by Philip Short
There was still no common programme other than a vague commitment to oppose ‘personal power’. Nonetheless, it was only the second time since the French Communists and Socialists had parted company in 1920, three years after the Bolshevik Revolution, that they had agreed to cooperate even that much.29
The elections, in March 1967, proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that Mitterrand’s strategy was well founded.
The Gaullist vote collapsed. Even with the support of a moderate right-wing party led by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, a technocrat in his early forties who had been the General’s Finance Minister but had left after differences with Georges Pompidou, the government’s parliamentary majority was reduced to a single seat.
The Communists and the Federation both increased their vote and several of Mitterrand’s inner circle, including André Rousselet and his confidant, Georges Dayan, neither of whom was by nature inclined to public political performance, were elected as MPs. The Convention passed from one MP – himself – to sixteen. His brother, Robert, who stood in the Corrèze, was defeated by a young man named Jacques Chirac, then an aide to Pompidou.
But just as defeat can contain the seeds of victory, the reverse is also true.
Four days after the second round, the FGDS Executive Committee met at Socialist Party headquarters. There Guy Mollet made clear that there could be no question of transforming the Federation into a broad-church movement, as Mitterrand and some of Mollet’s colleagues, including Defferre and Pierre Mauroy, had wished.30 The Socialists would continue as before, under his stewardship. The Federation staggered on for another eighteen months. But with no further elections in the offing to force them to stay together, the Socialists, the Radicals and the Convention increasingly went their separate ways.
In the summer of 1967, for the second time in his career, Mitterrand put politics to one side. He continued to speak in parliament, to nurse his constituency in the Nièvre and to chair meetings of the Convention. But most of his energy went elsewhere.
Two years earlier, on holiday at Hossegor, during a hike through the pine forests which march southward in a stately arc along the Atlantic coast to Biarritz, he had stumbled on a clearing with a wooden house in ruins and a sheepcote nearby. The place, which the locals called Latche, enchanted him. He brought Anne to see it. ‘Look at this!’ he told her, ‘we can make a home for ourselves here.’ She was enthusiastic. ‘It was our trysting place,’ she said later. ‘It wasn’t far from Hossegor, it was marvellous.’ The owner, an elderly aristocrat, Baron Etchegoin, agreed to sell and Mitterrand signed for the purchase in August. Three hectares of the surrounding forest belonged in part to two nephews who were on a visit to America and it was agreed that they would sign later. But then came the presidential election. When Mitterrand returned the following year, the baron had changed his mind. ‘He’s furious,’ the notary told him. ‘He says, “that rascal Mitterrand, who forced the General into a run-off, he’ll never have my pines.”’
By then Mitterrand, too, had had to change his plans. Latche would be home . . . not to Anne but to Danielle. He had assumed that, given Danielle’s relationship with Jean Balenci, she would have no objection. He was wrong. She put her foot down.
‘When you are young, you think you are so strong,’ Anne would say later. ‘I thought I was. [For Latche] I’d done some designs for the sheepcote. I thought it was for us. What an idiot I was!’ Forty years afterwards she could smile at her own innocence, but at the time she was devastated. ‘When something like that happens,’ she said, ‘you know you’re not the one he prefers. That’s the hardest thing to accept.’
There were other difficulties. François might have settled down, but he was still, as she put it, ‘free’. She wondered whether it was partly the ‘abandoned child complex’, making him seek solace in the arms of others. But whatever the reason, his ‘lapses’ continued. Moreover her own behaviour flew in the face not only of social convention – still a force to be reckoned with in the provinces – but of everything that her traditional, staunchly Catholic family believed in. ‘It was a sin,’ she said later, ‘and I tried to make up for it by living an exemplary life.’ François was the only partner she would ever have. ‘On my side,’ she said, ‘I knew I would never be with anyone else’:
To admire someone so much, never to be bored for a moment, to have the same interests . . . [For us] everything was in a state of perpetual renewal . . . It was thirty-two years of happiness. And unhappiness! Because it was hard too . . . I was not the preferred one. [But] François had a saying which I think goes to the heart of things. ‘No love is eternal unless it is thwarted’. Beware of a love which is easy and where everything goes well! When love is difficult not just sometimes but all the time, it lives for ever.31
The baronial decision sparked one of those judicial imbroglios, drawn from the pages of Marcel Pagnol, in which southern France rejoices. Etchegoin refused to give the Mitterrands access across his land, making it legally impossible for them to start building. They went ahead anyway. Then he threatened to erect barriers, so that trucks could not get through, but was dissuaded by a neighbour, who pointed out that in a region where land was always unfenced, he would make himself ridiculous. So he planted a barrier of pines instead. ‘Those poor pines,’ Danielle remembered, ‘they kept getting sick. Whenever we came on holiday, they died.’
