by Philip Short
A year later Mitterrand attempted an explanation: ‘The very fact of . . . having confronted General de Gaulle in the presidential election . . . had paradoxically . . . identified me with the dignitaries of the regime against which I had never stopped fighting. The regime and I belonged to the same slice of history . . . Those who wanted a future without de Gaulle also wanted a future without me.’
By the weekend of Sunday May 19, France was paralysed. All over the country, workers occupied factories and installed self-management committees.
In Paris there was no public transport and no petrol for private cars. The students occupied the Odeon theatre opposite the Senate and held impassioned debates, where anyone was free to join in – workers, housewives, celebrities, writers, company directors, even the occasional politician – while in the wings, and in the Luxembourg Gardens across the road, under the Mitterrand family’s windows, young people abandoned their clothes and inhibitions and put into practice the slogan, earthier than the ‘Make love, not war’ of their American counterparts: ‘Have orgasms without limit’.
The General’s spokesman quoted him as saying: ‘Reforms, yes. Shit-in-the-bed, no!’fn4
At the end of that week, with nine million workers, more than half the workforce, on strike, the President announced a referendum on ‘renovation’ and ‘participation’, the first to be applied to the universities and the second to the role of workers in their enterprises. If the referendum proposal were defeated, he added, he would step down.
The speech was not a success. The one part that stuck in everyone’s minds was the hint that he might resign. The students coined a new slogan: ‘The shit-in-the-bed is him!’
That night the rioting resumed. Once again, the police clamped down hard. De Gaulle did not sleep. ‘It’s me, now, that they are going for,’ he told his aides. ‘It’s my departure that they want.’ For several days he kept silent. There was a growing sense, not only among the opposition but also among his own supporters, that he would have to go. His brother-in-law, Jacques Vendroux, wrote in his diary: ‘the wind of defeatism is blowing more and more strongly’.
The person most often cited to replace de Gaulle was not Mitterrand but Pierre Mendès France. Mitterrand was too close to the Communists, too stained by the Fourth Republic. Mendès was esteemed as a symbol of probity, respected by the students and acceptable to a wide swathe of opinion on both Left and Right.
The realisation that, if he did not move quickly, the initiative would pass to a rival convinced Mitterrand that it was time to act. On Sunday May 26, he told a mass meeting in Château-Chinon: ‘We are facing a regime which is tottering, supplicating, a regime which has capitulated before the rising force of an angry people . . . The Republic awaits us!’
It was an error of judgement which would cost him dear.
Mitterrand’s fear of being outflanked by Mendès France had blinded him to the fact that the wind was beginning to change. De Gaulle had not seen it either. Pompidou was more clear-sighted. At dawn on Monday, May 27, the Prime Minister completed a marathon 72-hour negotiation resulting in major concessions to the trades unions on wages and working conditions. When the agreement was put to a vote, the workforce rejected it and demanded better terms. Pompidou was unfazed, telling de Gaulle that in time they would come round. He was right. Not only were the unions and the political establishment – Communists, Socialists, Centre and Right – united in wanting the agitation to end, but public opinion was at last starting to tire of the chaos and disruption that the students and the strikes were creating.
The following morning Mitterrand gave a press conference in the somewhat improbable velvet-and-gilt setting of the Continental Hotel, between the Place Vendôme and the Tuileries Gardens, at which he called for the formation of a government-in-waiting.
The Gaullist regime, he declared, ‘no longer has even the appearance of power’. To avoid a political vacuum if the General’s referendum were defeated and he were obliged to step down, it was wise to plan ahead. He proposed Mendès France as Prime Minister.39 Asked who should become President, he replied that that would be for the electorate to decide but he would certainly stand as a candidate. It was a carefully weighed, circumspect statement, which had been approved earlier that morning by the FGDS Executive Committee, including Guy Mollet and the new Radical Party leader, René Billères, and at first it was well received. The logic behind it, Mitterrand explained afterwards, was to prevent de Gaulle portraying the referendum as ‘either me or chaos’ by showing that there was a credible alternative ready to take his place.
