Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  In the autumn, the General announced a referendum on introducing direct suffrage for future presidential elections. Until then the Head of State had been elected indirectly, by a college of some 80,000 mayors, provincial councillors, MPs and senators. Now, using as a pretext the failed attempt to assassinate him at Petit Clamart, de Gaulle proposed that ‘at the end of my term in office, or if death or illness should interrupt it’, the next President should be chosen by the people.

  Shortly afterwards he called legislative elections. It was a favourite political trick: the referendum served as a plebiscite and the voters’ enthusiasm then spilled over into their choice of MPs. It did not work quite as well as he had hoped. But 62 per cent voted yes in the referendum and the Gaullists consolidated their position in parliament.

  ‘If we don’t do anything silly, we shall be there for thirty years,’ the Information Minister, Alain Peyrefitte, gloated. The General’s followers won 233 seats, which, with the support of right-wing allies, gave them a two-thirds majority. The Christian Democrat vote collapsed and de Gaulle’s most vocal opponents – Mendès France in the Eure; the pre-war Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, in Dunkerque; and Pascal Arrighi and the champions of ‘French Algeria’ – were all eliminated.

  All except one. Like Asterix’s mythical village of Armorique, which held out against imperial Rome, the Morvan, the gritty farming constituency in the eastern part of the Nièvre, where Mitterrand had been defeated four years earlier, stood firm against the Gaullist onslaught.

  During his years in the wilderness, Mitterrand had patched up relations with his Socialist rival, Dr Benoist, who in the second round stood down in his favour. The right-wing vote was divided, and on November 25, he was elected with 67 per cent of the vote. His rehabilitation was far from complete. But at least now he was back in the saddle, able to resume the career which, three years earlier, had so nearly been brought to a premature end.

  8

  De Gaulle Again

  IN THE WINTER of 1958, shortly after de Gaulle’s return, when the fortunes of the left-wing parties and of Mitterrand himself were at their lowest ebb, he had explained to Roland Dumas, then in hospital with a bone fracture from a skiing accident, his ideas for winning power. Mitterrand, who exalted friendship – ‘to have a friend, you have to be a friend’ – used to visit him a couple of times a week. One day, Dumas remembered, he took out a notebook and drew a circle. With one small group, he explained, they could create a political structure. Mitterrand then drew a second, larger circle around it: the first group would enter a bigger group and gain control of it from within. Finally he drew a third circle, taking up the entire page. In this way, by stages, he told Dumas, they could colonise the whole of the Left.

  It was the same tactic that he had used to win mastery of Pin’–Mitt’ in the Resistance, of the prisoners’ movement in the spring of 1945, and of the UDSR in the early 1950s, working not through orthodox, vertical, organisational channels but through networks of lateral contacts and circles of friends so attached to him that they were to all intents and purposes disciples.

  Mitterrand’s ostracism by the young men of the Autonomous Socialist Party, the PSA, coupled with the fallout from the Observatory Affair, seemed to deal a body blow to this elegant construction. In 1960, when he attended meetings of the ‘New Left’, always arriving late and sitting a little apart, the Chairman, Gilles Martinet, remembered being passed notes, warning: ‘If you let him speak, we shall leave.’

  Mitterrand persisted. ‘Each sarcasm, each invective, was a whiplash pushing him to meet the challenge,’ his brother, Robert, wrote. ‘These trials just made him more determined.’

  In fact being barred from the PSA was the best thing that could have happened to him. Had he been accepted he would have been surrounded by idealistic, ambitious youngsters, squabbling over political theory and utterly devoted to his mentor-cum-rival, Pierre Mendès France.

