Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  Such a man, whatever his qualities and however scintillating he might be, was not easy as a marriage partner. Danielle had come to terms with his infidelities early on and there were times when she was able to laugh at them. When François took up his post as Justice Minister, she accompanied him to the Chancellery to find, in the Minister’s apartments, an enormous bunch of red roses with a note from a female admirer. She took it upon herself to reply: ‘The consideration you have shown for us as a couple is equalled only by your generosity. I am so very touched. Danielle.’

  But there was an emptiness in her life which neither her bookbinding, at which she excelled,14 nor her children could fill. ‘Not having anyone to talk to, I lost the taste for conversation and discussion. I lived as a recluse. Isolation and withdrawal led me down into a terrifying gulf of anti-social behaviour, from which I could find no escape.’

  The shared nightmare of the Observatory Affair brought her and François back together. The relationship stabilised. But not as it had been before.

  In 1958, Danielle had taken a lover.

  Jean Balenci was a gym teacher at a nearby secondary school. They had met three years earlier, when he was 19 and she was 31. He was strongly built, muscular and athletic: contemporary photographs show him performing somersaults in diving competitions. Danielle was pretty and slim with an ingenuous charm which made all Mitterrand’s male colleagues want to flirt. Jean had fallen in love with her. ‘It happened little by little, imperceptibly,’ he remembered. ‘I couldn’t even say at what moment it started. It just happened, as these things do.’ On her side, she was lonely and, as she said later, ‘where there is loneliness, something will come to fill it. If it isn’t filled in one way, it will search for another.’

  François accepted the relationship. Jean was easy-going and Gilbert and Jean-Christophe adored him. He taught them tennis and took them on skiing holidays, helping to make up for their absent father. ‘We did not set out to have separate lives,’ Danielle explained. ‘Things happened, day by day, which meant that it worked out that way. But it was not something we had organised.’ Neither she nor François ever spoke of divorce.15 One day, she remembered, ‘I said to him: “You know, we are an odd couple,” and he took my hand in his, and said: “But you are my wife”.’ Much later, she rationalised the relationship, saying, ‘If you are fundamentally attached to each other, and you really want to stay together, to live separate loves is not inconceivable.’ He told friends: ‘I do not see how I can forbid to my wife what I allow to myself.’

  François observed the conventions. They were a married couple; they might have separate bedrooms and no conjugal relations. But they were united by a complicity which would continue until his death nearly forty years later. After the winter of 1959, they appeared in public more frequently together, at restaurants and the theatre.

  As an opposition member of the Senate, a somnolent institution where the good and the great of French politics are kicked gently upstairs, there were few calls on his time. He started work on a book about Lorenzo de Medici, the fifteenth-century ruler of Florence, patron of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Machiavelli. It was never completed but gave him an excuse to pay frequent visits to Florence and Venice, which he adored. He travelled to India and to China, where he tried to persuade Mao Zedong that Algeria was unlike other colonies and France needed guarantees that the European minority would be protected. The Chairman was unconvinced. The month-long journey produced a book, La Chine au défi (‘The Chinese Challenge’), which was principally notable for the fact that, like other Western visitors, Mitterrand saw no sign of the famine, then at its height, which, by the time it ended a year later, would claim 38 million Chinese lives.16

  In the Nièvre, where the Observatory Affair might as well have been on another planet, and at Hossegor, on the Atlantic coast in the département of the Landes, near Biarritz, where the family had a holiday home, he could escape from national politics and find solace in literature.

  Mitterrand delighted in rare editions. One of his favourite pastimes, whether in or out of office, was browsing among the bouquinistes’ stalls on the banks of the Seine and spending lazy afternoons exploring the shelves of antiquarian booksellers. At Hossegor he could immerse himself in Chateaubriand, Saint-Simon and Pascal, after whom he had named his first son. He read Lamartine and Stendhal, Jean Giono and Bernanos, and the poems of Aragon and Saint-John Perse, many of which he could recite by heart.

