Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  fn4 In June 1940, when de Gaulle appealed to the French from London to resist the German Occupation, Pétain was at the head of a lawful government established under the constitution of the Third Republic, which continued in existence until July 10. Although in May 1958 he went to great lengths to insist that he had returned to power legally, and not, as he put it, ‘in a tumult of generals’, speaking much later he acknowledged three acts of military rebellion in his life: in 1940, against Pétain; in August 1944, against the government of Pierre Laval, during the Occupation; and during the Algerian crisis which returned him to power in 1958.

  7

  Crossing the Desert

  IN THE WAR, when Mitterrand had been wounded, captured, sent to a prison camp and forced to acknowledge that his fiancée, the great passion of his life, was slipping from his grasp, he had shown that he was at his best when he had his back to the wall. The trials he faced after de Gaulle’s return were less dramatic but scarcely less difficult.

  On January 8 1959, the Fourth Republic expired peacefully in its sleep.

  Its record was much less bad than its reputation suggested. In its twelve years of existence, it had healed – or at least papered over – the wounds left by the Occupation; affirmed France’s role as a global power; helped establish the European Common Market; and laid the foundations of the ‘trente glorieuses’, the three decades of prosperity which would continue until the Oil Shocks of the 1970s. But the Fourth Republic was unloved and all those associated with it were discredited.

  Almost overnight, Mitterrand became yesterday’s man.

  The UDSR, to which he had devoted so much time and effort, had ceased to exist as a parliamentary force and barely survived as a political party. A new left-wing movement, the Union of Democratic Forces or UFD, was established by Pierre Mendès France as a refuge for survivors of the Gaullist shipwreck. But it quickly became clear that it was going nowhere. Another left-wing group, the Parti Socialiste Autonome (Autonomous Socialist Party) or PSA, split off from the Socialist Party and, together with three or four other left-wing fragments, formed the core of what would be termed the ‘New Left’, so-called to differentiate it from the Molletists, whose archaic official title was ‘The French Section of the Workers International’ (SFIO). The PSA appeared to have better prospects. But it wanted nothing to do with Mollet’s former Justice Minister. Mitterrand was too marked by his failure to speak out against torture, too tarnished by his Fourth Republic image, too retrograde and reactionary in his attitude to decolonisation. Alain Savary, who had resigned from Mollet’s government in protest against its Algerian policies, delivered the coup de grâce, declaring, ‘We have enough Franciscans in the PSA already.’ Savary, who had joined de Gaulle in London in 1940, was not referring to Mitterrand’s Catholic upbringing but to the francisque which he had been awarded by Pétain.

  The time Mitterrand had spent at Vichy and his earlier, supposed links with the extreme Right, while a student in the 1930s, were never long forgotten. Usually it was the Gaullists who attacked him as a Pétainist or an ex-member of the Cagoule. This time the bullet came from the other side. Mitterrand made light of it at the time, but his rejection by the ‘New Left’ scarred him. Years later Savary and a high-flying young intellectual named Michel Rocard, whom Mitterrand suspected – wrongly – of being among those who had blackballed him, would have cause to regret what had happened that spring.

  The only political post he then held, outside the moribund UDSR, was as a modest provincial councillor for the département of the Nièvre. But the support networks he had built up there over the previous twelve years stood him in good stead. In March he was elected Mayor of Château-Chinon, the chief town of the Morvan, and on April 26 1959, after less than half a year out of office – during which, for the first time in his life, he had had to earn his living as a lawyer, acting as defence counsel in a series of civil and criminal cases – he returned to parliament as senator for the Nièvre.

  It was just as well. His forays into the world of jurisprudence were not a great success. Georges Dayan, for whose law office he worked, remembered: ‘If you gave him a case where a lot of money could be made, he would always win, but in such a way that we never made a penny out of it.’

