusual promotion. That Schuman, a good judge of character, should have considered him was a notable tribute to his competence. Vincent Auriol wrote in his diary:

  I told [Schuman] he was an excellent choice. He is serious and intelligent . . . Mitterrand accepted, but when the UDSR learnt of it, they refused. [That is] the tyranny of the parties ! . . . They fear social unrest, so they want to leave the post to the Socialists . . . Mitterrand . . . was keen to take it, but they threatened to exclude him [from the parliamentary group].9

  In the event, Schuman’s government lasted only three days, so it was no great loss. His successor, the Radical leader, Henri Queuille, thought of Mitterrand as a possible Finance Minister. Léon Blum had pointed out that Raymond Poincaré, who became Finance Minister in 1894 at the age of 33 and went on to become French President and five times Prime Minister, ‘was scarcely older than [Mitterrand] is now’, a comparison which any French politician would find flattering. Fortunately for Mitterrand, Queuille decided to keep the post for himself. France’s finances were in a ruinous state, and if there was one area of government for which the young minister showed no aptitude, it was economics.

  Under Queuille, an affable, courteous man, with the air of a country doctor, who employed his considerable political acumen to conciliate rather than constrain, Mitterrand served for a year as Secretary of State for Information.10

  Television was in its infancy. When regular broadcasts started in 1949, only one household in a thousand, mainly in Paris, owned a TV set. But radio, which had been nationalised at the end of the war, and newspapers, which were privately owned, had enormous influence. Both were under constant pressure to toe the government line. Freedom of the press was a fine concept, espoused by all political parties, but, as Mitterrand soon discovered, whenever the government was criticised, it did not take long for the interphone from the Prime Minister’s office at Matignon to ring with an irate demand that he do a better job of keeping his troops in order. Each morning, Georges Dayan, whom he had called back from a profitable law career in Algeria to become his Chef de Cabinet, met the Head of Radio News to issue guidelines for the day’s coverage.

  He soon realised that it was impossible to keep everyone happy.

  When the Communists accused him in parliament of exercising an ‘absolutely abominable’ tyranny over the media, Mitterrand replied: ‘I do indeed try as much as I can to prevent the Communist Party’s propaganda being broadcast. I admit that it is not always easy, but I try.’ The Christian Democrats then insisted that, as minister responsible for film censorship, he order cuts in sequences deemed offensive to Catholics in Pierre Chenal’s new comedy, Clochemerle, which recounted the burlesque conflict between a mayor and the local gentry over the installation of a urinal opposite the village church. On a less contentious note, in 1949 he revived the Cannes Film Festival, where The Third Man, with Orson Welles, received that year’s Palme d’Or.

  The French media have a more consciously symbiotic relationship with government than is acceptable in Anglo-Saxon countries, and Mitterrand was not above a little bribery to keep his erstwhile colleagues in line. Marcel Haedrich, his predecessor at Libres, who now edited Samedi Soir, remembered being summoned to his office to be asked whether there was anything the Minister could do for him. When he demurred, Mitterrand wondered whether a new car might help. ‘Citroën had just started up again, and [he] gave me a voucher for a new model. It was superb, metallic grey, at the price fixed by the government, half what I had paid for my old clunker which I was able to sell at a profit. Such were the benefits of penury and politics.’

  The Minister also used his influence in more personal ways. Jean d’Arcy, his Chief of Staff at the Secretariat, went on to a senior post at French television. A year later, he contacted d’Arcy to arrange an audition for a young woman who he thought might make a good television presenter, a certain Marie-Louise Terrasse. She went on to build a career as one of the country’s best-loved television personalities.

  Mitterrand enjoyed ministerial office. There was a formality about it which resonated with the rituals of his childhood. The nonconformist, who refused discipline, needed the reassurance of rules. He dressed invariably in a white shirt, black tie and navy blue suit. When a photographer, commissioned to prepare a feature article, asked him to wear something more casual, the ministerial wardrobe was found to contain only a row of dark blue suits.

