Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  Mendès was as good as his word. During the night of July 20, a peace agreement was signed in Geneva, bringing to an end eight years of fighting in which 20,000 French soldiers, 30,000 colonial troops and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had died. Vietnam was partitioned. The Americans, obsessed by what was termed ‘the war against communism’, refused to recognise that nationalism was at the root of the Indochinese conflict and supported the government in the South in its refusal to hold promised elections, so paving the way to the Vietnam War. But that lay ten years in the future. In 1954, the Western powers were unanimous in saluting Mendès France’s achievement, a victory of the vanquished obtained by an honesty so transparent that all his opponents recognised there was nothing more he could give. Even the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, the apostle of anti-communism, enthused: ‘This guy is terrific!’ He returned to Paris a national hero.

  The Interior Ministry was Mitterrand’s first top-level Cabinet post. Logically it should have marked the last stage before he could aspire to be Prime Minister.26 Instead it provided an apprenticeship in the pitfalls of high office.

  Two weeks after his appointment, the Paris police chief, Jean Baylot, a prominent Freemason linked to the right wing of the Radical Party, told him that fliers had been discovered, apparently printed by the Communist Party, calling for violent demonstrations on Bastille Day, July 14. Baylot, like J. Edgar Hoover in America, had a fearsome reputation, having allegedly compiled compromising dossiers on all the country’s leading politicians. He urged Mitterrand to forbid the demonstration, as his right-wing predecessors had done, pointing out that the previous year, ‘communist elements’ had defied the ban, provoking clashes with the police in which seven people had died and more than a hundred had been injured.27

  The mid-1950s were a time of anti-communist hysteria all over the West. In America, McCarthyism was at its height. In Germany and France, ex-members of the Gestapo and the Vichy police were being secretly rehabilitated to work for the security services which wished to make use of their anti-communist ‘expertise’. No minister could afford to show weakness towards the Soviet threat.

  A few days later Mitterrand learnt that the fliers had been fabricated by Baylot’s underlings. Another report from the police chief – that a group of veterans had stockpiled arms and was likewise planning to make trouble – proved equally unfounded. The arms, the Special Branch told Mitterrand, were a few First World War rifles. They, too, had been planted by Baylot’s men.28

  With Mendès France’s agreement, Mitterrand decided that Baylot should go.

  On July 8, a Thursday, he placed the issue on the agenda for the following week’s Cabinet meeting. ‘From then on,’ he said later, ‘I was kept awake at night. On every side, influential people kept telephoning to advise me to go back on my decision.’29 Two days later he was summoned by René Coty, an elderly right-wing politician who had succeeded Vincent Auriol as President six months before. ‘Coty was in a foul mood and told me straight off that he would not accept Baylot’s departure. I replied that he did not have the right [and that, if he insisted,]. . . I would resign and address parliament from the back benches that very afternoon to demand his impeachment for exceeding his constitutional prerogatives.’ Mendès supported him and Coty backed down. But not without one final passe d’armes:

  COTY: Mr Mitterrand, I am warning you, if you authorise the demonstration on July 14 and there are deaths, you will be held personally responsible.

  MITTERRAND: I hope, Mr President, that you will not hold me responsible for any deaths until the eighth, because last year . . . on July 14, seven people died in a demonstration which had been forbidden.30

  Baylot was fired.31 The demonstration passed off without incident.

  There the matter should have ended. But both Mendès and Coty knew something which Mitterrand did not. A week earlier one of Baylot’s aides, Commissioner Jean Dides, had approached Christian Fouchet, the Gaullist Minister for Moroccan and Tunisian Affairs, with a sensational revelation.

