Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  Over time, however, its political complexion changed. In January 1947, when Mitterrand had become a member, Pleven, who admired the Westminster system, hoped to make it a French version of the British Liberal Party. But soon three factions formed: ‘dedicated Gaullists’, who, while remaining members of the UDSR, joined the RPF when it was set up in April of that year; ‘sentimental Gaullists’, as Claudius-Petit called them, who revered the person of the General but not all his policies;15 and Mitterrand, who had entered the movement by a different route, through parliament rather than the party, and politically, though not sentimentally, was hostile to de Gaulle.

  He did not remain isolated for long. In May 1947, at the UDSR’s first congress, a fault line developed between the ‘dedicated Gaullists’, who supported the General’s call for a change to a presidential regime, and everyone else, who wanted to keep, but improve, the existing parliamentary system. At the second congress, in 1948, Mitterrand clashed with the Gaullist standard-bearer, René Capitant. ‘I am going to speak as a heretic,’ he said, ‘and I realise that doesn’t please. But . . . [even de Gaulle] can make mistakes and we have the right to say so.’ He was supported by Pleven and by Claudius-Petit, who interjected: ‘De Gaulle is not God the Father!’

  A fracture was beginning to develop.

  In November, Mitterrand for the first time compared de Gaulle to Napoleon III, who had seized power in a coup d’état in December 1851, overthrowing the Second Republic. A month later, the ‘dedicated Gaullists’ formed a separate parliamentary group. At the third congress, in May 1949, Capitant accused Mitterrand of struggling ‘against the RPF and de Gaulle himself’ and warned that he would finish up by taking over the party. Mitterrand responded that a split was becoming inevitable and would have the merit of clarity, ending a situation ‘in which we no longer know who are friends and who are enemies’. The Gaullists stormed out.

  Five months later Mitterrand was named President of the UDSR parliamentary group. In little more than two years, he had transformed his role in the party from that of an outsider to principal spokesman for the anti-RPF majority. Pleven, as party President, remained above the fray. But his efforts at conciliation had failed and his position had been weakened. From then on, Mitterrand began packing the party’s regional federations with supporters drawn from the prisoners’ movement.16 Over the next two years, thirty members of the FNPG were elected to the seventy-strong UDSR executive committee.

  Years afterwards Pleven reflected bitterly: ‘[He] had a consummate art, and a pronounced taste, for intra-party manoeuvre. He enjoyed it and spent as much time on it as was needed.’

  By then the five-year parliamentary term was drawing to a close. In June 1951, elections were held. In the Nièvre, Mitterrand was again supported by a coalition including the UDSR, the Radicals and two small right-wing parties.17 Despite his ministerial duties, he had not neglected his constituency. In 1947, he had been elected to the town council at Nevers and two years later to the Conseil Général, the provincial council of the département. Danielle grumbled that he spent all his time there. Partly to keep her quiet and partly to establish himself more firmly in the area, he rented an old cottage from the parish priest in the hamlet of Champagne, near Clamecy. It had low ceilings, stone floors and a big garden with fruit trees. The only heat was from an open log fire and in winter the place froze. But it enabled him to escape what he called ‘the phoniness of Paris, with its conventions that kill the real rhythm of life’ and in the warmer months the family joined him for weekends. The campaign was difficult because of the presence of a candidate from the Gaullist RPF, which had not existed five years earlier. He was re-elected, but with a reduced margin.

  In the ensuing negotiations to form a new government,18 the Christian Democrats warned Pleven that if Mitterrand remained a minister, they would withdraw their support.

  The pretext was a bizarre incident the previous spring in which the Governor-General of Senegal, a socialist named Paul Béchard, had sued a local newspaper for defamation. Béchard was known to be anti-clerical. A missionary journal, seeking to embarrass him, published, in violation of the law, a transcript of the court proceedings. The two priests responsible, both White Fathers, were convicted and each fined a nominal 50 francs (5 pence or 15 cents). The trial provoked an outcry which soon assumed hysterical proportions. Mitterrand, as the minister responsible, was accused in parliament of having put ‘two White Fathers on the bench where normally sit thieves, crooks and prostitutes’. One of his opponents in the Nièvre told an election meeting that he had ‘had two White Fathers shot’. To the Christian Democrats, the Catholic party par excellence, whose supporters in the colonies blamed Mitterrand for ‘selling out Africa to the Blacks’, it was too good an opportunity to miss. More than 400 MPs approved a motion reducing his ministry’s budget by a symbolic 1,000 francs.