  At the Secretariat, he was as punctilious about protocol as he had been at the War Veterans Ministry. When a wealthy landowner with newspaper interests in the Nièvre came to seek government backing and was rash enough to suggest that it might help the Minister’s career if he signed the relevant papers quickly, he was immediately shown the door. Years later, the episode still grated. ‘I was exasperated to the highest degree,’ Mitterrand fumed. ‘Seriously! How could anyone permit themselves to use that kind of language to a representative of the State?’11

  He appreciated Ramadier, who had given him fatherly advice during his first months as a minister; Queuille, ‘straightforward and subtle, though not cut out for difficult times’; and Schuman, meditative and solitary, with whom he used to exchange flippant notes during Cabinet meetings. He approved of Vincent Auriol, who after his inauguration had told the Cabinet that he expected them to wear formal dress, to speak only when invited to do so and to address each other in a dignified manner. Thirty-four years later, as President himself, he laid down the same rules at his own first Cabinet meeting.12

  In the summer of 1950, François Mitterrand moved a step higher in the government hierarchy. Queuille’s government had fallen the pr
evious October after a dispute with the Socialists over wage restraint. Eight months later, after his successor, Georges Bidault, had been voted out of office over the same issue, Auriol had invited René Pleven, the President of the UDSR, to form a government. Pleven, a Breton, born with the century, was a discreet conciliator and a noted Anglophile whose diplomatic skills had made him de Gaulle’s closest collaborator in London. He appointed Mitterrand Minister of Overseas Territories with responsibility for the French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa.fn2

  Mitterrand wrote later that the post was ‘the major experience of my political life, which determined the way I would evolve’. In Africa he had found a cause that was not merely interesting but inspiring.

  His experience of the continent had begun as a child, when he and his brother, Robert, had brought home African school-friends from college in Angoulême. As a student he had demonstrated in support of Italy’s right to colonise Ethiopia, but he had also written that a man’s worth did not depend on the colour of his skin. In 1940 the German invasion had given him occasion to reflect on that further. Many of the troops in the colonial infantry regiments which bore the brunt of the German assault were from French West Africa. When Mitterrand awoke in hospital at Bruyères after being operated on for shrapnel wounds, the soldier in the bed next to him was Senegalese. Altogether 17,000 African soldiers died fighting for France during the war. Yet when Paris was liberated, in August 1944, Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division was laundered all-White. The Americans, whose troops were still segregated, had insisted, with the acquiescence of the British, that Black soldiers be replaced by White men, with the result that more than a quarter of Leclerc’s ‘French’ were actually Spanish, Syrian or North African.

  The Second World War was a catalyst for nationalism everywhere, loosening colonial bonds. But whereas the British recognised that independence, already granted to the White dominions, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, would inevitably follow elsewhere, the French remained locked into the policies laid down by the Brazzaville Conference, called by de Gaulle in 1944, which explicitly excluded ‘any idea of autonomy, all possibility of evolution outside the French bloc of the Empire, [or] the eventual constitution, even in the future, of self-government in the colonies’. To France, the Empire was crucial both to national pride and to its status as a major post-war power. By the time Mitterrand became Minister of Overseas Territories, the country was bogged down in a full-scale war in Indochina and had suppressed with great brutality uprisings in Algeria in 1945, which left 20,000 dead, and in Madagascar in 1947, where more than 80,000 – 2 per cent of the population – had died. Britain, by contrast, had already granted independence to Burma, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India and Pakistan; and the Gold Coast (Ghana) was advancing along the same road.

  Mitterrand had visited French North Africa for a holiday with the Dayans in 1947. He had been dazzled by the beauty of the landscapes and the archaeological sites and shocked by the poverty. He never forgot the chief of an Algerian village telling him, ‘You can’t meet all the children because we don’t have enough clothes for all of them.’ Two years later, in the winter of 1949, he made a long tour through West Africa, visiting Bénin, Mali, Niger and Senegal as well as Liberia and Ghana.13 He was overwhelmed by the timelessness, the immensity, the immutability of Africa. ‘Africa sleeps and is motionless,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Her limbs are spread out over so many latitudes that she feels neither voyages, nor passages, nor messages. She knows nothing of foreigners, researchers or wanderers. She does not stir.’

  In a book published three years later, he laid out the vision that his journey had conjured up:

  If the African world limits itself to its geographical frontiers, it will have no centre of gravity . . . Bound to France in a political, economic and spiritual entity, it will clear four centuries in a single leap and fulfil its modern role . . . From the Congo to the Rhine, the third continent will be in balance around France as its centre . . . If we consider that colossal bloc spreading out from Lille to Brazzaville and from [Chad] to [Senegal], 7000 kilometres long and 3000 kilometres wide, cut only by the western part of the Mediterranean, [our] first duty should be to defend this one indisputable historical reality: Eurafrican France, which currently contains or controls 85 million people . . . For the French, who wring their hands, suffocating within the narrow borders of their old country, what an exalting prospect! On them may depend the future of a continent.14

  ‘Eurafrican France’ was an alluring mirage, which would persist until the late 1950s, derived from the principles of the Union Française (French Union), an association of all French territories, created after the Second World War, which held that men were equal – French Africans would some day evolve into African Frenchmen – but countries were not.