  Hossegor had been Danielle’s idea. After they married, they had argued over whether to spend the holidays with his family or hers. François had suggested neutral territory, the Île de Ré, off the coast of Brittany, where he had vacationed as a teenager. Danielle hated it. She found herself marooned on an island where it rained all the time, and on the rare occasions when François could get away from his ministerial duties to join her, their young nanny flirted with him.

  The following year, when he suggested that she reserve the same place again, she temporised until she could tell him with a straight face that ‘everything is fully booked’. So they joined Georges Beauchamp and his wife, who had taken a house at Hossegor for the summer.

  The resort was, and still is, an oasis of middle-class propriety. A notice on the outskirts sets the tone: ‘In town, we dress properly.’ Neat, bijou villas, with whitewashed walls and small gardens that cry out for plaster gnomes, nestle in the lee of immense, grass-covered sand dunes, swept by a wind which, even in August, brings breakers rolling in from the Atlantic. Further back, overlooking a lake, lie the genteel homes of notabilities. Everything is as it should be, comfortable and well ordered.

  To Danielle, Hossegor was a nod towards what she knew she could never be – ‘a little bourgeois wife with a husband who was always there at mealtimes’. To François it resonated with the middle-class upbringing that had made him choose to live at Auteuil and in the rue Guynemer. He played golf and struck up friendships with other well-to-do visitors. Danielle’s sister, Christine, who had just married the actor, Roger Hanin, often joined them for the summer. In 1955 they decided to buy a piece of land, on which they built a simple, not very attractive villa with a patio and a pine tree in front, where they could relax and there was room for the children to play. With some reluctance, François gave up the cottage in the Nièvre: he could not afford both. Instead he rented a bare, sparsely furnished hotel room in an old hostelry near Château-Chinon, Le Vieux Morvan, which served as his base when visiting his constituency. Holidays from now on would be spent in the Landes.

  At the golf club at Hossegor, Mitterrand met Pierre Pingeot, a well-connected industrialist related to the Michelin tyre family, who headed a company making automobile parts in Clermont-Ferrand. They were the same age, from similar backgrounds, and soon became friends. The Pingeots’ second daughter, Anne, then fourteen, remembered the first time her father brought Mitterrand and André Rousselet home from the golf course for a drink. ‘It was fascinating . . . unforgettable.’ They opened a window on to a different world.

  The Pingeots were an old-school upper-middle-class Catholic family from the provinces, who, on her mother’s side, were, in Anne’s words, ‘a generation behind the times’. Her maternal grandfather, a retired general, had strong nineteenth-century views about a woman’s place being in the home. ‘Women should not work, nor should they study – the worst thing a woman could do was to wear glasses and pass the baccalaureate; in any case, they were inferior beings . . . That’s what I was brought up with, all through my childhood,’ she recalled. ‘There was no question of getting a job. I was expected to do something decorative and then get married. That was the programme laid out for me.’

  But by the late 1950s, even in the French countryside, those timeless certainties were beginning to erode. Anne got her baccalaureate and in September 1961, shortly after she turned eighteen, went to Paris to study at the École des Métiers d’Art (College of Arts and Crafts). Her mother, Thérèse, installed her in a former convent which had been conv
erted into a Catholic hostel for young women of good family from the provinces. ‘I discovered Paris. What happiness – it was freedom!’ Anne recalled. After three years she obtained her diploma as a master craftsman in stained glass. But by then her parents’ carefully laid plans to pair her off with a suitable young man from their own milieu were in ruins.

  The two families – the Mitterrands and the Pingeots – had grown close. Every summer they spent the holidays at Hossegor. Anne was three years older than Mitterrand’s son, Jean-Christophe, and the first year she was in Paris, François acted as her guardian. But the time they had shared at Hossegor had sown the seeds of what would follow. Anne was quick, intelligent, passionate about art, a slim, lively brunette with green eyes, a ready laugh and an enchanting smile. She captivated him. He charmed her. ‘He was so interesting,’ she remembered. ‘People like that, who are on a higher level, multiply life for you by their knowledge.’ Six years after they had first met, they fell in love.

  ‘It wasn’t at all what was supposed to happen,’ Anne would say later. ‘I had been overwhelmed.’