  Pleven may well have welcomed the opportunity to clip the wings of his young colleague, who was beginning to develop a following in the party which threatened his own position.19 For whatever combination of reasons, Mitterrand’s name was missing when the new government was announced.

  It turned out not to be a good idea.

  As a minister, Mitterrand had been restrained by loyalty to the man who had appointed him. Out of office and, what was more, removed for implementing policies which Pleven himself had laid down, there was no longer any reason for him not to put his own career first. As head of the UDSR parliamentary group, Mitterrand continued to support Pleven’s government. But within the party, the gloves were off.

  At the UDSR’s 5th congress, in Marseille in October 1951, Mitterrand’s supporters obtained a majority on the Executive Committee. There were rumours of fraud. The Secretary-General, Joseph Lanet, noted in his report that some of the new Committee members had joined the party only a few days before. Pleven was re-elected President, and would remain so for two more years. But Lanet was replaced by a Mitterrand loyalist, Joseph Perrin, who was also President of the FNPG, and the party’s Executive Committee and Political Bureau were packed with Mitterrand’s allies.

  The same networks of trusted associates that had helped him rise in the Resistance and the prisoners’ movement had gone into action for him again. Georges Dayan became Assistant Secretary-General. Georges Beauchamp, Jacques Bénet, Jean Bertin and Pierre Merli all assumed leading posts.

  When, in November 1953, Pleven finally threw in the towel and Mitterrand was elected to succeed him, one of the former President’s supporters wrote disgustedly: ‘The UDSR has become a branch of the FNPG.’ Pleven himself was stoical, observing laconically, ‘Mitterrand is not a man with whom to go alone on a tiger hunt.’

  Pleven’s ousting was not only, or even mainly, a result of political intrigue. The 1951 elections had been disappointing. The UDSR and its allies had won nine fewer seats than in 1946 and could barely form a parliamentary group.20 Pleven’s age was also a factor: Mitterrand was fifteen years younger and hungrier. But above all it reflected the fact that the political boundaries were shifting. The RPF had splintered and de Gaulle, turning his back on politics, had gone home to Normandy to write his memoirs. The time for ‘Third Force’ governments was past. The Socialists went into opposition, leaving the field free for the Christian Democrats to lead a series of unstable Centre-Right coalitions. Mitterrand had urged an alliance with the Socialists to end a situation where, as one writer put it, the UDSR was condemned to be forever ‘the left wing of a right-wing majority of which it is a willing hostage’. But Pleven and the dwindling band of ‘sentimental Gaullists’ had refused to change tack. As they drifted towards the Right, Mitterrand was moving slowly to the Left and taking the core of the party with him.

  It was as much by force of circumstances as by a conscious decision. Mitterrand was pulled that way by his companions, his friends, his wife, his concern for social justice, and his instinctive dislike of the moneyed classes. But increasingly he also saw the political logic of many of the Left’s positions. On water
shed issues like colonial reform and an end to state aid for church schools, he found himself on the Socialists’ side. Like them he blamed de Gaulle for his role in starting the Indochina war,21 and he was beginning to share their fear that the General’s presidential ambitions would one day become a threat to democracy. His conversion was incomplete and ambiguous. ‘Notions of Right and Left,’ he told the UDSR congress in 1954, the first he addressed as President, ‘have lost much of their meaning. This old division has been swept away.’ But imperceptibly, almost despite himself, the bourgeois values of his youth were being left behind.

  The UDSR, under Mitterrand as well as Pleven, espoused two great contradictory causes: the French Union, meaning, above all, France’s African possessions; and European unity. Like the British, convinced for decades that they could have all the advantages of being both within and without the European Union, the French in the 1950s were determined to see no conflict between their European and African ambitions.

