Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  The Coup d’état permanent established Mitterrand as the Saint-Just of the opposition. For the first time a left-wing leader had attacked the Right with the same virulence, if not the same tone or methods, that the extremist journals of the 1930s, Gringoire and Le Crapouillot, had once employed to savage the Left. Four and a half years after the Observatory Affair, he was again a contender for power. But he was ‘a’ leader, not yet ‘the’ leader of the anti-Gaullist opposition.

  In 1963, the political clubs, which until then had been little more than talking shops, began to organise. That September, at Mitterrand’s instigation, Georges Beauchamp and Charles Hernu established a coordinating committee, called the Centre for Institutional Action, which brought together the ‘Jacobins’ and Mitterrand’s League for Republican Combat. It foreshadowed a much larger movement with an equally cumbersome name, the Convention of Republican Institutions, whose founding congress, the following year, was attended by 600 delegates representing the clubs, the Socialist and Radical parties, the Christian Democrats, the ‘Unified Socialist Party’, or PSU, which had by then replaced the PSA in the alphabet soup from which French parties draw their names, as well as delegates from Masonic lodges, Catholic movements, trades unions and student federations. The Convention became the vehicle to unify the Left. A Standing Committee was elected, dominated by Mitterrand’s allies and supporters.

  The second circle was now in place.

  The name he had chosen was not innocent. The Convention of 1792 had voted to send Louis XVI to the guillotine. Fast-forward 170 years and the Convention of 1964 aimed to bring down the republican monarch, Charles de Gaulle.

  But who should be chosen as challenger?

  Hernu’s ‘Jacobins’ favoured Mitterrand. The ‘New Left’ disagreed. The weekly magazine, l’Express, edited by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, launched a campaign to find the ideal candidate, whom it called ‘Mr X’. A consensus developed that the man who would fit the bill best was the Mayor of Marseille, Gaston Defferre. And since the suspense could not be maintained indefinitely, in the spring of 1964, more than a year and a half before the election was due, Defferre confirmed that he was willing to stand.

  The Mayor of Marseille was calm, methodical and patient, a man with his feet on the ground who radiated reassurance. It was thought that his reputation as a conciliator would enable him to unite the opposition. The downside was that he was uncharismatic, ill at ease with crowds and, as a speaker, in the judgement of the French historian, Pierre Viansson-Ponté, ‘able in a matter of minutes to discourage his most ardent supporters, transform[ing] a warm, lively audience into a cold, silent assembly which puts up with, rather than listens to, his dry, distant words’.

  At first, everything seemed to be going Defferre’s way. In April 1964, Mitterrand had a run-in with Georges Pompidou, in which, for once, he came off badly. The Prime Minister, whom he had savaged as de Gaulle’s poodle, hit back:

  The truth is, Mr Mitterrand, that you are faithful to the Fourth Republic, [in other words] to a path sown with disasters and sometimes with dishonour . . . The future is not on your side. It is not with ghosts . . . The French people don’t always know what they want, but they do know what they don’t want. And what they don’t want is to fall again into your dreadful hands. Were they tempted to forget that, you would always be there, thank God, to remind them.12

  To Defferre’s backers, here was the proof that they had made a wise choice. Mitterrand was too vulnerable to the charge that he was yesterday’s man.

  But as the campaign developed, problems emerged. Both Mitterrand and Pierre Mendès France promised Defferre their support, and Mitterrand worked actively on his behalf. The third of the left-wing heavyweights, Guy Mollet, the Socialist Party leader, was reticent. Apart from personal animosities – he and Defferre loathed each other – they disagreed profoundly over strategy.

  Mollet wanted a campaign founded on the values of the Left.

  Defferre wanted a grand alliance, embracing everyone from the Centre-Right to the non-communist Left, modelled on the Democratic Party in America which had brought John F. Kennedy to power. It sounded progressive and modern. But beneath the new clothes, it was the same old ‘Third Force’ approach that had been used in the late 1940s, based on the exclusion of the two extremes, the Communists and the Gaullists.

