by Philip Short
But even Mendès was reluctant to campaign for him, leading some to wonder whether he was not hoping secretly that the younger man would break his teeth against the Gaullist fortress. It was not so, but his attitude offended Mitterrand and revived the bad blood between them.20
The PSU eventually decided, as Mitterrand had anticipated, that it had no choice but to support him, but it did so with bad grace. Michel Rocard came up with the formula, ‘critical support’, which enabled the party to save face and gave Mitterrand another reason to bear him a lasting grudge. Even then, Gilles Martinet and other diehards engaged in a guerrilla campaign. Claude Estier, a long-time ally, discovered one evening that Martinet’s journal, Le Nouvel Observateur, had set up that week’s cover story with the headline, ‘Mitterrand, Never!’ He was able, in extremis, to persuade the typesetters to amend it to ‘Mitterrand, Why?’
Even for a man who thrived on adversity, it was a daunting challenge. He wrote later:
I was alone. I had neither the support of a party, nor of a Church, nor of a counter-Church, nor of a newspaper, nor of a current of opinion. I had no money and no expectation of [getting] any . . . So many reasons not to be a candidate or so many reasons to be one.21
That was overdrawn. He had the backing of the Communists and the Federation of the Democratic Socialist Left, the FGDS, yet another ephemeral organisation with a name that stuck to the tongue, which had been created by Hernu and a sympathetic industrialist, François de Grossouvre, as an umbrella movement for the Convention, the Socialists, the Radicals, what remained of the UDSR and two smaller left-wing parties. But keeping them all together required extraordinary contortions of political ingenuity.
He had little money – by his own account, less than a million francs (£100,000 or US $240,000)fn2 – and his campaign staff consisted of a dozen volunteers, crammed into four small rooms at the former offices of the UDSR in the rue du Louvre in central Paris. Paulette Decraene, who later became his secretary, remembered: ‘The equipment was rundown, we had three phone lines, four typewriters and a duplicating machine out of the ark, which if you weren’t careful spilled greasy black ink over everything.’22 Her husband, Philippe, a journalist with the French news agency, lugged sacks of fliers after work each evening to the Central Post Office, for mailing to the provinces. Even Danielle’s partner, Jean Balenci, was roped in to accompany the candidate on campaign trips in a four-seater light aircraft, which was all they could afford. One day they flew through gale-force winds to Corsica to discover that Mitterrand’s rally had been cancelled because the storm was still so violent that tiles were being blown off roofs. Another journey, to the Massif Central, almost came to grief when the pilot found a herd of cows grazing on the grass runway and had to make low-level passes to frighten them off before the plane could land.
But what they lacked in means they made up for in enthusiasm. Their slogan was: ‘A young President for a modern France!’
In October, Jean Lecanuet, the new Christian Democrat leader, declared his candidacy. He was 45 years old, handsome, energetic and quick-thinking. The press dubbed him ‘the French Kennedy’. Against de Gaulle, thirty years his senior, he was the future challenging the past.
On the extreme-Right, Mitterrand’s old adversary, Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, tilted quixotically at the Gaullist windmill, winning amused attention but not necessarily votes.
Finally, on November 4, a week before the deadline for candidates to declare themselves, General de Gaulle announced on television that, as expected, he would seek a second term because otherwise, he warned balefully, ‘the Republic will immediately collapse and France will have to undergo, this time with no possible recourse, a confounding of the State even more disastrous than those it has known before.’ In other words, ‘après moi le déluge’.
The opinion polls predicted that de Gaulle would triumph with 66 per cent of the vote. Mitterrand was credited with 16 per cent.
De Gaulle’s announcement opened the way to three weeks of campaigning which, as one journalist wrote, were ‘literally stupefying’. For the first time the government was compelled to allow its political opponents to speak freely on television.23 The nation was mesmerised.
Lecanuet came across well, looking breezy and modern, totally at ease in the ‘high-tech world’ of the 1960s. De Gaulle, who, as his lead began to erode, eventually decided that he would have to campaign after all, looked his age, visibly ill at ease at having to compete publicly with upstarts.