The stand-off, pitting Don Camillo against Peppone, continued for more than twenty years. At last, shortly before his death, the baron relented. By then de Gaulle had been succeeded by Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, both on the Right, and by Mitterrand himself. ‘You can sign with him,’ the baron told his nephews. ‘After all, what Giscard did was even worse.’
The ruined house at Latche had been built by a family of gemmeurs, a now all but forgotten profession of men who tap pine resin in the forests in the same way that rubber is tapped from heveas. It stood on a grassy knoll in a glade, a long, low one-storey dwelling of half-timbered brick, amid green oaks and acacias, with the original carved woodwork of a gallery just barely holding up inside.32 By the beginning of 1968, restoration was complete. The house was simplicity itself: three minuscule bedrooms for Danielle and the two boys, a living area, a terrace at the back, and, forty yards away, the sheepcote, a square building with a pyramidal, tiled roof and a stone pillar at its centre, which François made his lair – bedroom, library and study rolled into one.
Latche was different from anywhere they had lived before.33 Because it represented a victory over Anne, Danielle was at pains to assert her rights.34 It would remain, for the rest of her life, the family home, ‘[a place] for my children and grand-children,. . . a house with a story to tell, a house whose walls bounced back memories of the lives of others, [guarding] secrets of love, of disputes, of children’s cries and adolescent pleasures, which, unconsciously, we would absorb’. For François, too, it became the sanctum sanctorum of his ‘official family’.
At a time when he was finally breaking free of the bourgeois attitudes instilled by his Catholic upbringing and the well-heeled, cosseted, Parisian circles in which his siblings moved, Latche was a declaration of independence. To Danielle it brought memories of her youth at Cluny; to François, a reminder of childhood at his grandparents’ farm at Touvent among the copses and meadows of the Charente.
There remained his other life to think of. Anne had realised early on that since she was determined to spend her life with François and they could not marry, she would have to be independent. A diploma in the techniques of medieval stained glass, however much the subject fascinated her, would not pay the rent. On François’s advice, she decided to become a museum curator, which would allow her to work in a field she loved – the arts – and would give her, as a government servant, the security that he could not. But for that it was necessary to have a university degree, so, for the next four years, she studied at the Law Faculty where François had been a student thirty years earlier. He had suggested it because he would be ab
le to help her – and he was as good as his word. She remembered how, between the two rounds of the presidential election in 1965, he had sat up helping her with an essay. ‘When I think of it now, I’m ashamed,’ she said. ‘A candidate for the presidency of the Republic had better things to do than assist me with my homework about communal law . . . But he made time. Which proves he must have been in love because you had to be a complete lunatic to do something like that.’
That was another quality for which Anne admired him. ‘He was able to detach himself from the things around him in a way which was astounding . . . His self-control was simply extraordinary.’ In later life, amid his official duties, he had the same ability to shut out everything around him and bury himself in a book as he had had when a small boy amid the hubbub of his brothers and sisters at Jarnac. ‘It allowed him to maintain a distance,’ she said. ‘Distance was his talent.’
Whenever they were able to, they travelled. He took her to Italy, where they stayed with the English writer and socialite, Violet Trefusis, a long-standing friend, at l’Ombrellino, her medieval villa, once the home of Galileo, in the hills overlooking Florence.35 At Christmas, every other year, they went to Israel with the Soudets, and in 1967 after the Six Day War were able for the first time to visit Mount Sinai.