  The French Union was the French Empire in new clothes, with Paris at its centre. The correct policy was to ‘reform and preserve’ the system as it was, in order to maintain a huge swathe of pink on the map from which France would draw prestige and power. But French Africa was not an island: political tensions were rising there as everywhere else on the continent. In the Ivory Coast in the winter of 1949, when the Governor ordered the disbandment of indigenous agricultural cooperatives rioting broke out.

  The principal nationalist leader in the colony, Félix Houphouet-Boigny, then in his forties, owned one of the country’s biggest coffee plantations. The son of a traditional chief, he had qualified as a doctor and afterwards founded a political party, the African Democratic Rally or RDA. By 1950, it had half a dozen MPs in the National Assembly in Paris, including Houphouet himself. They had affiliated to the Communist parliamentary group because the Communists were at that time the only French party to oppose colonialism. When the Cold War set in, this connection became an embarrassment. To the French settlers and their right-wing allies, Houphouet was a Black Stalinist. Mitterrand’s predecessor, a Christian Democrat with pronounced right-wing views, issued a warrant for his arrest and ordered the party banned.

  After taking office in July, Pleven arranged for Houphouet to come out of hiding and make a discreet visit to Paris. There a deal was struck: if the RDA disaffiliated from the Communists and promised not to campaign for independence, the ban on the party would be lifted and the government would listen sympathetically to the Africans’ grievances.

  At that point, Mitterrand was called in to flesh out the details. ‘Don’t wait,’ Pleven is supposed to have told an aide. ‘Call him at once. He takes umbrage like a prima donna.’

  It turned out that the RDA’s demands were modest. Houphouet wanted Africans to be permitted to stand for election to the all-White local councils; the introduction of a Labour Code to regulate wages and working hours; and the standardisation of commodity prices. African growers, Houphouet explained, were paid only a fraction of the price obtained by White farmers for the same weight and quality of crop. Mitterrand promised the government’s support for these and other reforms, including an end to petty apartheid in hotels and restaurants.

  In October 1950, Houphouet kept his side of the bargain. The RDA formally disaffiliated from the Communist parliamentary group.

  Four months later, Mitterrand travelled to Abidjan to inaugurate a new port complex. At a reception at the Cercle Français, to which, on his insistence, the RDA members of parliament had been invited, a group of prominent settlers, with the Governor beside them, began venting their discontent. ‘You are handing Africa to the Blacks and, what is worse, Black communists,’ they told him. ‘Your policy is anti-French. You are sacrificing us.’

  Mitterrand cut them off. ‘I advise you that from now on, if you continue to make such statements, I will issue orders for you to be prosecuted.’ The following day, he overheard a senior French official telling one of the African MPs, Gabriel Lisette, later Prime Minister of Chad, ‘As soon as that minister of yours is out of here, you’ll get a good kick up the arse.’

  Both the Governor and the functionary in question were on the next pla
ne back to Paris.

  The settlers’ protests continued. A telegram was sent to President Auriol, accusing Mitterrand of ‘delivering the Ivory Coast to international communism in the person of the Stalinist Houphouet-Boigny’. A Gaullist MP declared that Houphouet had put his country ‘to fire and the sword’.

  Auriol summoned Mitterrand and told him, ‘I know you are in the right, but we have to take all these protests into account.’

  René Pleven had been shrewd. It had been he who had decided the new policy. But no one held him responsible. Mitterrand took all the heat. Later, when Pleven’s strategy had been vindicated and the Ivory Coast under Houphouet was held up as a model of enlightened policy, Mitterrand turned that to his advantage, insisting that it had been his initiative from the start. He was stretching the truth. Pleven had received Houphouet first and agreed the basis for the accord. But the Prime Minister could hardly complain if, having deflected the blame, he also missed the credit. The initiative marked a turning point in France’s relations with sub-Saharan Africa. Even if Mitterrand had not originated it, he had brought it to fulfilment. For the first time he discovered that politics was not just a matter of managing the demands of interest groups. It was possible, in a small way, to change history.

  By the time Pleven became Prime Minister, the UDSR had come to be known as the ‘hinge party’ of parliament, a small group of MPs, rarely numbering more than twenty in an assembly of over 600, who straddled the middle ground and helped to hold governing coalitions together. With two exceptions, of four weeks in 1946 and six months in 1958, every government in the Fourth Republic included at least one UDSR minister.