  Instead, in June 1960, Mitterrand founded a political club, the League for Republican Combat, or LCR, which took its inspiration from the Fabian Society, a socialist think-tank affiliated to the British Labour Party.1

  Unlike Britain, where ‘the club’, strategically located in Mayfair, redolent of leather armchairs, deep carpets, chandeliers and high ceilings, good whisky, fine claret and indifferent food, has been traditionally a social institution, France, ever since the Revolution in 1789, has had clubs whose raison d’être was political. In the waning days of the Fourth Republic, they had taken on a new lease of life. One of the oldest, the Club des Jacobins, whose original members had included Mirabeau, Robespierre and Saint-Just, had been resuscitated in 1951 by Charles Hernu, the young Radical who had rallied to Mitterrand after the Observatory Affair. By the early 1960s, more than a hundred clubs were active, occupying the void created by the failure of the traditional parties to offer an alternative to the Gaullist juggernaut.

  Most were small. Mitterrand’s League for Republican Combat had only forty members, most of them close friends, like Beauchamp, Dayan and Joseph Perrin, who had been with him since the war or earlier, and younger men like Dumas and Louis Mermaz, the future Speaker of the National Assembly, who had joined him in the 1950s. It was the first of the circles which he had drawn in his notebook at Dumas’s bedside, eighteen months earlier.

  The end of the Algerian war had brought hopes of a return to normality. But de Gaulle’s decision to introduce direct suffrage for the election of the Head of State convinced Mitterrand and many others that they were witnessing a dangerous extension of presidential power. In 1958, he said, the General had ‘cooked up a constitutional pie, [using as ingredients] a lark and a horse, the lark being democracy and the horse, personal power’. Since then,

  the modest part reserved for democracy has been shrinking to the point where it disappears, while the large part reserved for personal power has been growing to take up the whole space . . . What the Head of State is after is absolute power to do whatever he pleases . . . It is not even . . . a presidential regime. [It] is in fact the regime which all through time has been known only by one name and that name is dictatorship. It matters little to me whether this dictatorship is paternalistic or cruel . . . Dictatorships are paternalistic or cruel depending on their need, and they know only one need: permanence . . .2

  The tone had changed since the aftermath of the Observatory Affair. Whatever Mitterrand’s admiration for de Gaulle as a statesman, as the man to measure himself against, even, in some senses, as an anti-model, the General was now his declared enemy and was to be treated as such.

  Polemics aside, Mitterrand’s criticism of de Gaulle’s use of power could not easily be dismissed. The General had pushed through the referendum on direct suffrage despite a ruling by the country’s highest administrative court, the Council of State, that he was exceeding his powers. He had then browbeaten the Constitutional Council, the equivalent of the US Supreme Court, into declaring itself incompetent in the matter. The mild-mannered, well-respected President of the Senate, Gaston Monnerville, a Radical, was so incensed that he accused him of ‘warping the normal interplay of the institutions, openly violating the constitution . . . and abusing the people’.

  Half a century later, the questionable legality of the General’s methods has been forgotten. The constitution of the Fifth Republic remains the cornerstone of French political life and, apart from occasional tinkering at the margins, no one wishes to change it.3

  But in 1962 de Gaulle’s actions were viewed as a disguised coup d’état. He acknowledged himself that the introduction of direct suffrage had been a declaration of war against the political parties. ‘I wanted to break [them],’ he told the Cabinet shortly after the referendum. ‘I was the only one able to do it . . . and I was right when all the others were wrong . . . The parties are beyond redemption.’

  In this climate, Mitterrand’s tirades fell on receptive ears.

  De Gaulle was not a dictator, but nor was he a very good democrat. France, in the 1960s, was no
t a very good democracy either.

  In 1961, a High Military Tribunal had been set up to deal with terrorists, an understandable necessity during the Algerian war. But when it pronounced a sentence with which de Gaulle disagreed (imprisonment, rather than the death sentence, on General Salan in May 1962), he ordered that it be disbanded and replaced by a Military Court of Justice. After the Council of State ruled that the new body was illegal, he replaced it with a State Security Court which, as its name implied, bore an unfortunate resemblance to similar institutions in the People’s Democracies in the East. Even the right-wing newspaper, Le Figaro, asked why the struggle against subversion could not be carried out ‘without offending gravely against the essential principles of the law’. When the judiciary and the executive branch came into conflict, the government expected the judiciary to give way and woe betide the judge who failed to do so.4

  The General’s attitude to radio and television was much the same: they were there to obey. The government had a monopoly – no private broadcasting station was permitted in France – and used it exclusively for its own propaganda.