He had reckoned without Georges Pompidou. Despite (or perhaps because of) his background as a banker with Rothschilds, his never having held elected office, his years working quietly behind the scenes in the General’s shadow, the Prime Minister was a formidable tactician, nicknamed by his colleagues Raminagrobis – the large, well-rounded, purring cat of La Fontaine’s fable with deceptively sharp claws. Although French television never normally covered the opposition, a camera crew mysteriously appeared to record Mitterrand’s announcement. That night the main item in the evening news was a montage of his press conference.
‘It was cleverly done,’ Mitterrand admitted later. ‘I looked like an apprentice dictator, ill-shaven, fanatical, chin stuck out and arm outstretched as though in [a Nazi salute]’. The effect was catastrophic. Georges Dayan returned from the provinces horrified by the comments he had heard. ‘Who does he think he is, your friend?’ one local activist had asked, ‘A Führer, that’s what he is.’
But neither Pompidou nor Mitterrand nor anyone else in the political establishment could have anticipated what came next.
Shortly after eleven o’clock the following morning, de Gaulle left the Elysée with his wife for the heliport at Issy-les-Moulineaux, just outside Paris. From there, they headed east. At Saint-Dizier, 120 miles from Paris, they refuelled at the end of a runway, out of sight of the control tower. The police helicopter escorting them was ordered to leave. Only then did the General tell the pilot his destination. The rest of the way they flew at low altitude to avoid radar and maintained radio silence. No one in France, not even the Prime Minister, knew that de Gaulle had left the country to meet General Jacques Massu at French Military Headquarters at Baden Baden, just across the border in Germany.
Massu himself was as surprised as everyone else. When de Gaulle’s aide-de-camp, François Flohic, telephoned from the landing strip to tell him that the General had arrived, he answered, ‘Who? . . . Give me five minutes. I’ve got no clothes on, I’m having a siesta.’ It emerged later that he had been up much of the previous night, drinking with Marshal Koshevoi, the Soviet Commander in East Germany.
De Gaulle’s first words when Massu presented himself were, ‘It’s all fucked.’ For half an hour, Massu gave him a pep talk. Then the General lunched alone. By the time he had finished, his doubts were laid to rest.40
Afterwards it would be claimed that de Gaulle’s flight to Germany was a clever ploy to create panic by his absence in order that he might return to a triumphal welcome from a grateful nation, or alternatively that he had sought out Massu in order to assure himself of the army’s support. It was nothing of the sort.
Once the crisis was over, the General was an astute enough politician to let the rumours have free rein.41 But the truth was that he had been on the point of giving up. Before taking a decision he had had the good sense to go and see an old fellow soldier who would call a spade a spade. He acknowledged as much some months later, telling Madame Massu: ‘it was Providence that put your husband in my path’.
While he had been at Baden Baden, the Communists had organised a show of force, a march of several hundred thousand people from the City Hall to the Gare St Lazare, half a mile from the Elysée. Le Monde devoted its front page next day to ‘the tandem of tomorrow’, Mitterrand and Mendès France.
Before it reached the news-stands it was already out of date.
The following afternoon, after the Cabi
net had met, de Gaulle spoke on the radio. The choice of medium was deliberate, recalling his wartime speeches. One of his staff commented: ‘He’s put on his 1940 boots again’. For the first time since the crisis began, the General found the words he needed. ‘I shall not withdraw. I have a mandate from the people. I shall fulfil it.’ At Pompidou’s urging, he announced that, instead of the planned referendum, he would dissolve parliament and call fresh elections. Also at Pompidou’s urging, he accused the Communists of threatening France with ‘a totalitarian . . . dictatorship [built on] the ambition and hatred of politicians who belong on the scrap heap’. It was dishonest and unfair, but politically it made perfect sense. The Communist Party was the scarecrow the Gaullists needed to send the people of France running for safety – back into the General’s arms.
