Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  The outcome was so bad that no one found anything to say.

  In 1965, Mitterrand had proved that a united front of the Left could put up a good fight even against de Gaulle. Four years later, when the different parties went their separate ways, the results were beyond awful. In that summer of 1969, his rivals self-destructed. It would take time to sink in but the message was clear. There was now only one possible way forward.

  * * *

  fn1 Respectively Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceaus̗escu, and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya.

  fn2 André Rousselet, who was Mitterrand’s campaign treasurer, maintained almost half a century later an exemplary discretion about the source of the candidate’s funds. In addition to the 970,000 francs declared officially by his campaign committee, headed by the President of the Paris Bar Association, René-William Thorp, others contributed sub rosa. A key figure was René Bousquet, then Deputy Director-General of the Banque d’Indochine and, in that capacity, the point man at election time for the Conseil National du Patronat Français, which represented French industry. The former Vichy police chief had been cleared of charges of collaboration by the Special Court in 1949, early in the Cold War, at a time when communists rather than collaborators were the French government’s main concern. Mitterrand had met him shortly afterwards through Jean-Paul Martin. In 1965, the Patronat no longer distributed envelopes stuffed with cash to MPs at election time, as its President, Georges Villiers, had during the Fourth Republic, but it continued to ‘support’ non-communist candidates of all political persuasions if it appeared that they had a promising future. Bousquet had persuaded Villiers and his colleagues that Mitterrand should be taken seriously. André Bettencourt, who had married the heiress to the Oréal fortune, Liliane Schueller, and François de Grossouvre, who had an exclusive contract to bottle Coca-Cola in France, were also generous. Some money came directly from big companies. Laurence Soudet, then on Mitterrand’s campaign staff, recalled going to see the Secretary-General of the French oil company, ELF, who, like her husband, was a member of the Council of State, to be given ‘an envelope full of cash. He said to me, “Look, here’s another envelope. It’s twice as big. It’s for de Gaulle.”’ One of the principal donors to Mitterrand’s campaign, she said, was the Communist Party. Some funds also came from the Socialists. How much Mitterrand raised altogether is uncertain. Franz-Olivier Giesbert estimated not more than two million francs, ten times less than de Gaulle, who in addition to contributions from industry had the whole apparatus of the State at the service of his re-election campaign. Bousquet was also the Administrator of La Dépêche du midi, the leading newspaper in south-western France, with whose owner, Evelyne Baylet, he had a long-running affair. The Dépêche, which supported the Radical Party, backed Mitterrand in 1965.

  fn3 Britain was a partial exception. Whether because the parliamentary system was more flexible, because there was less of a sense of social blockage or because there was greater tolerance of the sexual revolution than in a Catholic country like France, where even the sale of condoms had been forbidden until 1967 – Mitterrand, during the presidential election of 1965, was one of the first French politicians to call publicly for the legalisation of family planning – the ‘Swinging Sixties’ in Britain were a time of cultural and social change but of significantly less overt political conflict than elsewhere.

  fn4‘La réforme, oui; la chienlit, non!’ The word, chienlit, earlier spelt chie-en-lit (‘shit-in-the-bed’) and pronounced accordingly, was first used in print in the sixteenth century by Rabelais who included it in a long list of what he called ‘diffamatory epithets’. It originally denoted a character in street carnivals who appeared in a nightshirt with a brown smudge (sometimes of mustard) on his backside, and by extension, in the plural, street-players generally. In modern usage it has come to mean disorder. The General presumably intended it in both senses: the carnival on the streets and the chaos it was creating.