  The previous day, Dides said, the Communist Party Politburo had heard a detailed account of the deliberations of the Defence Council, the supreme French military planning body, which had met at the end of June to discuss the government’s strategy in Indochina if the Geneva talks should fail. As proof, he gave Fouchet a typed copy of what purported to be the minutes of the Politburo meeting, which he said he had obtained from a highly placed informant in the party apparatus. They indicated that the source of the leak was an unnamed minister. When Fouchet asked why Dides did not report the matter to Mitterrand, who as Interior Minister was responsible for security, he said he suspected Mitterrand of being the minister in question. By another channel, Dides sent the same information to Coty. Fouchet went straight to Mendès, who immediately initiated an inquiry but neglected to inform Mitterrand or anyone else in the government about what was under way.

  Baylot and Dides were an odd pair. Baylot had fought in the Resistance; Dides had collaborated with the Germans, was notoriously anti-Semitic and had strong links to the extreme Right. They had been brought together by a hatred of communism. With Baylot’s blessing, Dides had set up a secret network within the police to fight against communist subversion. That was how he claimed to have discovered Mitterrand’s alleged treason.

  Within 48 hours, Mendès learnt that the previous, right-wing government had been told of similar leaks from a Defence Council meeting in May, but had not bothered to pass on the information. That ruled out Mitterrand, who was not then a minister. Yet Mendès continued to keep him in the dark. Baylot, Dides, the Director of Criminal Investigations, Robert Hirsch, and the head of the counter-espionage service, the DST, Roger Wybot, all of whom reported to Mitterrand, had knowledge of the leaks, but were instructed to tell no one, including their own minister, what was going on.

  On the face of it, the Prime Minister’s behaviour was incomprehensible.

  It is true that his mind was elsewhere.32 The Geneva negotiations, on which his future depended, were at a crucial stage. Crises were brewing in North Africa and over the European Defence Community. Nonetheless, it was an extraordinary misjudgement.

  Had Mendès launched an official investigation at once, instead of keeping the affair under wraps, it would have been nipped in the bud. Instead, he let it fester, giving the impression that he harboured doubts about his young colleague’s trustworthiness even though he now knew he could not have been involved. That, at least, was the construction Mitterrand put on it, when, on September 8, two days before the Defence Council was next due to meet, Mendès finally took him into his confidence.

  Those close to him remember he was shattered. That night he stayed in his office, unable to sleep. ‘I was the only one to know that I was completely innocent,’ he told a friend later, ‘and I was also the only one to be certain that I could never prove it.’ The following day, he did what Mendès should have done in July and ordered a full-scale police inquiry. It did not take long to bear fruit. On September 18, Dides sought another meeting with Fouchet, this time to claim that the minutes of the September Defence Council had been leaked. DST agents arrested him and searched the apartment of his informant, a self-described communist named André Baranès. It emerged that Baranès, posing as a journalist, had obtained the minutes from two pacifists employed at the Defence Ministry. Either Dides or Baranès, or a third person, had then inserted them into fictitious transcripts of Politburo meetings, in order to make it appear that a minister was betraying State secrets.

  Baranès’s motives were venal. A confidence trickster of unusual charm and persuasiveness, who seemed to have sprung from the pages of a bad spy novel, he had adroitly exploited the paranoia of the time, providing succulent (and largely fabricated) morsels of ‘intelligence’ to Western secret services in return for lavish retainers, which he invested in a lingerie shop run by his wife not far from the red-light district in Pigalle.33

  But what was Dides’s role?

  The gov
ernment was convinced that he, and perhaps Baylot as well, were part of a high-level conspiracy.34 Dides and his backers, it was argued, wanted to show that neither Mendès France’s administration, nor that of his conservative predecessors, could be trusted with the country’s future. By allowing rumours of the scandal to spread in the press and among right-wing circles in parliament, they hoped to destabilise the regime, opening the way for a more muscular, authoritarian government which, even if it were too late for Indochina, would keep an iron grip on France’s remaining overseas possessions, notably in North Africa.35

  It was not implausible. Jean-Paul Martin, who had known Mitterrand since they had been students together and had then acted as his informant in the Police Department at Vichy, was now his deputy Chief of Staff. He drew a parallel with the Affair of the Queen’s Necklace, which so discredited the monarchy at the end of the eighteenth century that it paved the way for the French Revolution that led Louis XVI to the scaffold. Roger Wybot, the DST chief, had a different explanation. He was convinced it was a communist, rather than a right-wing, plot, engineered by Baranès with Politburo backing, perhaps on the direct orders of Moscow, to undermine the French State, discrediting the democratic system and paving the way for a communist coup de force. But whatever the interpretation, everyone felt certain that it was part of a political plot.