Israel fascinated him. He had what Laurence Soudet called ‘a lifelong obsession’ with the Holy Land and its past. The Bible, he wrote later, was ‘a terrifying book, full of massacres and ruthlessness . . . But what force and what poetry!’
By the time they returned, François had decided that he and Anne still needed a place of their own. The following spring he bought two small pieces of land in Gordes, on the other side of the village from the Soudets, set back from the highway with a view southward over the massif of the Luberon. They did not build at once. But it was another step towards accepting that he now had two families to support.
For France, as for most of Western Europe, the middle years of the 1960s were a jubilant time. They were the peak of the ‘trente glorieuses’, the new era of post-war prosperity. For the first time since the eighteenth century, French GDP overtook Britain’s. De Gaulle rode a wave of nationalism. He told the United States that it would be defeated in Vietnam, a truth which earned him few friends in Washington, and infuriated Canada by proclaiming, ‘Long live Free Quebec!’ France quit the military structure of NATO, developed an independent nuclear arsenal and became in 1965 the third nation after the Soviet Union and the US to put a satellite into space.
The first motorways opened; girls sunbathed bare-breasted on the beach at St Tropez; and André Courrèges and Mary Quant competed for authorship of the miniskirt. It was a period of optimism and hope.
But even the best of times pall. By the spring of 1968, the country seemed to be stuck in a rut. De Gaulle grumbled to his aide-de-camp, François Flohic: ‘This is no longer fun. There is nothing difficult, nothing heroic, to do any more.’
‘France is bored’, headlined Le Monde in an editorial complaining that young people all over the world were demonstrating for freedom, but in France the only thing students seemed to care about was ‘whether girls would be allowed into the boys’ dormitories, which . . . is a rather limited conception of human rights’. While that may have been true in the early stages, the mood rapidly changed. At Nanterre, in the west of Paris, students occupied teaching blocks to protest against the Vietnam War. When the authorities ordered the faculty closed, they moved to the Sorbonne.
Thus was lit the touchpaper of a social explosion which would remain embedded in the nation’s consciousness ever afterwards as ‘May 68’.
The root cause of the upheavals which shook not only Europe but the United States and much of Asia in the late 1960s was the extraordinary burst of energy which accompanied the coming of age of the baby boomers, the generation born twenty years earlier which had never experienced wartime deprivation and now found itself confronted by outdated social or political structures which refused to move with the times. In China Mao used this energy to fuel the Cultural Revolution. In Eastern Europe it was channelled by reformist intellectuals who hoped to democratise the Soviet system. In America it was directed against racism and the misdeeds of the military-industrial complex, symbolised by the drafting of young men to what de Gaulle called Washington’s ‘odious war’ in Vietnam. In France and most of the rest of Western Europe,fn3 it was anarchistic and hostile both towards political parties and the official trades unions.
From his balcony on the rue Guynemer, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, Mitterrand had a grandstand view of the growing agitation. Like de Gaulle and the rest of the French political establishment, he felt, as Danielle said later, ‘out of sync with events’.
At the beginning of April, he had told an interviewer that he thought France was finally ready to elect a left-wing Head of State. Now ten years of patient effort were being put at risk by groups of nihilistic young people who knew what they disliked but had no idea what they wanted in its place. ‘I can’t make sense of this movement,’ he complained. ‘Yes, imagination is on the streets, but the leaders have nothing to say.’ He grouched about ‘a revolution with long hair but short on ideas’. When students invaded the offices of the Convention, in the rue du Louvre, he told them peevishly: ‘Being young doesn’t last very long. You spend a lot more time being old.’
On the afternoon of May 3, a Friday, the government decided to evacuate the Sorbonne by force, violating a centuries-old compact that universities, like churches, were a sanctuary for dissenters. The students erected barricades and dug up cobblestones to hurl at the police. The response was immediate and brutal. That night twenty students were injured and several hundred detained for questioning, of whom thirty were charged with public order offences. ‘May 68’ had begun.