  Back in the mainstream of national politics, Mitterrand settled into his new role as the bête noire of the Gaullists. ‘Was [de Gaulle] part of the plot [in Algiers]?’ he asked, a few weeks after the General assumed the presidency. ‘No! He was no more part of the plot than God was part of the Creation!’ The elections of 1958, he said, had signalled the start of ‘a totalitarian process . . . [marked by] brainwashing and intoxication by radio, television and the press’. Even more than the General, he targeted the ultras. As Interior Minister, five years earlier, he had earned their lasting enmity by proposing to amalgamate Algeria’s police force with that of metropolitan France. Now he taunted them as the tail which wanted to wag the dog:

  Forty-three million French citizens have the right to speak, not just the [one] million in Algeria . . . To allow a minority [European] community to maintain a false equilibrium against the [Muslim] majority by institutional devices which will not withstand the tide of history will lead in the end either to that community being crushed or to its carrying out the same kind of absolutely unacceptable operation as the Whites in South Africa, who have founded their domination on unjust laws. We should not let them choose. It’s not their private affair. Since they insist they are French, it is for France to choose in their name . . . In all circumstances, [we must demonstrate] an implacable will to prevent the minority dominating . . . and imposing, in the name of the integrity of France, out-of-date worn-out concepts which in reality represent only [its own] seditious interests . . . We should say to those French citizens [in Algeria] who are of [European] origin: . . . ‘Each of you represents only one 43-millionth . . . part of the nation . . .’ One small part cannot lay down the law to the whole country.1

  In the Senate, his favourite quarry was Michel Debré, whom de Gaulle had appointed Prime Minister. Before May 1958, Debré had published a weekly newspaper, Le Courrier de la colère (‘The Anger Post’), which had been one of the ultras’ principal propaganda sheets and had campaigned for de Gaulle’s return. The Prime Minister, Mitterrand told the senators, equated reform in Algeria with treason, ‘because he is truly, deeply, unshakeably convinced, and nothing can alter that conviction, that the moment that he stops using force, everything will be lost’. His sincerity was undeniable, he declared, but ‘if we wait until the guns are silent, the only ones left to hear France’s voice will be a mute people amid ruins’.

  De Gaulle saw that danger. In an interview with a settler newspaper in Oran in April 1959, he warned that ‘the Algeria of papa is dead, and those who don’t understand that will die with her’. Change was coming, and those, like Debré, who were wedded to the settlers’ cause, had either to submit or rebel. The Prime Minister swallowed his pride and submitted.

  In September, the General made an announcement which increased tension sharply on both sides of the Mediterranean. Once law and order had been restored, he said, Algerians would be allowed to decide their own future. They had three choices: independence, which, he asserted, would bring ‘appalling misery, frightful political chaos, generalised throat-cutting and before long a bellicose dictatorship of communists’; ‘Frenchification’, whereby all Algerians, regardless of their origin, would become ‘an integral part of the French people’; or self-government as an associated state.2

  The ultras, and parts of the army, viewed that as a betrayal. Mitterrand’s sniping at ‘French Algeria’ and its supporters, at a time when de Gaulle’s intentions appeared increasingly uncertain, set the stage for the machination that became the Observatory Affair.

  If the mechanisms of the plot which caused Mitterrand to act as he did in the autumn of 1959 – allowing himself to be enticed by Robert Pesquet, a former extreme right-wing MP, into acquiescing in a faked assassination attempt
– are no longer in doubt, the identities of those behind the conspiracy, in which Pesquet was a cat’s-paw, a ‘lamplighter’ as the French put it, remain elusive.

  Whoever masterminded the scheme was a man of perverse intelligence and remarkable intuition about human vulnerabilities. Pesquet was nimble and cunning. But he was not in that league.

  Mitterrand believed that Michel Debré was responsible.

  The theory was plausible. Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury, whom Pesquet had initially approached, was the one man, apart from himself, who, when they were both ministers in the government of Guy Mollet, had had access to the secret files on the Bazooka Affair in which Debré had been implicated.3 The prosecutor in Algiers, Jean Reliquet, had thought the evidence sufficiently solid to request the lifting of Debré’s parliamentary immunity. Mitterrand and Bourgès had decided, for political reasons, not to let the case proceed. But both were in a position to know embarrassing details of Debré’s role and perhaps to have kept in a safe place copies of incriminating documents. Now Debré was seeking the lifting of Mitterrand’s immunity on the grounds that he had omitted to inform the police of his conversations with Pesquet until the latter’s role had been made public, which, the government argued, was tantamount to contempt of court.

