Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  In the weeks leading up to the Congress, Mollet felt uneasy. He had a nose for such things. But he could not put his finger on what was wrong.

  Mitterrand, Mauroy and Defferre had been meeting secretly since January.

  All three wanted an end to Mollet’s influence. Mitterrand had little difficulty convincing the others that the only way to do that was to get rid of Savary too. Within the Party, everyone was growing impatient with the slow pace of change. One of Mollet’s loyalists told Mitterrand that spring: ‘the Party is going nowhere without you. Alain Savary has failed . . . Too cautious, too hesitant, too many scruples.’

  The timing was finally right. Shortly before the Congress, Chevènement was brought into the plot. Then Mitterrand fine-tuned the machination which was to confound his opponents. Louis Mermaz, for the Convention, and Mauroy and Defferre, on behalf of their two federations, were to present rival motions for debate as alternatives to the ‘official’ motion which would be tabled by Savary. Mitterrand himself rewrote both texts, giving one a radical left-wing tonality, emphasising unity, and the other a more liberal, social-democratic slant, in order to make them sufficiently different for no one to suspect that their supporters were planning to collude, but sufficiently close on essentials that, when the moment came, a synthesis would be credible, enabling the two groups to come together.

  But first he set an ambush.

  The morning of Saturday, June 12 1971, was taken up with routine business. Savary presented a proposal for a change in the voting system to strengthen the Executive Committee by making it more difficult for those who supported dissident motions to obtain representation. To everyone’s surprise, Chevènement proposed an amendment: proportional representation on the Committee for all whose motions obtained more than 5 per cent of the vote. To Mollet’s fury, the ammendment – supported by the Convention, Mauroy and Defferre as well as Chevènement’s group – carried the day.

  The blow was totally unexpected. It was not fatal – all else being equal, Savary could still expect a majority on the new Executive Committee – but dissidents would be more strongly represented than had been the case hitherto. During the lunch break, a young member of the Convention, Gilles Catoire, pushing open the door of a small conference room, stumbled on a conclave of Mollet, Savary and Jean Poperen. Mollet, beside himself with rage, was fuming at the other two: ‘How could you let it happen, to lose the Party like this?’

  The following day, Sunday, the leaders presented their groups’ motions. Mitterrand gave a rousing speech, proclaiming his confidence in the Party’s future, which he compared with the passivity of the recent past. ‘Now that we have a new party,’ he told the 900 delegates packed into the hall,

  I want its first mission to be to conquer . . . I want this party to take power! I know, I know, I’m starting badly. Already the sin of electoralism! Yes, I too would like . . . the transformation of our society . . . to commence with a change in our own consciousness and the consciousness of the masses. But we must also win power! To remain a splinter group is not my vocation, nor that of those who vote this motion with me.3

  It was a language of hope in the tradition of Léon Blum and Jean Jaurès, the emblematic figures of French socialism. Unity, Mitterrand declared, could not be held hostage to a prior ideological accord with the Communists, as Mollet and Savary wished, because in that case it would never happen. Unity must be built on a practical basis, to win back the support the Socialists had lost to the Communist Party, to attract liberal democrats who wanted change even if they disagreed with socialist methods, to convince the ‘leftists’ and the youth whose demands had exploded on to the streets in May 1968. What policies should be followed once that unity was achieved? It was up to the Congress to decide:

  Reform or revolution? I want to say . . . yes, revolution! . . . Whether it is violent or peaceful, revolution is first and foremost a rupture. Whoever does not accept a rupture . . . with the established order, [with] capitalist society, that person, I say, cannot be a member of the Socialist Party . . . There is not and will never be a socialist society without collective ownership of the main means of production, exchange and research . . . The real enemy, . . . the only enemy, because it includes everything else . . . is the monopoly! The term is broad, it covers the power of money in all its forms: money which corrupts, money which buys, money which crushes, money which kills, money which ruins, money which rots men’s consciences! Those who govern us politically are merely the executives of this monopoly. As for our base, . . . our base is the class front . . . the Union of the Left.4

  Fighting words, which contrasted all the more strongly with the warmed-up platitudes of Guy Mollet, who spoke next. Mollet could be a skilful orator on his own turf, but this time he floundered, unable to find the words to retrieve the situation. When the ballots were counted, Mitterrand’s motion, supported by Mauroy, Defferre, Chevènement and the Convention, received 43,926 votes, just over 2,000 more than the motion of Savary’s team. That Sunday afternoon, he became de facto First Secretary – a position formally confirmed three days later – of a party of which the previous Friday he had not even been a member.

