by Philip Short
Throughout these days of high drama, Mitterrand, like his colleagues, had been an impotent bystander. In principle, he had not been hostile to the General’s return. Despite their political differences, and his run-ins with de Gaulle’s supporters in the battle for leadership of the UDSR, the General remained for him a reference, a symbol of the greatness of France, who merited respect. At dinner at his apartment one evening with a group of colleagues, when one of them made a disobliging remark about the General, Mitterrand cut him off: ‘I will not permit anyone to speak of General de Gaulle in that tone at my table.’ In March 1958, at a time when debate about his possible comeback was already in full spate, he wrote in Le Monde that ‘no Frenchman alive is more worthy of a permanent place in History than the leader of Free France’ and expressed the hope that, through him, some ‘as yet unknown agreement’ would be found to lead the country towards harmony and peace.
A few days earlier, Maurice Duverger, a respected political commentator, had written in the same newspaper that the only question about de Gaulle’s return was: ‘When?’ For Mitterrand, it was not ‘When?’ but ‘How?’, and as the events of May played out, he liked less and less what he saw.
He knew nothing yet about ‘Resurrection’ and still less about de Gaulle’s part in it. But the General’s refusal to condemn the rebellion and his evident determination to use it as a lever for his return to power raised disturbing questions. On May 25, when Arrighi and the paratroopers seized power in Corsica, Mitterrand spoke in parliament for the first time of a pronunciamento – a military putsch – in the making. Four days later, after Coty’s appeal to de Gaulle to form a government, he spent the afternoon walking along the Left Bank of the Seine, pondering his future:
It was a day of clear, pale sun. The watery surface of the river glinted under the changing light of the sky. I wondered to myself . . . Should I defend a political system which was incapable of giving France its proper rank? Or should I lend a helping hand to the conspiracy which was about to destroy it? . . . Everything invited me to agree to the liquidation of the Fourth Republic, with its warring ceremonial kings, its stewards who ruled in their stead, this dinginess of a dying breath. But everything separated me too from this dictatorship, which under a mask of meekness could be seen by the naked eye . . .34
It was perhaps the most difficult decision he would have to take in the whole of his political career. Should he throw in his lot with the General? Or strike out on his own? ‘He was debating within himself’, his friend André Rousselet remembered. In the days that followed, most of Mitterrand’s colleagues in the UDSR and in the other centrist parties would rally to de Gaulle’s standard. Guy Mollet and even the ‘Stalinist’, Félix Houphouet-Boigny, accepted posts in the new government. But Mitterrand was not prepared to serve in the General’s shadow. He refused to play second fiddle – to de Gaulle or anyone else.
By the time he returned to the National Assembly, he had made up his mind. He would vote against de Gaulle. ‘We are going to have him for twenty years,’ he told his friend, Jean Pinel, ‘[and] I am the only one who is capable of opposing him.’35 It was an astonishing prediction. Twenty-three years would elapse before the elections of May 1981 brought Mitterrand to power.36
On Saturday afternoon, de Gaulle received the parliamentary leadership (except the Communists, who were not invited) at the Hôtel La Pérouse, where he stayed when he was in Paris, not far from the Arc de Triomphe. Roger Duveau, who accompanied Mitterrand, representing the UDSR, remembered being struck by the General’s enormous feet, shod in light yellow leather. He was courteous, affable, soliciting each one’s opinions, assuring them that he was ‘in agreement with most of your views’. Those present, including Mendès France, Mollet, Ramadier and several other former prime ministers, Mitterrand wrote later, ‘bowed and scraped’ before him. When his own turn came to speak, he remembered feeling nervous. He began in an elliptical manner by noting ‘the impermanence of things’. De Gaulle interrupted to ask what he was trying to say. ‘You will understand, mon général,’ he replied, ‘if you will kindly let me speak’:
I will not vote for you until you disavow publicly the Public Safety Committee in Algiers and the military insurrection. A republican regime cannot be born out of the constraints of a putsch . . . During these last days we have embarked on the perilous and unwonted path of the pronunciamento, which until now has been the preserve of South American republics . . . After the generals, next it will be the turn of the colonels . . . You tell us that, to face these kinds of tragedies which risk bringing the ruin of France, there is only one recourse: yourself, mon général. But you are mortal!37
It was, as the French like to say, ‘a fart in church’. For once de Gaulle could not find the right words. ‘I can see where you are leading,’ he snapped, before getting up and walking out. ‘You want my death. Well I am ready.’