  Subsequent events lent credence to that view.

  Once the source of the leaks had been established and the machination exposed, it should have come to an end. Instead it resumed with redoubled vigour.

  The main right-wing newspapers – L’Aurore, Le Figaro and La Croix – denounced Mitterrand and Mendès France as Soviet agents. Mendès, it was claimed, had made a deal in Geneva with the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, whereby in return for peace in Indochina, France would sabotage the European Defence Community. The Washington Post and the New York Times piled in with reports that France was ‘turning Red’. In November, further documents, allegedly from communist sources, brought fresh accusations of Mitterrand’s ‘treason’, leading to calls for his impeachment.

  Some of the charges were so grotesque that even mainstream right-wing politicians felt obliged to take his side. A leading Gaullist, Jacques Chaban-Delmas told Coty that the affair was ‘odious’ and he personally guaranteed Mitterrand’s innocence. But the atmosphere had become so highly charged that the President rebuffed him. ‘How can you guarantee it?’ he bristled.

  At the beginning of December, when the furore was at its height, an independent right-wing MP, Jean Legendre, claimed in parliament that Mitterrand had caused the French army’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu by passing information to the Viet Minh about French military planning. The fact that he was not then a member of the government was beside the point, Legendre argued. His guilt was proved by his failure to launch a timely investigation into the Defence Council leaks. Thus Mitterrand found himself in the invidious position of having publicly to defend an error which was not his own but his Prime Minister’s and of which he was the principal victim:

  For several weeks, the government of Mr Mendès France, like its predecessor, was abused. It believed that the documents in its possession were authentic. [In fact] they were . . . falsified . . . Why didn’t the government’s inquiries make progress in July and August? It is easy for those who have never had to lead such an investigation . . . to think that it can be concluded rapidly . . . [especially] when it is based on documents that have been deliberately falsified in such a way as . . . to direct suspicion at politicians whom one opposes, one detests, one loathes, and in the first place at the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior . . . The falsification [of these documents] took place either at the level of Baranès . . . or at the level of Dides . . . It was Commissioner Dides’s arrest that . . . opened the way for us to discover the truth . . .

  [Mr Legendre] has wished to show that . . . every time there have been leaks, it was due to the complicity or treason of a member of the government . . . That is what I find infamous – yes, infamous! – on the part of the person making those claims . . .

  I beg you to excuse me if I seem a little irritated, but . . . embedded in the most secret machinery of the State, [we have found] rottenness, lies and treason . . . We must put an end, once and for all, to these parallel police networks, grafted on to the forces of the law . . .

  From the public gallery: What about those who died at Dien Bien Phu? [Applause]

  [I see that] the opponents of the regime, who are not absent from this parliament, would like to use this debate to let it be thought that Dien Bien Phu was the result of treason. That is intolerable. I have given you the facts we have found . . . All the rest is invention . . .

  How do you explain that [Dides], the man receiving these documents through [Baranès], never wondered where they were coming from? . . . All this time wasted, whose fault was it? . . . The moment an official inquiry was entrusted to the DST . . . [it] led to the discovery of the guilty parties . . . In [Dides’s] so-called anti-communist network, there was a huge part of bluff. Nothing is more dangerous than the replacement of legally constituted organs . . . by shady backroom organisations and gangs affiliated to clans each working for its own ends . . . And in the end, who benefits? . . . Whose ends has all this served?36

  It was a robust reply to a classic parliamentary campaign of innuendo and denigration. But between the lines, visible only to the man to whom it was addressed – ‘All this time wasted, whose fault was it? The moment an official inquiry was entrusted to the DST . . .’ – was a stinging rebuke to Mendès France.