  9

  Union of the Left

  WHEN GEORGES POMPIDOU took office in June 1969, the French Right was in a stronger position than at any time in the previous half-century. In the presidential election, the Left had failed to get a candidate through to the second round. In parliament, the government had an overwhelming majority until the next elections, still four years away. The opposition was in disarray. Guy Mollet, who had ruled the Socialists in autocratic fashion since 1946, clung to his post if for no other reason than to prevent Mitterrand uniting the Left without him. The Radicals were split between leftists and rightists, most of their energy absorbed by the effort to stay together. The Communists were in internal exile and Waldeck Rochet had been diagnosed with the early stages of Parkinson’s disease.

  In this discouraging situation, Mitterrand was strangely serene.

  ‘I am the most hated man in France,’ he told Michèle Cotta, a young journalist to whom he had taken a fancy some years earlier. ‘Doesn’t that mean that one day I have the chance of being the best loved?’ By then he had been in politics long enough to have learnt that when the pendulum swings far enough one way, it is only a matter of time before it will swing back.

  He set himself three tasks. To establish publicly his socialist beliefs beyond any possibility of dispute in order to be in a position to assume the leadership of the new left-wing movement which he was convinced would eventually arise. Secondly, to continue the strategy that he had explained to Roland Dumas ten years earlier, to colonise and bring under control, one circle at a time, the whole of the non-communist Left. He had failed with the FGDS because the defences of the traditional parties had been too strong, but, now that the Socialists and the Radicals had suffered a series of crushing defeats, their resistance would be weaker. Thirdly, once the first two stages were complete, to establish not just an electoral cartel but a common programme with the Communists, so that when the next elections arrived, the Left would go into battle united.

  The first part was the easiest. Ma part de vérité, published a few days after Pompidou’s election, provided for the first time a coherent explanation of the long, erratic journey he had made from a Catholic upbringing in the provinces, his association with the far Right, life in a PoW camp, Vichy and the Resistance, through the political confusion of the Fourth Republic, to the return of de Gaulle and, finally, his transfiguration, whether real or imagined, during the 1965 presidential campaign. His account elided some of the trickiest episodes but he recognised that, to be credible, he needed to acknowledge both his own contradictions and his continuing doubts. The book was a success, largely because of its honesty:

  I was not born on the Left and, still less, socialist . . . I will make things worse by confessing that subsequently I manifested no early enthusiasm.

  I could have become a socialist under the impact of ideas or events, at university for instance, or during the war. No. Effective grace took its time about making its way to my side . . . I did not become [a socialist] by doing a job which would have instilled in me class reflexes [or] by joining a political movement which . . . would have trained me in its ideological disciplines.

  In fact, I have no pretensions. I made my commitment simply for the sake of justice . . . I obeyed, I suppose, an innate feeling [rooted in] my family background . . . which held that hierarchies founded on privilege and money were the worst offence against nature. To those around me, the idea that money might be more important than the values which underpinned their lives – motherland, religion, freedom, dignity – was revolting. [Money] was the enemy, the agent of corruption, with which one had no dealings. Their Christian faith strengthened this belief [but] at the same time deflected it . . . They felt a bit contemptuous of a revolution attached to material objectives. [They were light years away from] adhering intellectually to socialist theories . . .

  What I learnt in captivity [as a PoW] reduced that distance for me. [But] I did not suddenly encounter the god of socialism on some street corner . . . I did not throw myself on m
y knees and weep with joy . . . Socialism . . . has many revealed truths and in each chapel it has priests who watch, decide and punish . . . Rare are those who prefer counsel to precepts, study to dogma . . . That put me off at first . . . I thought it was possible for capitalist society to be brought to reform itself . . . But as I looked more and more with eyes that did not see, in the end I recognised a certain truth. It happened, as it were, by a succession of brush-strokes . . . It wasn’t a matter of choosing between the Fourth and the Fifth Republics, but between capitalism and socialism. That is the conclusion I reached. You ask me, what is the Left? The Left [for me] now is socialism.1

  The reservations were important. Unlike Mollet and unlike the Communists, Mitterrand did not embrace socialism as an ideological straitjacket.