  Don Juan had met his match. He was 47; she was 20. There was no question of his leaving Danielle. Since the Observatory, if not before, they had known that they would stay together. But Anne gave him that surge of energy – a ‘regeneration’, she would call it – that comes to a man, still in the full vigour of life, on the threshold of middle age, who suddenly finds his existence transformed by a consuming and reciprocated passion for a girl less than half his age.

  Danielle had taken Jean Balenci not out of passion but loneliness. François found in Anne the other great love of his life. She was the Beatrice that he had sought, and not found, in Marie-Louise Terrasse.

  His friends used to wonder why he did not seek a divorce. Some thought he feared a separation would damage his career; others that he remained with Danielle because of the Catholic values which he had absorbed as a child and a traditional, almost feudalistic attitude that held family, singular or plural, to be sacred. Anne had a different explanation. ‘Once he had made a choice, he stuck to it. Danielle was a choice he had made and he would not leave her.’ There was another consideration, too, she thought: the death of the Mitterrands’ first-born son, Pascal. ‘Losing a child creates a bond between a man and a woman which is indestructible.’17

  That may indeed have played a part. But the real reason was simpler. He loved them both. All political leaders run on egoism. Private and public life are different sides of the same coin. Mitterrand’s behaviour was supremely egoistic. But the two women who shared his life were strong, original characters with minds of their own, as they would show, in different ways, throughout the time they were with him. If they accepted their situation, it was because they chose to and because Mitterrand managed the two relationships, and the families that resulted, in ways that enabled them, if not to cohabit, at least to coexist.

  The 1960s was a decade of emancipation and prosperity in Europe. In Britain, ‘Supermac’, as the newspapers called Harold Macmillan, had coined the slogan, ‘We’ve never had it so good’. In America a wealthy young Bostonian named John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected to a White House which the press would dub Camelot.

  Only in France did nothing go right. There were strikes for higher wages; the biggest farmers’ protests in living memory; and, overshadowing everything else, like a shroud for a country locked into its past, the never-ending war in Algeria.

  Since de Gaulle’s announcement of self-determination, the ultras had been restive. In January 1960, matters came to a head. European extremists barricaded themselves into the University of Algiers, provoking a firefight with police in which twenty-two people died and more than 200 were wounded. The goal was to force the army to take power and despatch paratroops to Paris to seize control of the capital and the rest of metropolitan France. For a week, the fate of the Fifth Republic hung in the balance. The government drew up contingency plans to move to Belgium if Paris were attacked. But insurrections, like bicycles, topple unless they move forward. De Gaulle, in military uniform, delivered one of those imperious, soaring speeches, of which, alone among twentieth-century statesmen, he and Winston Churchill had the secret. The army hesitated. The barricades collapsed.

  The revolt had several consequences. De Gaulle removed the settlers’ sympathisers, including Massu and Jacques Soustelle, from military and government posts. He launched a muscular charm offensive to win back the support of the army, whose loyalty, he now realised, could no longer be taken for granted. And he started talks with the FLN.

  The ultras did not give up. A year later a small group of extremists, led by Soustelle and Raoul Salan, created the OAS, the Secret Army Organisation, whose mission was to use all available means, including terror and assassination, to prevent Algerian independence. In April 1961, Salan and three other generals staged a putsch. De Gaulle, once more in uniform, appeared on television to warn that, unless the putschists surrendered, there would be civil war. Jean Lacouture, then a young journalist with Le Monde, was among the millions of French people glued to their sets that night:

  We saw appearing on our screens the old Jacobin inquisitor, whose redoubtable physiognomy had, with a few imperious growls, fifteen months before, brought the barricades crashing down . . . The look was piercing, the mask twisted with anger, the clenched fists resting on the table either side of the microphone like two pistols of the hero of a cowboy film.18

  The General was in blistering form. After denouncing the pronunciamento undertaken by ‘a quart-pot of retired generals’ whose actions were ‘leading the nation straight to disaster’, he proclaimed solemnly: ‘In the name of France, I order that all means – I say clearly, all means – shall be used to stop these men . . . I forbid any Frenchman, and firstly, any soldier, to carry out their orders . . . The future of usurpers must be that which is reserved for them by the rigour of the law.’ The melodrama was deliberate. It forced the military, above all the rank-and-file, gathered around transistor radios in bases all over Algeria, to measure the extent of the mess that its officers were leading them into.