  To Mitterrand, as to most European leaders in the aftermath of the war, unifying Europe was the key to peace. Plus jamais ça! – Never again! – had not kept the peace after the First War. If Europe were ever to break the ruinous cycle of battles and destruction in which it had been locked for centuries, it would be by creating an institutional framework which would so bind its peoples together as to make armed conflict impossible. In May 1948, as Minister for War Veterans, Mitterrand had attended the Congress of Europe at The Hague, where Winston Churchill had spoken prophetically of the Union that was to come:

  We shall only save ourselves from the perils which draw near by forgetting the hatreds of the past, by letting national rancours and revenges die, by progressively effacing frontiers and barriers which aggravate and congeal our divisions, and by rejoicing together in that glorious treasure of literature, of romance, of ethics, of thought and toleration belonging to all, which . . . by our quarrels, our follies, by our fearful wars and the cruel and awful deeds that spring from war and tyrants, we have almost cast away . . . Mutual aid in the economic field and joint military defence must inevitably be accompanied step by step with a parallel policy of closer political unity. It is said with truth that this involves some sacrifice or merger of national sovereignty. But it is also possible and not less agreeable to regard it as the gradual assumption by all the nations concerned of that larger sovereignty which can alone protect their diverse and distinctive customs and characteristics and their national traditions.22

  Danielle, who accompanied him, was still dazzled, 60 years later. ‘That was the moment it all started,’ she remembered. ‘Churchill’s speech was like a clap of thunder.’ Among the audience were Konrad Adenauer, the future West German Chancellor; Harold Macmillan, who would become Britain’s Prime Minister; Altiero Spinelli of Italy; three former French premiers; and Maurice Schumann, representing de Gaulle.

  The Congress led to the creation of the Council of Europe as a political and parliamentary forum for European integration. In 1950, other measures followed: the European Court of Human Rights was established, and Robert Schuman proposed the European Coal and Steel Community between France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries, in order, as he put it, to make a new war ‘not only unthinkable but materially impossible’.

  Mitterrand was enthusiastic. ‘There is no possibility of modernisation if we remain within our own frontiers,’ he declared the following year. But he added a proviso: ‘France [must be] the prime mover of Europe.’ Churchill’s premonitory words about renouncing sovereignty were coming home to roost.

  The first serious test of the Europeans’ will to unite – and the first major setback to Churchill’s vision – was already looming on the horizon. The cause lay 8,000 miles away in Korea, where in June 1950 the communist North, supported by China and the Soviet Union, had invaded the American-backed South. The world suddenly discovered that the Cold War could turn hot. In London, Paris and Washington, the possibility of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was on everybody’s lips. In the French elections the following summer, UDSR candidates asked voters: ‘Do you, or do you not, want France to become a Soviet state?’ Mitterrand spoke against the Communists’ ‘fanatical, military one-party rule’. Others warned that ‘if the Red Army invades’, it would mean ‘the destruction of civilisation [and] the most barbarous . . . of tyrannies’.

  To meet the Soviet threat, the Americans demanded the immediate rearmament of West Germany. France, having fought three wars against the Germans in the previous eighty years, was violently opposed. A compromise was eventually reached to set up a European Defence Community, analogous to the Coal and Steel Community, in which German soldiers would be integrated with French and British troops in a European army answering to a European Defence Minister under the control of a European parliament. A treaty to that effect was signed. But it was light years ahead of its time. The idea of French and German soldiers fighting alongside each other so soon after the war was too much for many Frenchmen. The entire country was divided. When finally, in August 1954, parliament was asked to ratify the accord, the government refused to say whether it supported the treaty or not. In the end MPs decided not to hold a vote, which meant that it was rejected.

  The predictable result was that Germany rearmed, as the Americans had wanted all along, becoming a full member of NATO; the European Army was aborted; and a curious organisation, the Western European Union, a kind of talking shop for defence matters, was set up to serve as a pretext for doing nothing further about European military co-operation until its dissolution more than half a century later.23

  Mitterrand drew from the debate a lesson which would prove important for his later career: to win support for European integration, rational considerations were not enough. It was possible to move ahead with practical cooperation, which did not impinge directly on sovereignty, like the Treaty of Rome which created the European Economic Community in 1957. But to break down deeply ingrained, atavistic barriers of culture and identity required an emotional as well as a political dynamic. Besides protecting people’s pocketbooks, it was necessary to weave a dream powerful enough to overcome their fears.