Next day, June 1, parliament met exceptionally on a Sunday to debate his investiture. Mitterrand used the occasion for a memorable philippic, in which he explained his reasons for opposing de Gaulle’s being sworn in:
When, on September 10 1944, General de Gaulle presented himself before the Consultative Assembly . . . he had with him two companions called honour and patriotism. His companions today, which he no doubt did not choose but which have followed him, are named coup and sedition.
General de Gaulle’s presence [here] means that, even though he may not wish it, from now on violent minorities will be able to launch with impunity victorious assaults against democracy . . .
The dilemma parliament faces is as follows: Either we accept a Prime Minister – whose merits are immense and whose role is supposed to permit national reconciliation, but who has already been elected by the Committee in Algiers – or we . . . will be chased away . . . We do not accept that ultimatum . . .
General de Gaulle . . . was called back in the first place by an undisciplined army. In law, the powers that will be conferred on him tonight will have been bestowed by the representatives of the nation. In fact he holds them already as the result of a coup d’état.38
His attack extended beyond de Gaulle to those responsible for the Fourth Republic’s demise. ‘While there was still time to resist [the insurrection] and uphold the law . . . the government disappeared,’ he said. ‘It died, as it had lived, with a whimper.’ The General, he recalled, ‘eloquent as always, precise as always, severe as always’, had condemned the old system. Yet his new government included that system’s ‘most representative figures’, Mollet on the Left, Pinay on the Right, and the Christian Democrat, Pflimlin – all former prime ministers. Where was the coherence in that?
When he finished, only the Communists and a handful of Socialists applauded.
With this speech, Mitterrand burnt his boats, not only with de Gaulle but with a wide swathe of parliamentary opinion, stretching from the Centre to the far Right.
It was typical of him. He always hung on to a position far longer than was reasonable and then made a sudden, bold, reckless, leap into the unknown. In his private life, he had gone on hoping that Marie-Louise Terrasse would respond to his love long after it was clear to all around him that the relationship was doomed; then he made a snap decision to marry Danielle, whose background and family values were totally different from his own. At Vichy, he had hesitated, equivocated and agonised for more than a year before committing himself to the Resistance with an excessive, defiant act of bravado at the Salle Wagram in Paris. In the Fourth Republic, he had held on as Justice Minister in the hope that, by manipulating slippery parliamentary combinations, he would eventually become Prime Minister. When de Gaulle’s return finally convinced him that that was impossible, he leapt away once more, this time into opposition.39
Only two political groupings in France consistently opposed de Gaulle: the extreme Right and (parts of) the Left. Whatever interest Mitterrand might once have felt in the far Right, as a student in the 1930s, was long since forgotten. In the new circumstances provoked by
de Gaulle’s return, his future – as the applause which greeted his speech made clear – lay with the Left. There was a nice symmetry about it. Now that the General was back, occupying the Centre and Right of the political spectrum, Mitterrand, his self-proclaimed challenger, was displaced towards the terrain held by the Communists and the left wing of the Socialist Party.40 All other considerations aside, there was nowhere else he could go.
De Gaulle was invested as Prime Minister that night by a large majority. In the UDSR group, ten MPs voted for him, only Mitterrand and three others against. The following day, he was entrusted with ‘full powers’, as Pétain had been, eighteen years earlier, though in this case for a duration limited to six months while a new constitution was drawn up.