Mitterrand was still worse.
Television is a caustic medium, exposing and amplifying traits which normally remain hidden. In Mitterrand’s case, what came across was a constant battle to control his own nervousness. Georges Dayan told him, ‘when you speak, your eyes keep blinking as if you were flashing the headlights of your car.’ But it was stronger than he was. Mitterrand was an introvert. Television did not come naturally. In 1965 each appearance was an ordeal. He grumbled that the technicians made his voice sound like Donald Duck. The truth, as he admitted later, was that he was simply not very good at it.
Nevertheless it was television that made the campaign catch fire. By late November, de Gaulle’s projected score had fallen to 51 per cent.
On the Left, the sniping at Mitterrand’s candidature ceased. He criss-crossed the country, working 20 hours a day, speaking at rallies where each crowd was bigger and more enthusiastic than the one before: 5,000 in Paris on November 22; nearly 10,000 in Lille the next day; twice as many at Grenoble.
As the campaign drew to a close, he was buoyed up by the certainty that at last he had found the right path. ‘In politics,’ he told Pierre Mauroy, a young Socialist Party leader, ‘there are ideas, and there are men. If we can gather together a hundred men who are determined and who agree on the main elements of policy . . . one day we will rule France.’
On December 5, at 8 p.m., the results exceeded both the opinion polls and his own expectations: de Gaulle, 44.6 per cent; Mitterrand, 31.7; Lecanuet, 15.6 and Tixier-Vignancour, 5.2. He had forced the General into a run-off. ‘Blasphemy!’ wrote Pierre Viansson-Ponté in Le Monde.
Mitterrand had understood what no one else had seen. A presidential election by direct suffrage was fundamentally different from anything France had experienced before. It was not, as Mendès France would have liked, a choice between two programmes. It was not, as de Gaulle believed, a referendum on his policies.24 It was a choice between personalities. The General? Or someone else? The only programme Mitterrand offered was to ‘oppose the arbitrariness of personal power, chauvinistic nationalism and social conservatism’, which, as the right-wing Figaro commented, was vague enough for almost everyone to support. And that, of course, was the point. In 1965, the General’s outsize ego so dominated the political landscape that the identity of his opponent was secondary. So long as the challenger offered a credible alternative, the only thing that counted, in Mendès’s dismissive metaphor, was which horse would win.
De Gaulle groused and threatened to give up before pulling himself together and throwing himself back into the fray. But in the campaign for the second round, the dynamic had changed. It was no longer de Gaulle towering over a few midgets. The General was face to face with a single adversary, whom he now had to take seriously and whose stature was accordingly transformed.
Pompidou urged him to attack Mitterrand for colluding with the Communists. ‘Absolutely not!’ the General told him. ‘No question of a campaign of Left against Right. That’s what Mitterrand is dreaming of. We won’t make him that gift.’ De Gaulle, quicker on the uptake than his Prime Minister, had grasped the new rules. Mitterrand’s strength was the support of a large part of the Left. To oppose him, de Gaulle needed to appeal to both Left and Right.
On the principle that an enemy’s enemy is a friend, Tixier-Vignancour called on his followers to give Mitterrand their backing, as did some former leaders of the OAS. To those who urged him to refuse support from such unsavoury quarters, Mitterrand retorted that it was not up t
o him to select those who wished to vote for him.25 But he rejected the idea of a compromise with the Christian Democrats, even if that meant only a lukewarm endorsement from Lecanuet. The first round had convinced him that his future lay with the Left.
In this single combat, both sides told their partisans to lie low.
When the Interior Minister, Roger Frey, informed de Gaulle that he had discovered a photograph of Mitterrand at Vichy with Marshal Pétain, the General forbade him to use it. ‘We must think of the future,’ de Gaulle told him. ‘One never knows what it will bring. This man may one day, perhaps, be President of France. Let us not sully him.’ Ministers were instructed not to raise the Observatory Affair. Mitterrand abandoned the incendiary language of the Coup d’état permanent. They duelled on a basis if not of equality at least of wary respect. Mitterrand knew he could not win. There were moments when de Gaulle was not so sure.