  Luck had been on Mitterrand’s side.

  The veteran co-leader of the northern federation, Augustin Laurent, an ally of Mollet who could have prevented Mauroy from switching his votes to Mitterrand, was persuaded to go home early. Other delegations from distant provinces also left ahead of time, in some cases handing their mandates to Mitterrand’s sympathisers to use as they thought best. With 4,000 abstentions and blank votes, the margin of victory was so narrow that the slightest misstep could have reversed it. Or it could all have come unstuck at a much earlier stage. Had Michel Rocard decided that spring to join the Socialists, bringing with him his followers in the PSU, not only would Mitterrand’s takeover have been blocked but Rocard himself might have been chosen as Savary’s successor. He acknowledged years later that he had been so involved in the PSU’s internecine doctrinal squabbling that he had failed to see that the opportunity of a lifetime was passing him by.

  Mitterrand’s gamble had paid off. He had fired his one shot from his one gun and he had won.

  As leader of the Socialist Party – the adjective ‘New’ had been dropped – Mitterrand was again the acknowledged standard-bearer of the Left, as he had been after the 1965 election against de Gaulle. The General, the colossus who for a quarter of a century had dominated France, had died suddenly from a ruptured artery eight months before. Georges Pompidou, announcing his death to the French people, said simply: ‘France is a widow.’

  But whereas, in 1965 and the years that followed, Mitterrand had constantly to fend off potential rivals, after Épinay his pre-eminence was unchallenged. Mendès France withdrew from active politics. Mollet also left the scene. Michel Rocard retained a following but the PSU was marginalised.

  In March 1972, the Socialists approved a ‘programme of government’, setting out for the first time the policies Mitterrand would implement if the Left obtained a majority in the parliamentary elections due the following year. With a title – ‘To Change Life’ – inspired by May 1968, it listed ninety-one propositions, some of which, including a minimum wage of 1,000 francs (then £100 or US $240) a month, higher old age pensions, cheaper health and free hospital care, were to take effect ‘within hours’ of a socialist government taking office.

  Much of the rest was standard left-wing boilerplate of the kind attempted, with varying degrees of success, throughout Western Europe: equal wages for women; a 40-hour working week (against an average in France of 45 hours, the longest in the European Community); the reduction of the retirement age to 60 for those ‘carrying out arduous work’; the granting of an extra week of paid holiday in winter (making a total of five weeks a year, compared with two weeks on average in the USA and, at that time, three weeks in Britain); and nationalisation of banks, insurance companies and key industries.

  There were occasional verbal flourishes. ‘The banks,’
it declared, ‘are the new Lords of Creation.’ The ‘privileged classes, the exploiters and profiteers’ were ‘enemies of the people’. The final goal was to replace the ‘unjust and decadent society’ built on capitalism with ‘a classless society’ which would operate by self-management. But the method was to be reform, not revolution. Mitterrand had already covered himself in his speech at Épinay, declaring that ‘without playing with words, the everyday struggle for deep structural reform can also be revolutionary in nature’. To drive home the point, the programme insisted on ‘gradual processes and sustained effort’, noting that France, as part of Western Europe, trading in a world dominated by the US dollar, could survive ‘only if it wins the gamble of industrial expansion’. Socialism would fail unless it took that into account.

  The constitution of the Fifth Republic was to be kept largely intact. The presidential mandate would be reduced from seven years to five; special courts and capital punishment abolished; radio and television freed from government control; abortion legalised; and France’s overseas territories granted self-determination.