  The charge was bizarre. An ‘omission’, under French law, does not constitute judicial contempt. But that was not Debré’s problem. He was determined to use every means at his disposal to prolong his opponent’s agony.4 Mitterrand had savaged Debré over Algeria. Now the Prime Minister was taking his revenge.

  When the Senate met in November, Mitterrand hit back, recalling how ‘in February 1957, [when I was Justice Minister] a man was waiting to see me at the Chancellery . . . I received him. He protested his innocence in an affair which had just broken . . . Doubtless in the dossier there were accusations and troubling confessions, but he would explain all that later. He just needed time, which he would not have . . . if I asked for the lifting of [his] parliamentary immunity.’ After an interminable pause, while Mitterrand looked slowly around the packed benches, he drove home his advantage: ‘The man walking nervously around my office . . . was the Prime Minister, Michel Debré!’5

  The attack won him a reprieve. But a week later, the Senate lifted his immunity anyway, by 175 votes to 27, and in December the investigating magistrate preferred charges.

  At that point, however, a complication arose. Roland Dumas, who represented Mitterrand, discovered that the magistrate and the prosecutor, both of whom had been named to the case by the Justice Ministry, were personal friends of Pesquet, which not only provided grounds for annulling the procedure but raised intriguing questions about how and on whose instructions the pair had been appointed.6

  By then Debré was having second thoughts. A trial in open court risked opening a can of worms. He had nothing to gain, and much to lose, by allowing the case to continue.

  In fact there are good reasons for thinking that the Prime Minister was not among the authors of Mitterrand’s misfortunes. He exploited them to the hilt once they became known, but he almost certainly did not originate them, nor would it have been in his interest to do so.7 The Bazooka Affair was a red herring. Far from explaining Pesquet’s choice of Mitterrand and Bourgès as targets, it gave Debré a strong incentive not to do anything which might cause the secret files to be reopened. The Prime Minister was intelligent enough to realise that pushing Mitterrand into a corner, far from silencing him, would goad him to counter-attack, which was exactly what happened. The reference in Mitterrand’s speech to ‘accusations and troubling confessions’ was a clear enough warning to Debré that if he did not back off, those ‘troubling confessions’ would be made public.

  By then it was too late to terminate the proceedings. But nor did they advance. Mitterrand never had his day in court. He was never acquitted of contempt and the charge was never withdrawn. The case was simply allowed to die.8

  Pesquet, in exile in Switzerland, at a time when his political friends had deserted him, would later accuse Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, the standard-bearer of the extreme Right in the 1950s and ’60s, of having concocted the plot.9 Tixier had been in touch with Pesquet in the weeks before the attack, and afterwards defended him. An orator of rare eloquence, with a booming voice and barnstorming emotional range, Tixier was – in the words of Roland Dumas, who had pleaded in court against him – ‘more strange and twisted than you could possibly imagine’. Dumas, too, believed that Tixier was responsible. He had ‘half-admitted it’, Dumas said, and had predicted: ‘There will be a great trial. It will give us a tribune to defend French Algeria.’10

  Did the conspiracy reach higher? André Rousselet thought it had been fomented by the entourage of Georges Bidault, the former Christian Democrat leader, who was at odds with de Gaulle over Algeria and later joined the ultras in rebellion against him. Bidault had given false evidence against Mitterrand during the ‘Leaks Affair’. Testimony also emerged that two other leading supporters of ‘French Algeria’, Léon Delbecque and Jacques Soustelle, had discussed ways to ‘eliminate’ Mitterrand. But both denied it and the investigation was abandoned. In the end, it was all conjecture.