  The original Third Force had bitten the dust in September 1951, when Mollet’s Socialists walked out after a dispute with the Christian Democrats over state financing for church schools. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. In the early hours of the morning on June 18 1965, after more than a year of negotiations, Defferre’s candidacy collapsed for the same reasons. Officially the cause was the schools issue – the eternal stumbling block between Left and Right in France – but the root of the problem was deeper. The Christian Democrats were a right-wing party. As Mitterrand had realised from the start – although he had been careful not to say so – agreement between them and the Socialists would always be a mirage.

  A week later Defferre confirmed his withdrawal. ‘Mr X’ had imploded. Less than six months before the elections, the Left was without a candidate.

  In Mitterrand’s view, Defferre’s candidacy failed because it had been misconceived. Right and Left could be temporary allies, but only in exceptional circumstances and for a very limited time. What was needed to confront de Gaulle was not a dog’s breakfast of parties spanning the whole of the centre ground, but unity on the Left, which meant coming to terms with the Communists.

  The question was, how could he bring that about?

  Mitterrand’s experiences with the Communist Party during and after the war, first in the Resistance, then with the prisoners’ federation, the FNPG, and its newspaper, Libres, had left him in two minds. On the one hand, as he had told Georges Dayan, the Communists were ‘a pain’ – so rigid that dialogue was impossible and bent on taking control of every organisation they joined. On the other, they were a force in the Resistance, and afterwards in post-war politics, which it would be foolish to ignore. ‘We can’t do anything,’ he had told Philippe Dechartre, ‘unless we take into account communist arithmetic.’ As individuals, Mitterrand found, they often merited respect. He had got on well with Maurice Thorez when they had both been ministers, and knew and liked Thorez’s successor as Communist Party leader, Waldeck Rochet, whom he had first met in London as the Party’s representative with the Free French in 1944. Waldeck was from a poor farming family and had started work as a cowherd at the age of eight. Mitterrand had appreciated his company and had carried back to France a letter for his wife.

  Politically, in the late ’40s and early ’50s, he and the Communists had been poles apart. The Right, for its own purposes, had tried to paint him as a communist sympathiser. But in three successive elections from 1946 to 1956, he had been returned to parliament by conservative voters in the Nièvre on a staunchly anti-communist platform.

  Mitterrand’s aim at that time had been to weaken the Communists by stealing their clothes. Since the late 1940s, he had argued that the goal must be to reduce Communist support to below 10 per cent, because then ‘they can no longer do harm’. In 1955 he told the UDSR, ‘The more Communist MPs are elected, the more . . . it bites into the representation of the socialist or liberal Left, and makes the constitution of a Centre-Left majority difficult if not impossible.’ The solution was for the non-communist Left ‘to realise a certain number of perfectly acceptable working-class social ideals which the Communists have confiscated’. As long as the left-wing parties were perceived as being in the pocket of the ruling class, paying no more than lip service to the goals of the workers they were supposed to represent, the latter would inevitably conclude that the Communists were the only party which could be relied on to support them.

  After de Gaulle’s reappearance upended the political chessboard, Mitterrand and the Communists started to develop a tentative rapport based on their shared opposition to the General’s return to power.13 On May
28 1958, Mitterrand took part in a demonstration of 200,000 people in Paris, organised jointly by the left-wing parties, including the Communists, to defend the Fourth Republic. Afterwards, Communist MPs applauded his speech attacking de Gaulle in parliament.

  Since the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had launched de-Stalinisation two years earlier, the French Communist Party had been searching for ways to end its isolation. Mitterrand, for his part, was beginning to understand that as long as communist voters were locked in an electoral ghetto the victory of the Left was impossible. But to sup with Thorez and his friends it was necessary to use a long spoon. In the 1950s, any non-communist politician seen dealing with the ‘Party of Moscow’ would be treated as a pariah. ‘The Communists are not on the Left,’ Guy Mollet liked to say, ‘They are in the East.’ For a time Mitterrand maintained a prudent distance. ‘The working class,’ he declared, ‘knows perfectly well that the Communist Party is playing games.’ When the Party’s Central Committee next met, his old friend, Waldeck, retorted: ‘François Mitterrand is not unaware that anti-communism plays the game of fascism.’