On Sunday, ten students were given suspended sentences and four others two months in prison. Within hours, fresh barricades were thrown up in the Latin Quarter. That night 400 students and 200 policemen were injured. By the end of the week, the 6th and 7th arrondissements of Paris resembled a war zone. Clouds of tear gas hung in the air, eerily illuminated by the explosions of Molotov cocktails. The streets were littered with the burnt-out wrecks of cars.
De Gaulle, who had insisted on repression, was beginning to have second thoughts. His Defence Minister, Pierre Messmer, proposed bringing in the paratroops and declaring martial law. Louis Joxe, the Justice Minister, said soberly: ‘You cannot treat children as rebels.’
When Pompidou returned on the evening of Saturday, May 11, from a ten-day visit to the Near East, the General was still in two minds. The Prime Minister convinced him to give negotiation a chance. That night he announced on television that the Sorbonne would reopen after the weekend, courses would resume and the four imprisoned activists would be able to appeal their sentences.
His overture succeeded to the extent that the tension eased and, for the next two weeks, there was no more rioting. But the government was perceived to have capitulated and the agitation continued and spread.
On Monday, May 13, the 10th anniversary of the insurrection in Algiers which had brought de Gaulle to power, the trades unions declared a one-day general strike. More than half a million people, students and workers together,36 marched from the Gare de l’Est, in the north of Paris, past the Place de la République and the Bastille, across the Seine to skirt the Latin Quarter before dispersing at Denfert Rochereau in the south. In the vanguard were Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Alain Geismar and other student leaders, followed by the unions, headed by the Secretary-General of the CGT, Georges Séguy, and then, much further back, the politicians, Mitterrand, Mendès France, Mollet and Waldeck Rochet, lost among the crowd like so many pointless hangers-on.
The mood was good humoured. The marchers’ banners carried slogans which were already plastered on all the walls of Paris, some political – ‘10 years is enough!’, ‘De Gaulle to the gallows!’, and ‘We are all German Jews!’, a reference to an ill-considered article in the
Communist newspaper, l’Humanité, denouncing Cohn-Bendit as ‘a German anarchist’ – others proclaiming ‘To forbid is forbidden’; ‘Be realistic, ask for the impossible!’, ‘Under the cobblestones is the beach’ and ‘Marx is dead, God also, and I’m not feeling too well myself’.
It was one of those extraordinary periods, like that which followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the Democracy Wall movement in China, which come only once in a generation, when timeless barriers collapse and overnight the unthinkable becomes not only possible but banal. For a full month, France was caught up in a frenzy of debate – part student rag, part movement for change – in which Maoists, Trotskyists, Situationists and adepts of Althusser and Marcuse sought to mobilise the masses in the universities and factories to build a luminous new world.
For Mitterrand, it should have brought back memories of his own student days in the Latin Quarter in the service of the ineffable Ferdinand Lop. Not so. The generations were too far apart. The parallel escaped him. Instead he went ahead with a long-planned trip to the provinces, where he spoke on subjects largely unconnected with the crisis which was then transfixing France.37 Once back in Paris, he denounced the brutality of the police and the hypocrisy of the Gaullists for condemning student insurgents when they themselves had taken power thanks to an insurrection. In parliament, defending a censorship motion which came within a handful of votes of succeeding, he told Georges Pompidou: ‘You have lost everything. You must go.’ But it meant nothing. In the incandescent climate of May 1968, parliament was irrelevant. The students’ slogan said it all: ‘Power is in the streets’.
Mitterrand did make one approach to the students. Georges Dayan arranged a meeting at his home in the rue de Rivoli, close to the City Hall, with Alain Geismar, the President of the University Teachers’ Union. Geismar had been a member of Mitterrand’s campaign committee in 1965 and was one of the few insurgent leaders interested in building bridges to left-wing politicians.38 But when he reported back to his colleagues afterwards, Geismar said, they made him ‘feel like a zombie’. Most of them saw in Mitterrand a Justice Minister who had done nothing to stop torture in Algeria; an ally of the ‘Stalinist villains’, as Cohn-Bendit called the Communists; an unprincipled opportunist. He was jeered and whistled at. The students’ watchword became: ‘Neither de Gaulle nor Mitterrand!’