Two days later, he set out for Algiers, where he was given a tickertape welcome, worthy of Fifth Avenue in New York, reassuring the Arab population and encouraging the ultras with his promise, ‘Je vous ai compris!’, to believe, at least for a time, that he was on their side. He himself had no such illusions. Back in Paris, he told his Chief of Staff, Pierre Lefranc:
They are dreaming . . . They forget that there are nine million Muslims for a million Europeans . . . What is the army down there? A few colonels who think that they are Giap [the Viet Minh commander who defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu]. And the French? The big settlers cling to their rights; the little ones panic . . . We cannot keep Algeria. Believe me, I am the first to regret it, but the proportion of Europeans is too small . . . We will have to find a form of cooperation where the rights of France will be protected.41
Algeria’s fate was sealed. The only question was what could be saved from the wreckage and how the process would play out before the curtain was rung down.
In August it was the turn of Black Africa to feel the General’s implacable logic. Two years earlier, Gaston Defferre had persuaded parliament to pass a law giving the French territories in sub-Saharan Africa internal self-government. The measure had provided a safety valve for nationalist aspirations. But by the time de Gaulle took office, pressure was building for the next step. He responded by proposing a Franco-African Community in which each country would enjoy enhanced autonomy and also have the right to secede.
Mitterrand and the rest of the non-communist Left were wrong-footed. Here was de Gaulle, doing in a matter of weeks for Black Africa what successive parliamentary governments had failed to do for years.
Mitterrand’s thinking had evolved since his condescending reference to the subject peoples as ‘children’ in 1955. He had approved Defferre’s formula for ‘self-government within the French Union’. He had accepted that integration would not work: if applied consistently, it would make France, for demographic reasons, the colony of its own colonies. He understood that in a Federal Republic, the rules would need to be the same for all, France, Algeria and Black Africa, and that neither the settlers nor the FLN would accept that. But he was still unwilling to recognise that the ‘disaster’ of independence – as he had called it five years earlier – might be the only answer. In this, as in much else, de Gaulle was streets ahead of him.
By September 1958, the new constitution was ready.
It followed closely the blueprint the General had laid out at Bayeux in 1946. The stranglehold exerted by the parties on the political process was lifted. For the first time since the Second Empire – when Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, afterwards Napoleon III, had also been brought to power by a coup – France would have a strong executive president, elected by indirect suffrage for a seven-year term and endowed with greater powers than any of his Western counterparts. He named the Prime Minister and members of the Cabinet and could revoke their appointments at any time. If France faced ‘a grave and immediate danger’, he was authorised to take ‘whatever measures the circumstances require’ without reference to parliament or any other constitutional body, a far looser formulation than in the United States or Britain. Parliament could bring down the government by refusing a vote of confidence, but the Head of State could dissolve parliament at will, equivalent to a US President being able to call fresh congressional elections whenever he saw fit. And as though that were not enough, in practice – if not in law – the President had what was called a ‘reserved domain’, which gave him, rather than the government, the last word on policy in foreign affairs and defence.42
The constitutional referendum, held on September 28, in the overseas territories as well as metropolitan France, was a triumph. Nearly 80 per cent of those who took part (and 96 per cent in Algeria, where Arabs voted en masse for the first time) were in favour. It was hardly a surprise. The propaganda apparatus of the State had been mobilised as never before to ensure that only the General’s side of the argument was heard. To most voters, it was a plebiscite for or against de Gaulle. Those who voted against him did so to protest at the manner in which he had returned to power; from doubts about the wisdom of concentrating such sovereign authority in one pair of hands; and from fears that parliament, having for so long been too powerful, would now be stripped of its proper role – or, as in the case of Mitterrand and Mendès France, for a combination of all those reasons.
A small minority on the far Right worried that it would give the General carte blanche to offer independence to French Africa and eventually to Algeria as well.
That proved to be the case. When the people of Guinea voted against the constitution and rejected membership of the proposed Franco-African Community, de Gaulle retaliated with a pettiness which, at various times in his career, marred his authentic grandeur. Guinea became independent and, overnight, all economic and political relations with the former colony were cut. Eighteen months later, the rest of the Community followed suit.