  It marked the beginning of a very long hesitation waltz.

  In the November 1958 elections, the Communist Party candidate in the Morvan stood down in Mitterrand’s favour. The following spring, in an interview with the Radical journal, La Nef (‘The Nave’), he said the future of the Left depended on uniting all ‘those who so wish’ against de Gaulle and his allies. The formulation was deliberately vague but it could be interpreted as meaning that the Communists were included. Six months later, after the Observatory Affair, the Communists were the only group in the Senate to vote unanimously against the lifting of Mitterrand’s parliamentary immunity.

  For the next three years, while he remained in the political wilderness, nothing moved. But the decision to introduce direct suffrage for the presidential election and the prospect of the Gaullists indefinitely consolidating their hold on power persuaded the Socialists, for the first time, to conclude an electoral pact with the Communists for the second round of the 1962 parliamentary elections. Both parties did better than expected. The following year Mitterrand drew the lesson, urging ‘all republicans’ – in other words, the whole of the Left – to unite in 1965 behind a single presidential candidate:

  My attitude toward the Communists is simple: everything which contributes to the struggle and to victory over a regime which shows a tendency to the dictatorship of one man and the establishment of a one-party system is good. Four to five million voters, who are from the people, vote communist. To neglect their support and their votes would be culpable or just plain stupid.14

  Mitterrand’s strategy was to create a common front of four groups: the nascent Convention of Republican Institutions; the Socialists and the Radical Party; the ‘New Left’, led by the Unified Socialist Party, the PSU, of which Mendès France was the guru; and the Communists.

  To the Socialists he proclaimed his left-wing credentials. ‘I personally believe,’ he told a party colloquium, ‘that the choice of socialism is the only response to the Gaullist experience,’ adding, in a backhanded reference to his problems with the PSU: ‘That is a statement of principle and I am not going to take an exam [to prove it] every six months!’

  The Radicals, whose new leader, Maurice Faure, six years Mitterrand’s junior, had been among the few to offer him a helping hand after the Observatory Affair, were a broad church whose members ranged from the Centre-Left to the Centre-Right. They included right-wing notables to whom the Socialists, not to speak of the Communists, were anathema, and vice versa. But Mitterrand made a point of attending their congresses and affiliated himself to their parliamentary group.

  He could do little to influence the ‘New Left’. But he calculated that if the others joined together, the PSU would have no choice but to follow.

  The Communists, at a time when the Kremlin was supporting the ‘parliamentary road to socialism’, were open to an arrangement.

  It was a delicate balancing act.

  Straddling contradictions was the kind of exercise at which Mitterrand excelled. As long as Defferre was standing he could do nothing. But he was able to keep the pieces in place throughout the eighteen months that it took for ‘Mr X’s’ candidacy to unravel.

  On June 25 1965, when the Mayor of Marseille withdrew, the way was finally open. Mitterrand had been expecting it since the beginning of the year.15 But now that the moment had arrived, the ground still needed to be prepared. For another two and a half months, he waited, testing the extent of his support and trying to flush out potential opponents.

  The first to rally to his cause was Pierre Mendès France. Mendès’s decision, once it became known, did not please the ‘New Left’. The leaders of the PSU besieged his apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, pleading with him to stand himself, because otherwise ‘it will be that villain, Mitterrand’. But Mendès was adamant. He considered the Fifth Republic to be fundamentally undemocratic and the direct election of the President a vulgar Americanism which reduced the primary act of the country’s political life to the level of a horse race on which the electorate was invited to place bets. He refused to have any part in it. Moreover, he added – serving up the argument of last resort he always used at such moments – France was not yet ready to elect a Jewish President. He told Mitterrand that he could not approve an alliance with the Communists, but Mitterrand said he would go ahead anyway. They agreed to disagree.