  For Mitterrand, the first two weeks after the Observatory Affair were critical. That was when, in Rousselet’s words, ‘nothing was ruled out’. Once Debré started attacking him, the worst was over. He had someone to fight.

  Long-time supporters, like François Mauriac and Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, rallied to his side. Patrice Pelat, his mentor in captivity and colleague in the Resistance, now a successful businessman, who had become estranged after breaking off his engagement to Danielle’s sister, Christine, returned to tell him: ‘François, I am first and foremost your friend.’ Mendès France spoke out on his behalf. One of the Young Turks of the Radical Party, Charles Hernu, whose political career would from then on be linked to Mitterrand’s, volunteered his support, telling him that he did not believe a word of Pesquet’s allegations.11

  Danielle and others in Mitterrand’s inner circle used to say that, during this period, he could count his friends on the fingers of one hand.

  It was not quite that bad. In early November 1959, when the campaign against him was at its height, Rousselet and a few others organised a seminar at Poigny-la-Forêt, in the countryside near Rambouillet, 30 miles west of Paris, to try to lift his spirits. About twenty-five people, mainly from the UDSR and the prisoners’ movement, turned up to show support.12 But for a man who had spent more than a decade at the top of the political tree, it was a terrible comedown. Danielle did the rounds of her friends, trying to drum up sympathy. ‘François told me, “Don’t! You’re heading for a huge disappointment” . . . They were all friends from the Resistance. Someone you had been with in the Resistance could not betray you. Well . . . they did betray us.’

  She went to see the Lazareffs, the owners of France Soir, then the newspaper with the biggest circulation in France, who had cultivated the Mitterrands, inviting her regularly to their property at Louveciennes where the artistic, intellectual and political elite of Paris congregated every weekend. ‘It was the worst slap in the face, the worst snub, of my life,’ she recalled. ‘Everyone just stared at me. No one moved . . . [Eventually] I found Pierre [Lazareff], and Pierre said to me: “Of course we believe François, but . . .” I never saw them again.’

  It was the same with Jacques Chaban-Delmas and his wife, with Henri Frenay and many others. For Danielle, ‘there was no “but”’. Many friendships were found wanting that winter.

  Her courage was all the more striking because it followed a long period in which their marriage had been slowly coming apart.

  It had started with François’s absences. He was constantly away on business for the UDSR or absorbed by his work as a minister or campaigning to help a colleague. ‘He wasn’t there, he wasn’t there,’ Danielle remembered. ‘He wasn’t there with the children. He wasn’t there when I was changing them as babies. Every weekend, I was alone with them. I tau
ght them to say: “Papa is in the Nièvre”.’

  In Paris, too, he would disappear without explanation. It might be a government crisis, an all-night meeting of the UDSR bureau, a stay-over at the Dayans or at the home of another close friend. Or a love affair.

  Aided by that redoubtable aphrodisiac that comes with political power, Mitterrand, the shy young student who had languished under the spell of Marie-Louise Terrasse, had become a formidable King of Hearts. ‘When you are 34 years old, a good-looking young man, a champion tennis player, a hunter of elephants in Africa and of whales in the Gulf of Gabon,’ gushed a celebrity magazine, ‘the female voter is a sweet prey, willingly consenting.’ Even Françoise Giroud, an able chronicler of French mores, as tough-minded as any of her male colleagues, wrote that Mitterrand’s overpowering charm, which had frightened women away in his youth, became mesmerising as he matured:

  When he unwound, he was irresistible . . . Like Casanova, he had a golden tongue, the gift of pleasing with words, of bewitching with a phrase, of dazzling with a remark . . . When, at a gathering, a woman . . . attracted him, . . . he would single her out with a look, fix her with his gaze and she would melt. No one knows how many passions he inspired in young women who never got over him and remained faithful to him in their hearts. If he had wanted to, he could have seduced a stone – economical in his gestures, his eyes shining with mischief, his voice velvety, his words enveloping you like a shawl. And he wanted to often . . . Women, with politics, were the great passion of his life.13