On December 19, when all the votes had been counted, de Gaulle was re-elected with 55.2 per cent. Mitterrand obtained 44.8. It was an honourable result. Yet for the General, the winner, it carried a whiff of failure. He had been forced to come down from his pedestal and, for the first time since his return to power, to acknowledge a serious rival. The Statue had revealed a weakness which, less than four years later, would bring his rule to an end.
In contrast, Mitterrand, the loser, had proved himself a president-in-waiting. The Observatory and his long years as a minister under the Fourth Republic had been relegated to the background. If not yet the Left’s undisputed leader, he had become its dominant figure. Mendès France and Mollet retained influence, but they, rather than Mitterrand, now appeared as yesterday’s men. In the country at large, the election had given him a status which, six months earlier, was unimaginable.
François Mitterrand’s transformation in the winter of 1965 was due above all to a system which he had strenuously opposed.
Had the President still been chosen by a college of 80,000 conservative dignitaries, drawn from every village and small town in France, no left-wing candidate could ever have succeeded. De Gaulle had embraced direct suffrage as establishing a mystic bond between President and people, legitimising the regalian role of the Head of State as elected monarch. Mitterrand had condemned it as incompatible with parliamentary democracy and a dangerous extension of the President’s already vast powers. But every coin has two sides. By elevating the presidency to new heights, de Gaulle had also made it dependent on the people. It would prove to be the crucial step in France’s evolution towards modern democracy.
If the General’s reform opened the way for Mitterrand’s ascension, other factors also played their part.
Moscow, for foreign policy reasons, had wanted de Gaulle to stay in power. Loyal to the Western Alliance but recalcitrant to Washington’s hegemony, he had established diplomatic relations with China (breaking the US-led diplomatic embargo); loosened French links with NATO; and obstructed progress towards European unity. That was more than enough to make him the Kremlin’s candidate. It was Mitterrand’s good fortune that Waldeck Rochet, who had taken over from Maurice Thorez only four months earlier, had decided to put the French Communist Party’s interests first. Supporting Mitterrand’s campaign, Waldeck decided, was its best hope of breaking out of isolation and regaining a meaningful role in French politics. The fact that he and Mitterrand had known and appreciated each other in London during the war had helped. Had the Party been in different hands, Mitterrand might well have been unable to maintain the delicate balancing act which kept both the Socialists and the Communists on board.
There was also a psychological component.
Mitterrand’s brother, Robert, wrote that his pugnacity was fuelled by a desire for revenge. The ‘Leaks Affair’ and, above all, the events at the Observatory had been exploited by the Right to try to destroy his political career. François Mitterrand was not a man to forgive and forget. The cold anger that found expression in the vitriol of the Coup d’état permanent redoubled his determination to prove his enemies wrong.
So did his relationship with Anne Pingeot, which had begun in the summer of 1963.
Laurence Soudet, who became their close friend, had been introduced to Mitterrand in the early 1960s by her fiancé, Pierre, who had worked for him when he had been Justice Minister. The Soudets had a cottage at Gordes, a pretty hill-village in Provence. François and Anne often stayed with them. ‘We made a foursome,’ she remembered. ‘We went out all the time together. Ah, youth!’
As Laurence told it, François became a different person after he fell in love with Anne. ‘I can tell you exactly when he changed. It was the month before Kennedy was killed . . . It was extraordinary. His private, personal and intellectual life suddenly all came together.’ He changed both in small ways, giving up smoking, developing a passion for architecture, in which he had shown little interest before, and in larger ones, becoming fascinated by ‘the way great historical figures had built their societies, rather than just the cultivation of power’. But above all, she said, the relationship provided ‘an affective continuity which gave him solidity as a human being . . . which ultimately had an effect on his political life. Obviously, that’s very difficult to evaluate, but I’m convinced it played a part.’