  But no less important was his declaration of faith. The core of his political creed, a belief in social justice, went back to his youth. There had been, he admitted, moments when ‘I rebelled against it, when I did not want to commit myself, when I turned my back’ – a reference to his reliance on a right-wing constituency as an MP in the Nièvre and his failure as Minister of Justice to speak out against torture in Algeria. But wanting social justice was one thing. Being a socialist was another. That had come about gradually in the decade after de Gaulle’s return. His views took on a new consistency, a new ‘density’ as one French writer put it, until in the summer of 1969 he resigned himself to the conclusion that socialism was the only means by which he could achieve his goals.2 There was a parallel with his decision to join the Resistance at Vichy nearly thirty years before. It was less from conviction than from a process of elimination which ruled out any other choice.

  From then on his political vocabulary changed.

  For the first time in his life, Mitterrand studied the socialist classics. In Ma part de vérité, he quoted passages from Marx and Lenin, writing about class conflict and capitalism, the domination of the bourgeoisie and workers’ alienation, terms from the socialist playbook which had never figured in his earlier essays. It was made easier by May 1968, which had given a new, revolutionary edge to left-wing political discourse. But it did not come naturally to him and he could not resist a sideways swipe at ‘the disputes and excommunications’ of Marxist theoreticians. Socialism, he declared, was not a ‘vitrified mummy preserved in the shop window of the guardians of the Faith . . . It is also and above all enthusiasm, collective action, the communion of men in search of justice!’ But the new vocabulary and the concepts that went with it were part of the arsenal he needed in order to prevail over his rivals. Deliberately he staked out a position more radical than that of Mollet or Michel Rocard. ‘The liberal Left,’ he said, ‘is too close to capitalism.’ The Socialists could not be both ‘on the side of the exploiters and of the exploited’.

  The message was that, recent convert though he might be, he was the man best equipped to win back for the Socialists the support they had lost to the Communists by their failure to offer anything better.

  Next came the difficult part.

  Throughout the brief lifespan of the FGDS, the main obstacle to change had been Guy Mollet. Eleven years Mitterrand’s senior, he ruled the Socialist Party with an iron hand, installing loyalists in key positions and systematically blocking any initiative by others. With trademark horn-rimmed spectacles, he looked more like an accountant than the schoolteacher he actually was, while a cigarette perpetually hanging from his upper lip suggested long nights of negotiation in nicotine-filled rooms. Mollet freely acknowledged his errors, notably over Algeria and Suez, but minimised their import, asserting: ‘the priest who fails in no way mars the religion in whose name he speaks’. He lived in the northern French town of Arras in an apartment so small that when, as Prime Minister, he allowed himself the luxury of having a bathroom installed, the only place they could find to put it was in the entrance hall. Yet alongside a simplicity as mule-headed as it was genuine, Mollet had a knack for intrigue which rivalled Mitterrand’s own. He was not a man to yield without a struggle.

  In February 1969, as yet another round of discussions was beginning about the formation of a new movement to unite the non-communist Left, Mitterrand told Mollet bluntly over dinner one night that he thought the time had come for him to step down and make way for someone younger. From a man who usually took pains not to show his hand, the confidence was surprising. But Mitterrand had concluded that the only way to shift the immovable Socialist Secretary-General would be to confront him head on.

  Three months later, Mollet gave his response.

  On Sunday, May 4, citing de Gaulle’s resignation the previous weekend, he called an urgent meeting of the Socialist Party, the Convention and two other small left-wing groups to approve a charter for the projected new movement, which he suggested should be named the New Socialist Party. Sensing a trap, Mitterrand refused to attend. He had already warned some months earlier that ‘if it is going to be just a matter of putting paint on worm-eaten benches, we will not be the paint’. A second group, led by Jean Poperen, an ex-Communist who had broken with the Party in 1956, also stayed away. But Mollet and the remaining group, led by Alain Savary, the man who had blackballed Mitterrand when he had sought to join the ‘New Left’ nine years earlier, went ahead anyway.