  Christmas came and the agitation died down, supplanted by other concerns. Two years later, under a different government, Baranès’s accomplices in the Defence Ministry were given prison terms; Baranès himself was acquitted; Dides and Baylot were not charged.

  But the ‘Leaks Affair’, as it became known, had lasting consequences.

  Between Mitterrand and Mendès France, it left a wound which never healed. Mendès maintained that he had acted from a sense of duty that required him to treat every member of the Defence Council as a potential suspect. His wife said later, ‘if [it had been] his own son, he would have acted the same way’. One may be permitted to doubt that. Even after his son’s innocence had become obvious? The argument did not hold up. The truth was that Mendès had been blind. To Mitterrand, for whom fidelity was the greatest of virtues, it was an unconscionable betrayal.37 Outwardly they remained close, expressing admiration for each other and, at critical moments, providing mutual support.38 But inside, something was broken.39

  Mud sticks. Dides, in the eyes of the far Right, was an anti-communist patriot, which made up for everything else. Mitterrand was hated for his efforts at colonial reform, for his sympathies for ‘the Stalinist, Houphouet-Boigny’ and, perhaps above all, because this ‘brilliant political animal’, as Jean Lacouture described him, was too clever by half. Where Mendès was transparent, Mitterrand was perceived as duplicitous. Claude Bourdet, Frenay’s associate in the Resistance movement, Combat, who had strong left-wing views, was struck by the fact that Mitterrand ‘always had two or three policies up his sleeve, rather than just one. It explains why he was not trusted.’

  But that was part of who Mitterrand was and there was not much he could do about it, any more than he could change his coldness or the distance he maintained toward his subordinates.

  That, too, had made matters worse during the ‘Leaks Affair’. On July 14, at the very beginning of the crisis, he had summoned Robert Hirsch, the Criminal Investigation chief. Hirsch recounted later that he had been intending to inform Mitterrand about the leaks, but the Minister would not let him speak. ‘He told me: “I don’t wish to waste my time in pointless discussions. I am informing you that [Jean] Mairey will replace you. You will go to Rouen [as prefect of the province of the Seine Maritime] . . .” Naturally, having been told that he did not want to talk to me, I said nothing . . . about the leaks.’

  Mitterran
d’s haughtiness was not quite what it seemed. He had nothing against Hirsch, he explained later, he simply wanted his own men in key posts. His coldness was intended to protect himself in an awkward situation – in this case a transfer which he thought Hirsch would see as a demotion. In fact the police chief was delighted. His wife’s family was from Rouen and she had been badgering him for months to try to get a transfer there.

  Like the perception of trickiness, the icy veneer behind which Mitterrand took refuge often did him a disservice.

  Mitterrand’s question, cui bono? – ‘Who stands to gain?’ – was never answered. Some suspected the plot was nurtured by right-wing Gaullist leaders or settler groups in North Africa. Mitterrand himself noted that the extreme right-wing MP and lawyer, Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, had taken an interest in the case. ‘All I want,’ Tixier had proclaimed, ‘is a tribune to hammer Mendès France and Mitterrand.’40

  But it was all supposition.41 Nothing was ever proved.

  In that respect, as in many others, the ‘Leaks Affair’ was an eerie precursor, in some senses a progenitor, of events at the Observatory five years later. The suspicions that it generated among the Right never entirely abated. From then on, Mitterrand was the man to bring down. François Mauriac, who had recently been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote perceptively in l’Express the following spring: ‘The inexpiable hatred of his opponents designates François Mitterrand as one of the leaders . . . of that Left which one day will have to be rebuilt.’ Nolens volens, events were conspiring to push him in that direction.