  Not all of this should be laid at de Gaulle’s door. The tradition of a strong centralised state was deeply rooted. But the General’s personality, his military background and his army officer’s conviction that subordinates should follow orders, did not improve matters.

  Heir to Colbert and Richelieu, the Jacobins and Napoleon, he was now in his early seventies, his sight was deteriorating, he was developing a prostate condition and increasingly feeling his age.5 At each new setback, he would ruminate morbidly about the imminence of death before pulling himself together and bludgeoning his opponents.6 With the impatience not of youth but of old age came an outsize idea of his own role – he spoke of being ‘the incarnation of the legitimacy of the nation’ and mused that, when he died, ‘there will be nothing to replace me . . . I have re-established the monarchy in my favour, but after me, no one will be able to impose himself on the country.’

  When the Algerian war no longer provided an alibi for the General’s methods, the terrain for the opposition became more favourable.

  Like Saint-Just, the 25-year-old revolutionary who had called for Louis XVI to be executed not for his crimes but for his tyranny, Mitterrand attacked not de Gaulle’s policies but the Sovereign himself. ‘One does not reign innocently,’ Saint-Just had famously declared.7 Mitterrand made that the centrepiece of an incendiary, book-length polemic, Le Coup d’état permanent, published in May 1964:

  Times of misfortune secrete a singular race of men who flourish only in storms and torments. [For] de Gaulle, [in 1940 when] disaster overtook France, it was a deliverance . . . War and defeat allowed de Gaulle to demonstrate his stature . . .

  [But] once France was liberated . . . there was no longer any misfortune which would allow [him] to sink his teeth into the weft of French politics . . . With nothing to do, he languished . . . It is a Gaullist truth: there can be no France to save unless France first is lost! Oh, what a temptation to give things a helping hand so as to bring that moment closer! . . . At Colombey, impatience was setting in. Would misfortune arrive in time for the man who was living in the secret hope of one last rendezvous to measure himself against it?

  For de Gaulle, the absolute evil was not the war, the abandonment of Indochina and Algeria . . . It was the Fourth Republic . . . He knew that decolonisation was . . . inexorable. But [he gave] the impression that everything could still be saved if only he returned to power. [To that end] he fed the rancours of nationalism, transfixed the army with the impossible hope that the situation could be reversed, and won the favours of the colonialists.

  That is how Gaullism worked.

  Gaullism? What Gaullism? . . . Does it still deserve the name, this Gaullism that . . . concluded an astonishing alliance . . . with both divisions of French nationalism, passing over the schism of 1940? . . . Former members of the [Gaullist] networks and the Free French intelligence service in London; of the fascist party of Jacques Doriot; of the Milice; not to mention the captains of the world of business; the old guard of Action Française; the extreme Right of Pierre Poujade; the failures who were nostalgic for fascism – all of them supported him!8

  Mitterrand considered the Coup d’état permanent to be the best book he ever wrote. It was certainly the most ferocious, the most coherent and original – a venomous caricature, in the pure style of a nineteenth-century pamphleteer, of a colossus whose feet, if not made of clay, had surreptitiously crossed the border of illegality to bring their owner back to power. For that was the core of Mitterrand’s argument. De Gaulle, he wrote, had been ‘a lucid and courageous soldier’ who, in 1940, had come to France’s aid, but ‘I deplore his attempt to benefit illicitly from that glory, the incomparable historical achievement that was his.’ He had taken office through ‘the kind of break-in which precedes a burglary’, founding his regime with ‘an astonishing mixture of duplicity and boldness’ on a coup d’état which gave him personal power at the expense of the personal freedoms of the nation.