Soon after he finished speaking, crowds began gathering at the Place de la Concorde. It was not the spontaneous manifestation of support which the Gaullists later claimed: André Malraux and others had been at work in the shadows for a week, organising a counter-demonstration. But the result far exceeded their expectations. Nearly a million people marched up the Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe in a sea of red-white-and-blue French flags with the Gaullist ‘barons’ – Debré, Chaban-Delmas, Joxe, Maurice Schumann and Pierre Messmer – at their head. ‘De Gaulle is not alone,’ they chanted, ‘Mitterrand, charlatan!’, ‘Mitterrand to the gallows’ and ‘Mitterrand, you failed.’
The crowd included many who were simply exasperated by the chienlit, the ‘shit-in-the-bed’, which was making everyone’s life impossible. But the doctoring of the television coverage of Mitterrand’s news conference, which Pompidou had arranged, also played a part. Mitterrand wrote later that the French, having encouraged him to fight against de Gaulle, had recoiled in horror when they realised that the deity was about to be dethroned. They were not yet ready for a parricide.
Timing is everything in politics. In 1968, the timing was not right. Once de Gaulle had found his feet again, there was nothing Mitterrand could do.
After the demonstration that night, the agitation faded, the students returned to their exams, the factories reopened and the country got back to work. In June, the General’s followers rode a tidal wave of support back into the National Assembly. Gaullists won 360 out of 485 seats, a triumph on a scale not seen since the time of Louis XVIII after the fall of Napoleon in 1815. It was achieved in part through massive State-sponsored intimidation. In the Nièvre, where Mitterrand campaigned, members of Foccart’s Service d’Action Civique, wearing helmets and wielding iron bars, descended on the villages, warning the inhabitants that left-wing terrorists were trying to seize power. Mitterrand’s opponent depicted him as an agent of communism and, to show what awaited the population if he were re-elected, a red flag with the hammer and sickle was flown from the top of a church tower. All over France, as de Gaulle himself acknowledged, the elections were driven by fear. Mitterrand held on to his seat by a narrow margin after a run-off. But all the other MPs from the Convention who had been elected fifteen months earlier were soundly defeated. The Socialists and the Communists each lost more than half their parliamentary strength.
For Mitterrand there was an ugly symmetry about it. In May 1958, de Gaulle had returned to power, ending his hopes of becoming Prime Minister under the Fourth Republic. Ten years later, almost to the day,42 a herd of feckless students, barely out of their teens, had trampled into the ground the prospect of a Union of the Left on which he had placed his hopes for becoming President.
Mitterrand insisted later that he had sympathised all along with the students’ cause.43 One may be forgiven for disbelieving him. In his more candid moments, he fumed at what he called the ‘thoughtlessness’ of ‘the gibberish Left’, these ‘ninnies [and] little frauds . . . who have given 400 seats to the Right’ by ‘stacking up ideologies glued on top of each other’. The one lesson he drew was that the traditional parties had to change if they were to win the support of the voters of tomorrow.
But that seemed further away than ever.
After the June 1968 elections, Mitterrand became so isolated that he sat in parliament as an independent. The Socialists and the Radicals blamed him for destroying their electoral chances with his press conference (which, at the time, they had warmly applauded) that Pompidou-Raminagrobis had so cleverly used against them. In July, Gaston Defferre suggested that the moment had come for him to step down as President of the Federation of the Left. In November, when he eventually did so, his farewell speech was heard out in silence. Only Pierre Mauroy and the left-wing Radical, Robert Fabre, deigned to thank him and shake his hand. Afterwards he quoted Chateaubriand: ‘There are times when one has to dispense one’s contempt economically because there are so many who need it.’
Mitterrand’s departure spelled the end of the Federation. It had died, he wrote, because ‘it was unable to overcome the resistance of the parties which had delegated to it only the appearance of power’. In three short years, the credit that he had built up as de Gaulle’s challenger in 1965 had run into the sand.
The Communists had not helped. When Mitterrand had proposed his government-in-waiting, Waldeck Rochet had been reticent. He objected to Mendès France as Prime Minister because of his anti-communist views and, more importantly, he worried that if de Gaulle were to resign it might provoke a military coup. A month later, when the General called snap elections, the Communists, for the first time since 1962, failed to conclude a second-round pact with the Socialists, increasing both parties’ losses. The final straw came in August, when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and they were forced back into their ghetto, condemned once more by public opinion as tools of a hostile and aggressive foreign power.