  The putsch collapsed. But the ‘dirty war’ of the OAS was just beginning.

  Americans have never experienced systematic urban terrorism. Historically it has been limited to Europe, the Maghreb, the Middle East and parts of West Asia. The OAS campaign was a textbook example of the use of terror to try to force a government to reverse its policies by provoking a spiral of violence which exceeds the limits a democracy can sustain.

  The summer of 1961 saw a constant drumbeat of murders of officials and army and police officers, both in Algeria and in metropolitan France. In September, de Gaulle’s car was ambushed as he was being driven back to Colombey for the weekend. The attack failed because, inexplicably, the main charge of plastic explosive did not detonate. The following month, 30,000 Algerian immigrants demonstrated in Paris in favour of independence. The police, infiltrated by OAS provocateurs, reacted with a level of violence not seen in the French capital since the destruction of the Commune almost a century before. Twelve thousand of the protesters were rounded up and detained at a football stadium. Many were tortured. More than a hundred were acknowledged officially to have died and hundreds more were injured. For days after, bodies were found floating in the Seine.

  After seven years of warfare, the situation had polarised. ‘All the Muslims are with the FLN,’ de Gaulle told the Cabinet, ‘and practically all the Europeans are with the OAS.’

  In March 1962, after the FLN agreed to a ceasefire, leading to independence, the OAS vowed to block the accords. For the next two months, all over the country, more than a hundred bombs exploded every day. In Paris, members of the Cabinet went in constant fear of assassination. In Algiers French soldiers opened fire on OAS supporters, killing forty-six Europeans and injuring more than a hundred. Initially the FLN retaliated against known OAS activists and spared the European population at large. But after Algerian independence on July 5 1962, the Arab
s’ long-repressed anger boiled over. As in France, after the German retreat, those who had been the last to join the struggle were at the forefront of the reprisals that followed. In Oran, as many as five thousand Europeans may have been massacred; no accurate figure was ever established. Far worse was the fate of the harkis, the Arabs who had sided with the French. At least 30,000 – and possibly several times that number – were slaughtered, often with appalling cruelty. Men were boiled alive, buried alive, emasculated.

  Over the next two years, all but a tiny minority of the settlers, many from families which had lived in Algeria for generations, returned to France. Each person was allowed to take only two suitcases of personal possessions. They brought with them accumulated hatreds which would poison race relations in France for decades to come.

  The settlers in Algeria, Mitterrand wrote later, had ‘wanted to keep everything . . . They lost everything.’

  The OAS and its supporters made one last effort to settle scores with the author of their misfortunes. On the evening of August 22, the General and his wife left the Elysée to drive to the military airport near Versailles from which they would fly to Colombey. At Petit Clamart, about three miles beyond the city limits, their car was ambushed. The subsequent investigation showed that almost 200 bullets had been fired, of which several passed within inches of the presidential couple. None of the occupants had even a scratch. When they reached the airport, de Gaulle, his suit still covered with fragments of glass, inspected the honour guard. His wife reminded an aide ‘not to forget the chickens’ which had been packed for the following day’s lunch. The only casualty that night was the police commandant at Colombey, who died of a heart attack after learning what had happened.

  It was the final spasm of yet another war, the third in twenty years, after Indochina and the debacle of 1940, which France had lost.

  The violence in Algeria obliterated all other considerations. Apart from two rather superficial speeches in the Senate in 1961, in which he was reduced to accusing de Gaulle of ‘making war just enough not to win it and peace just enough not to conclude it’, Mitterrand remained silent. Like the rest of the non-communist Left he had nothing to propose. In any case he was still shackled by the Observatory Affair. All he could do was keep quiet and hope that, as time passed, that ‘enormous, fantastic piece of stupidity’, as François Dalle had called it, would eventually be forgotten.