  ‘It’s salami tactics, comrade,’ one of Mollet’s aides explained afterwards. ‘We’ve already got Savary . . . Next we will take in Poperen. And we are working to absorb the members of the Convention despite Mitterrand.’

  The strategy looked like succeeding. At a second meeting in the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux that summer, Poperen and his supporters, as Mollet had anticipated, rallied to the New Socialist Party, which now formally committed itself to the long-desired Union of the Left. For Mitterrand, this was the worst possible outcome. Not only was the Convention isolated but the new movement was advocating the very policies that Mitterrand himself had long championed. What possible justification could there be for continuing to hold aloof? Slowly the Convention’s members began haemorrhaging towards the new body that Mollet’s forceps had ingeniously brought into being.

  But at that point the Socialist leader made a fatal error.

  Instead of confirming his dauphin, Pierre Mauroy, to succeed him, he engineered the election of Alain Savary, who he thought would be more malleable and easier to control. As a condition of his appointment, Mollet had insisted that several of his close aides retain key positions. The result was what Louis Mexandeau called a ‘cloister government’, in which Savary enjoyed the appearance of power but Mollet continued to pull the strings from his supposed ‘retirement’.

  Mauroy, who controlled the Party’s powerful northern region federation, was furious. For the moment there was nothing he could do. But in time his anger would make itself felt. Meanwhile Mitterrand redoubled his efforts to maintain the Convention’s independence, travelling widely, addressing meetings in small provincial towns, a thousand people here, 1,500 there, constantly preaching the need for left-wing unity. The town meeting was then one of the few ways for an opposition leader to make his voice heard. Radio and television were still in the hands of the State. It was as though Mitterrand had returned to the beginning of his career, building a following a few members at a time. The Convention bore up better than he had feared. From 12,000 activists in the autumn of 1968, it stabilised at 8,000 two years later. And the enthusiasm with which he was received reassured him that the support he had acquired during the 1965 campaign against de Gaulle was not entirely lost.

  By the summer of 1970, Savary’s leadership was increasingly under challenge. He was respected and well liked, but he was a mild-mannered professor, without charisma and all too obviously under Mollet’s thumb. Defferre, whose federation in Marseille was the second largest after Mauroy’s, had been urging him for months to strike out on his own and fire the henchmen Mollet had left to watch over him. To no avail. That was not Savary’s style.

  Defferre and Mauroy did not have a majority even if they joined f
orces. But a third group, on the far Left of the Party, led by an idiosyncratic young technocrat named Jean-Pierre Chevènement, was also disenchanted. If the three were to unite, Savary’s leadership – and Mollet’s control – would be threatened.

  Mitterrand did not instigate their disaffection. But he nursed it.

  In November 1970 he decided the time had come to act. ‘I had only one gun, which could fire one shot, and one cartridge,’ he said later. At Château-Chinon that month he issued an appeal to ‘all political organisations favourable [to] organic socialist unity’ to set up without delay a ‘National Delegation’ to work for ‘the resurrection of a big and powerful Socialist Party’ which would attract the young. In December the Convention, at its annual assembly, approved the initiative after a debate sufficiently stormy to convince Mollet that the appeal was genuine. The ‘Delegation’ was established, one third of its members from the Convention, two thirds Socialists and their allies. It was agreed that a Congress of Unity would be held the following summer in the dormitory suburb of Épinay on the northern outskirts of Paris. For voting purposes the Convention would be treated as having 10,000 members, the Socialists 70,000.

  Mollet and Savary had every reason to be pleased with themselves. The last slice of the salami was waiting to be eaten. After two years of splendid, but rather lonely, isolation, Mitterrand and his Convention had been forced to come in from the cold. Their surrender was to be unconditional. Mitterrand gave Savary to believe that when the merger was completed he would not even seek a place on the new Executive Committee.