  Maurice Faure promised his support and Waldeck Rochet sent word that the Communist Party viewed Mitterrand’s candidature favourably.16

  That left Guy Mollet. The Socialist Party leader worried that if Mitterrand succeeded, his own position would be threatened. But, like Mendès, he had no desire to stand himself. Faute de mieux, the Socialists acquiesced, but not without setting conditions.

  ‘The Socialists . . . let me run,’ Mitterrand wrote later, ‘but at the end of a tether on which they kept a firm hold. All contact with the Communists was forbidden to me under pain of their support being withdrawn. I realised a little late that they wanted a candidate who [would not] reach out too far either to the Left or the Right and who would disappear without trace as soon as the election was over.’

  In fact all Mitterrand’s rivals had reached the same conclusion. No one could beat de Gaulle. There was a good chance that whoever tried would make such a dismal performance that his career would never recover. Better to let Mitterrand try his luck as an independent than risk the reputation of a mainstream party leader.

  On September 5, he returned to Paris from Hossegor, where he had spent part of the summer with Danielle and the children.

  Three days later, de Gaulle gave a press conference at the Elysée about the European Community, which France was then boycotting under the so-called ‘policy of the empty chair’ in protest against attempts to replace the principle of unanimity by majority decision-making, seen by the General as an infringement of sovereignty. As he was completing his diatribe against ‘the areopagus of stateless, irresponsible technocrats’ in Brussels, the French news agency flashed: ‘Mitterrand candidate’.

  He had timed the declaration deliberately to steal the General’s thunder. It fell horribly flat. Press coverage was minimal and largely negative.

  Mitterrand’s problem was that he was seen, on the Left even more than on the Right, as unprincipled and devious, a ‘ghost’ from the Fourth Republic, as Pompidou had called him, prepared to accept any compromise so long as it would bring him to power. Le Canard enchaîné wrote that he was ‘so labyrinthine that he gets lost in his own diversions and ends up trapped in . . . an undergrowth of intrigues which might be taken from a novel’. Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, who had been for so long his loyal supporter, predicted in l’Express that he would take the Left to its worst defeat for a hundred years. Jean-Paul Sartre, in Les temps modernes, wrote that if Mitterrand was the Left’s candidate, it was ‘because he expresses its deliquescence’. Pierre Viansson-Ponté called him
‘the worst candidate possible’.

  But it was the venom of an article in Le Monde by a left-wing lawyer, Pierre Stibbe, that stung Mitterrand most. The writer, speaking for the PSU, described the perfect candidate: ‘a man of absolute moral rigour, [immune from] personal attack, [never guilty of] opportunism, naked ambition, a taste for intrigue or for mounting “affairs”, or compromises with the regime of Vichy’ – in short everything, or so he implied, that Mitterrand was not.

  ‘[That] article alone,’ he wrote later, ‘would have removed my last hesitations, had I had any.’

  In private the back-stabbing was still worse. A PSU leader, Marc Heurgon, asked: ‘The Right is not putting forward Pesquet. Why are we presenting Mitterrand?’

  All through the autumn, attempts continued to find an alternative. Servan-Schreiber urged Maurice Faure to stand. He refused. The PSU tried to draft Daniel Mayer, Mollet’s predecessor as Socialist Party chief. He refused too.17 Then, at the beginning of October, Mollet himself, supposedly one of Mitterrand’s main backers, suggested that Antoine Pinay, who had begun his career under the Third Republic, might be tempted out of retirement. That the head of the Socialist Party should publicly favour an elderly right-winger as the best chance to oppose de Gaulle was so outlandish that even Mitterrand was taken aback. Pinay had indeed been tempted, but after looking at the arithmetic and realising that he would be trounced, had decided to leave well alone.18

  Mendès France tried to set things straight, declaring in an interview at the end of October:

  It seems that some on the Left have scruples [about François Mitterrand]. Let me say here something which for me is decisive. On every serious matter for the last 25 years, I have always found him on the right side of the barricades . . . Mitterrand is the man best placed to unite the whole range of socialist and democratic votes. I do not see how anyone can still hesitate. I am voting for him, and I ask those who have confidence in me to vote for him too.19