  As Mitterrand continued his rise through the political hierarchy, two time bombs were ticking: Indochina and North Africa.

  Against the advice of General Leclerc, the commander whose 2nd Armoured Division had participated in the liberation of Paris, the French government had decided on a military, rather than a political, response to Ho Chi Minh’s campaign for Vietnamese independence. In the autumn of 1950, after the first major disaster of the war, when the Viet Minh destroyed a French column withdrawing from the town of Cao Bang, opinion in the Cabinet was divided. Mitterrand wanted more troops to strengthen the French Expeditionary Corps. Pleven wanted more help from America. The Socialist, Gaston Defferre, suggested an international conference to find a political solution.

  Only Pierre Mendès France, who led the left wing of the Radical Party and was not a member of the government, was willing to call a spade a spade. ‘Without a military solution,’ he told parliament, ‘the only possibility is negotiation.’ That was not what the government wanted to hear. It was willing to offer an ersatz independence – increased autonomy for the three Indochinese territories under continuing French suzerainty – but not the real thing, fearing that if Vietnam obtained its freedom it would set off a chain reaction in other French overseas possessions. By the time parliament accepted the logic of Mendes’s position, France had no cards left. On May 7 1954, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu capitulated. To all intents and purposes, the Viet Minh had won. What was there left to negotiate?

  In the week that followed, the French Defence Council met three times to discuss the possibility of using nuclear weapons. The Deputy Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, said France ‘should envisage with the Americans the use of the H-bomb against China, to face the communist bloc with the risk of world war’. The proposal was put to President Eisenhower, who instantly rejected it.

  On J
une 12 the government resigned. Five days later Mendès France told parliament that if he were invested as Prime Minister, he would end the war within a month or step down.

  Mendès was then 47 years old. He was Jewish, which was no longer quite the handicap it had been in the 1930s but still attracted anti-Semitic abuse from those on the far Right. Idealistic, inflexible, rational, rigorous and direct, detesting ambiguity and compromise, he was often referred to as ‘the conscience of the Left’. During the war, when he joined de Gaulle in London, he had turned down an office job and enrolled in the air force, flying sorties over Occupied France. Under the Fourth Republic, he had refused government posts, saying that he would not serve unless he was sure he would be able to act. Consistent in all he did, he now announced that he would not accept the prime ministership unless he had a majority without Communist support. The Communists voted for him anyway.

  The following day Mendès began drawing up a list of Cabinet members. It was not something he was good at. After almost twenty years as an MP, he had learnt little and cared less about the arcana of political patronage. But he knew someone who did.24

  That night he sent word to Mitterrand to join him at his apartment near the Ranelagh Gardens, adjoining the Bois de Boulogne. They had first met in Algiers in 1944. Mendès respected Mitterrand and had written a preface to his book on colonial policy in which he had praised his ‘lucidity . . . and intellectual and political courage’. Mitterrand, in turn, looked on Mendès with feelings akin to reverence, regarding him as the answer to the country’s ‘need for renewal’. Mitterrand, as René Pleven had discovered, could weigh the strengths and weaknesses of his colleagues with a jeweller’s finesse. That was what Mendès now needed.

  After Mitterrand had spent some time considering the draft list which the Prime Minister handed him, Mendès asked him which post he envisaged for himself. ‘The Interior,’ he replied. The older man hesitated. ‘It’s that or nothing,’ Mitterrand told him. Mendès acquiesced. The rest of the Cabinet was settled within the hour. Three other UDSR members received portfolios, including Eugène Claudius-Petit, who eight years earlier had recommended Mitterrand for the War Veterans post, and Joseph Lanet, who was recompensed for having eased his path to the party presidency. His friend, André Bettencourt, representing a right-wing party, the National Centre for Independents and Peasants, the CNIP, was made Secretary for Information. But the majority of those named were Radicals or Gaullists.25