Mitterrand’s dream of a Eurafrican France, extending ‘from Lille to the Congo, from Chad to Senegal’, was over, buried by a man who had seen more quickly and more clearly than he that France’s colonial empire was a relic of the past. Not until much later would he bring himself to admit: ‘I was wrong to try to reconcile what was unreconcilable . . . Colonial emancipation can only be global and complete.’
Mitterrand’s career, in the closing months of 1958, was in danger of becoming a relic of the past too.
Parliamentary elections were called on Sunday, November 23, with a second round a week later. Unlike the previous elections in which Mitterrand had taken part, where proportional representation was applied at the level of each département, de Gaulle, for the first time since 1936, had reintroduced a first-past-the-post system with single-seat constituencies. The area around Nevers, where Mitterrand had been a municipal councillor, had a moderate right-wing electorate. In the past they had supported him, but they were ‘as unstable as the sands of the River Loire’ and this time he thought they would vote for a Gaullist. Instead he chose to stand in the sprawling constituency in the east of the Nièvre, the Morvan, whose hardscrabble farming communities were more sympathetic to the Left.
In the first round, he finished third, behind a Gaullist and a Socialist, Dr Daniel Benoist. Normally he would have been expected to stand down in favour of the better-placed left-wing candidate. But Mitterrand’s relations with Benoist were execrable and he decided to remain in the race. The good doctor was enraged, and distributed pamphlets depicting Mitterrand with a hammer and sickle and the Pétainist francisque to suggest that he was in league both with the Communists and the extreme Right. In fact the Communists did support him – the first time they had done so – though less because of a convergence of views than because he had voted against the new constitution, whereas Benoist, like Guy Mollet, had campaigned in its favour.
The following Sunday, when the votes were counted, the Gaullist was elected with 40.3 per cent, Mitterrand came second with 32.1 per cent, and Benoist, third with 27 per cent. In the tidal wave of support for the General which washed over France that month, many others – including Mendès France, Edgar Faure and Édouard Daladier, all former prime ministers – were also swept away. The Socialists hung on to
only 40 seats out of nearly a hundred in the previous parliament. Communist strength declined from 150 to 10.
But that was scant consolation. After twelve years as an MP, during which he had been a minister eleven times, Mitterrand was out of a job.
* * *
fn1 Not for lack of warning. The veteran nationalist, Ferhat Abbas, had written some weeks earlier that Algerians had lost patience with France. ‘[Their] anger is at its peak and [their] silence reflects contempt and revolt. Algeria is not calm, and the divorce could very soon become irrevocable.’ On October 23, the day Mitterrand returned to Paris, the Chief of Security in Algiers, Jean Vaujour, sent him word that ‘we may be on the eve of terrorist attacks in Algeria. It is impossible to be absolutely certain, but in my judgement it is to be feared.’ Mitterrand replied that he ‘would think about it’. A week later, the insurrection began. After two years of open rebellion in Tunisia and Morocco, which appeared to have left Algeria untouched, the government had fallen victim to its own propaganda that Algeria, being ‘French’, was different.
fn2 During the French presidential elections in 2002, 2007 and 2012, where immigration, especially from North Africa, was a major campaign issue, it was widely acknowledged that France’s difficulties in integrating its Arab population, even those born in France of the second or third generation, were rooted in the hatreds and incomprehension sown fifty years earlier during the Algerian war.
fn3 The silence of US congressmen, Democrats and Republicans alike, when confronted with ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ during the administration of George W. Bush, is a reminder that French politicians in the 1950s were not alone in thinking torture an appropriate response to Arab terrorism. French historians have since tried to explain their leaders’ acquiescence in barbaric practices by the context of the Cold War, the universal belief in France at that time that Algeria was part of the ‘homeland’, and the lack of priority, half a century ago, accorded to human rights. The American experience suggests rather that in both cases, the primary cause was the reluctance of politicians, when the lives of soldiers were at stake, to take a moral stance at the risk of being branded unpatriotic.