Thus by the autumn of 1968, both pillars of Mitterrand’s political strategy had come crashing to the ground. The Communists were beyond the pale. The non-communist Left was more disunited than ever.
He withdrew to Latche to work on a new book, Ma part de vérité (‘My Portion of Truth’), which, after three years of a semi-truce with de Gaulle, would show flashes of the same virulence as the Coup d’état permanent.44 But it was no longer quite the same de Gaulle. Pompidou, not the General, had organised the Gaullist resistance and reconquest in May 1968. Pompidou, not the General, had stage-managed the June elections. The elderly President knew it and was mortified. Part of his authority had been usurped by another. In July, he replaced Pompidou by Maurice Couve de Murville, who had been his Foreign Minister. But the former dauphin did not leave the scene quietly. That winter he made clear that, when de Gaulle stepped down, he would be a candidate to succeed him, provoking the General to warn that he intended to serve out his full term, ending in December 1972, when he would be 82 years old.
That was not to be.
De Gaulle had not given up the idea of the referendum on ‘renovation’ and ‘participation’ which he had originally planned the previous spring. The subject had been modified: now it would be a proposal to increase the powers of the regions at the expense of the Senate, whose role would become essentially consultative. Couve de Murville tried hard to dissuade him. So did the rest of the Cabinet. But the General had the bit between his teeth and the more others argued against it, the more determined he was to press ahead.
In February, he realised that the vote would probably go against him. But by then it was too late for him to draw back. On the night of April 27 1969, a Sunday, when the verdict was announced, 52.4 per cent had voted ‘no’ and 47.6 per cent ‘yes’. Shortly after midnight a laconic communiqué declared: ‘I am ceasing to exercise my functions of President of the Republic. This decision takes effect at midday today.’ He left neither with a bang nor a whimper but with majestic indifference. ‘Deep down,’ he told François Flohic the following afternoon, ‘I am not sorry it ended like this. [If I had stayed] what would have awaited me? Difficulties which could only . . . have worn me out with no benefit to France.’
Towards the end of his life, Mitterrand wo
uld concede that de Gaulle had ended his long career ‘on the side of democracy’. Nothing obliged him to step down when the referendum went against him. He had not hesitated.
An election to choose his successor was scheduled five weeks later.
The President of the Senate, Alain Poher, a Christian Democrat, who, under the constitution, became interim President, announced that he would stand. So did Georges Pompidou.
On the Left confusion reigned. The Communists proposed that Mitterrand stand again as he had in 1965. The Socialists vetoed the idea. Mitterrand was sidelined not only, as he charged later, because ‘a small group of men who formed a cabal of intrigue took it on themselves to destroy the hopes of the people’ – a reference to Guy Mollet and his allies – but because the opinion polls, which, a year earlier, had predicted that he would defeat Pompidou by 53 to 47 per cent, now gave him only 18 per cent. In his absence Gaston Defferre announced that he was going to try again and if elected would appoint Mendès France as Prime Minister. That ended any chance of a common front with the Communists.
On Election Day, Sunday, June 1, the Left put forward four candidates: Jacques Duclos for the Communist Party, Defferre for the Socialists, Michel Rocard for the PSU and a young man named Alain Krivine representing a small Trotskyist faction.
Mitterrand was out in the cold. As things turned out, it was exactly the right place to be.
When the results of the first round were announced, Pompidou had a comfortable lead over his Centre-Right challenger, Alain Poher. Jacques Duclos, for the Communists, won 22.5 per cent, proving that, despite the crushing of the Prague Spring, the party faithful were still able to get out the vote. Rocard received 3 per cent, a creditable score for a representative of a fringe party. But the Socialists, who had been hoping to outdo Duclos or at least to give him a good run for his money, were annihilated. Defferre, despite Mendès France’s backing, obtained only 5.1 per cent. Servan-Schreiber’s prediction of the ‘worst defeat since the Second Empire’ had come true, one election late.