  Ridicule being the most powerful weapon in a polemicist’s armoury, Mitterrand illustrated his thesis with the case of a humble citizen named Vicari:

  Vicari? Why Vicari? Who is Vicari? Fair questions, for the official gazettes have neglected to inform the French people . . . of the act of which Vicari was the author. That act is recounted in a judgment by the 17th Magistrates’ Division of the Higher Court of the Département of the Seine, pronounced at a public hearing on April 1 1963 under the rubric, ‘Offences against the President of the Republic’, which stated:

  ‘Given that Vicari has admitted . . . that he shouted “Hou hou!” and whistled as the presidential motorcade passed by, taking the Head of State to the Arc de Triomphe; [Given that] the accused claims he did so to attract the attention of a friend in the crowd on the other side of the road, [but] that this explanation cannot be accepted because Mr Vicari was unable to name the friend concerned; [and given that] the shouts of Mr Vicari . . . were of a nature to cause offence to the President of the Republic, [the Court] declares Vicari guilty and sentences him to a fine of 1000 francs [£100 or US $280] plus costs.’

  So Vicari cried ‘Hou hou!’ at General de Gaulle on the Champs-Elysées and his ‘Hou hou!’ shook the foundations of the State . . . No doubt some ill-intentioned spirits [will try to defend him], but every honest person knows that a country capable of punishing ‘Hou hou!’ with a 1,000 franc fine is a country defended against anarchy, against terrorism, against regicide, in short against anti-Gaullism and above all against that spontaneous, shameless, exclamatory anti-Gaullism which dares to stage intolerable excesses right in the middle of the public thoroughfare . . . Nothing could be more damaging than to let these ‘Hou hous!’ spread and take all the space reserved for vivats and bravos.

  [What is more], the same day that Vicari proffered his ‘Hou hou!’, and at the very same spot, another citizen of the same sort [named Castaing], of equal incivility and vulgarity, went so far – without it being possible to establish from his conduct that he was conspiring with the first-named, which, had it been so, would undoubtedly have revealed the existence of a plot – as to shout three words, which, when combined in a phrase, also constituted a deliberate offence to the Head of State: ‘Go and retire!’ Fortunately, as in the first case, the 17th Division was watching. By means of a 500 franc fine, order and morality were safeguarded . . .

  It is noteworthy . . . that in the scales of justice, to invite General de Gaulle to return to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises to enjoy a well-merited rest costs only half as much as . . . that enigmatic ‘Hou hou!’, which might be a password or a call for insurrection . . . a crime of lèse-majesté, a challenge to History, an affront to a legend, a cry of sedition.9

  Mitterrand’s task was made easier by the tendency of the law to be an ass but he was making a serious point. In de Gaulle’s France, the law was not only an ass but a subservient one. And when that was not enough, the Service d�
��Action Civique (Civic Action Service) or SAC, a Gaullist militia controlled by Jacques Foccart, the General’s éminence grise, which had been set up to counter the OAS and was notorious for its strong-arm tactics and its ties with the underworld, was available for more unsavoury tasks.

  The separation of powers was systematically undermined. The General himself, in a much-quoted passage, had explained at a news conference in January 1964 his view of how the presidency should function:

  The indivisible authority of the State is delegated in its entirety to the President by the people who have elected him. There is no authority either ministerial, civil, military or judicial which can be conferred or maintained other than by him. It is for him to find the balance between the supreme domain, which is his alone, and those [domains] in which he delegates his powers to others.10

  De Gaulle’s biographer, Jean Lacouture, who was among the journalists present, wrote years afterwards that ‘no one could hear . . . those incandescent words without feeling they were witnessing a vast restoration of centuries of monarchical power’. Mitterrand seized on them as the ultimate proof of the General’s decadence:

  What is the Fifth Republic if not the possession of power by one man? And who is he, this one man, de Gaulle? Duce, Führer, Caudillo, Conducator, Guide?fn1 . . . I call the Gaullist regime a dictatorship because, when all is said and done, that is what it most resembles . . . ‘There is no authority [dixit the General], other than that conferred or maintained by him’. No need for a 101-gun salute to herald the accession of a sovereign. A few words, spoken in a neutral tone of voice, sufficed.11