The interplay of private life and public career is always opaque, indirect and invisible to outsiders. In August 1965, two years after their relationship had begun and a month before he declared his candidature, he and Anne became lovers. It was the final proof – after periods of doubt and hesitation, including a trial separation which had only confirmed the strength of their feelings – that for both of them a new world was opening. One may legitimately wonder whether there was not a connection between that private fulfilment and the energy and confidence which Mitterrand brought to the presidential campaign that followed. What is certain is that the relationship gave him a stability he had not known before. Anne said later she felt the basis of the understanding which developed between them was that they shared ‘the same values . . . which were patriarchal and corresponded to his childhood . . . He was a man who kept everything in different compartments, and in that particular compartment – the compartment of his childhood, which was very deep – he and I were completely on the same wavelength.’
Danielle was then living her own life with Jean Balenci. Before he had become committed to Anne, Mitterrand had been ‘a free spirit’, as Laurence Soudet put it, ‘with adventures left and right’. Afterwards he settled down.
Mitterrand emerged from the election not only with enhanced stature but with a new faith in socialism. Georges Dayan dated his conversion to a meeting in Toulouse, on the eve of the second round. Coal miners, wearing white helmets, formed a guard of honour. Every Radical and Socialist leader in the south-west, led by Gaston Monnerville, the President of the Senate, was there to show support. The crowd acclaimed him in triumph. Thirty years later, he remembered: ‘The bigger the auditorium, the happier I was. Ah, that meeting in Toulouse! . . . Those 30,000 faces, looking up at me!’ To Dayan, it was the moment of illumination. ‘After that, he was no longer the same. There was a fervour in him.’
Was his conversion sincere? Many thought so. Perhaps it was. But Mitterrand’s oft-repeated claim that those who knew him best knew only 30 per cent of his thinking left room for doubt. And even then . . . ‘30 per cent?’ asked Louis Mermaz, ‘10 per cent, I would say’. Mermaz’s colleague, Louis Mexandeau, remembered his speeches in the presidential campaign as being ‘more like Gambetta [a moderate nineteenth-century republican] than Lenin’.26 But sincere or not, the die had been cast. From the winter of 1965, socialism was François Mitterrand’s lodestar.
France, he now argued, was sociologically on the Left – more than half the population consisted of workers, low-paid public servants, artisans and farm labourers – yet politically the majority was on the Right. The challenge was to make the two coincide. It could only be done by creating a union of all the left-wing parties so that instead of fighting agains
t each other they joined forces against the Right. The electoral alliance for the presidential election, under the umbrella of the Federation of the Left, the FGDS, was a start. But a detailed analysis of the figures showed that in his contest with de Gaulle, a significant proportion of working-class voters had either stayed at home or supported his opponent.27 To be able one day to win power, the Federation would need to be strengthened and enlarged.
Between the two rounds of the election, on December 9, Mitterrand had been elected FGDS President. In that capacity, he would spend the next fifteen months trying to create the broad unified movement he was convinced the Left required.
His first plan – to build the Federation into ‘a vast movement on the lines of the [British] Labour Party’, the same ambition that had animated Henri Frenay in 194528 – failed miserably. The Socialists and the Radicals were both determined to defend their own turf. Mitterrand’s next goal, to enlarge the Federation’s appeal, also proved a chimera. The Centre-Right was willing to flirt but not to be seduced. ‘Like Defferre, Mitterrand is making eyes at the “good” Christian Democrats,’ Waldeck Rochet told his colleagues, ‘but there is no reason to think that in a few months he will find any of the Christian Democrats good.’
He was right. Mitterrand gave up.
Only in his third objective was the FGDS President successful: the creation of a common front with the Communists.
Mollet once more dragged his feet. ‘When we go 10 kilometres,’ Mitterrand complained, ‘Mollet spends nine kilometres putting up an anti-communist façade . . . and then, in the last 500 metres, he is obliged . . . to come round to my point of view.’ Nonetheless, on December 20 1966, Mitterrand and Waldeck Rochet, on behalf of the FGDS and the Communists, signed an electoral pact for the parliamentary elections the following spring.