  In short, the programme conformed to the Party’s new emblem, a clenched fist (signifying strength) holding a rose (the symbol of dreams). No one had done an accurate costing, but inevitably the dreams were to be paid for by higher taxes, including a wealth tax, increased estate duties and a tax on capital gains. The goal was to reduce income differentials so as to create an egalitarian society in which ‘the privileges of fortune will be extinguished’ and ‘the needs of all will count for more than the profit of the few’.

  All that now remained was to bring the Communists on board.

  Ever since 1963, Thorez and his successors had been on record urging the Socialists to negotiate a Common Programme. Mitterrand had taken a step in that direction when, five years later, he and Waldeck Rochet had signed a Common Platform committing them to work together.5 But a ‘Programme’, setting out agreed policies, was a very different proposition.

  To the Communists it would bring democratic respectability – notwithstanding Duclos’s impressive showing in the 1969 elections, French public opinion was still up in arms over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia – and reassure the Party’s main constituency, the industrial workforce, that a Communist–Socialist coalition had a real chance of coming to power, thereby encouraging it to resist the blandishments of the pleiad of Maoist and Trotskyist groups which had surfaced after May 1968 and were now competing for its favour.

  To Mitterrand it was a way to sap Communist strength. In Ma part de vérité he had spelt out his objective: to reverse in favour of the Socialists, at the Communists’ expense, ‘the internal balance of forces on the Left, which has been to [our] detriment for the last thirty years’. A Common Programme was the best way to achieve that.

  But Mitterrand’s opposite number was no longer the affable Waldeck Rochet. There was a new acting Secretary-General, Georges Marchais, who had started his career as an aircraft factory worker and had risen through the trades union movement. Marchais had reservations. But the logic of the Socialists’ proposal proved too strong: an alliance with the non-communist Left was the only way for the Party to return to the mainstream of French political life. In April 1972 Marchais agreed to talks.

  The Common Programme they negotiated closely resembled the ‘programme of government’ which the Socialists had published a month earlier. Over Marchais’s objections, Mitterrand insisted on maintaining a clause giving the President the right to name a new Prime Minister if parliament voted a censure motion, rather than being obliged to call new elections: the provision was crucial, because otherwise the Communists could threaten to bring down the government and go to the country whenever they thought it to their advantage. Marchais also had to accept the Socialists’ position on French membership of NATO and on the ‘primordial’ importance of the European Community, about to be enlarged by the admission of Britain, Denmark and Ireland. To Mitterrand, European unity was the key to overcoming the division of the world into the rival blocs agreed by Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta and thus to the eventual dissolution of the two great military alliances. Even the French nuclear deterrent, the force de frappe (‘strike force’), which Charles Hernu, now the Socialists’ defence spokesman, had persuaded Mitterrand to retain, received the Communists’ reluctant approval.

  The one area on which Marchais and his colleagues were not prepared to budge was economic policy, which interested Mitterrand least. The Communist leader insisted that the role of the State be expanded through enhanced central planning and increased government control of the financial sector and demanded the nationalisation of nine major industrial groups, instead of five as the Socialists’ programme proposed. But Mitterrand dug in his heels against including the steel industry. During the final all-night negotiating session on June 26, Gaston Defferre, whose distrust of the Communists was undiminished, accused Marchais of trying to impose ‘hackneyed recipes for state-ownership’ which were thirty years out of date. A few minutes later, the meeting was close to breakdown:

  MITTERRAND: There is no way that nationalising steel is justified . . .

  MARCHAIS: But you are going back on what you said! You’re calling into question what we discussed before. My word, you want the shirt off our backs!

  MITTERRAND: Listen – as regards nationalisations, you can increase the stakes afterwards if that’s what you want. We Socialists are serious: we want a linkage between nationalisations, self-management and economic policy. You people are always tempted to go overboard . . .

  MARCHAIS: For us it’s a key issue.

  MITTERRAND: Too bad. We have reached our limit.6

  After a 20-minute break to allow tempers to cool, Marchais backed down.

  Only on one point did he refuse to compromise. The Socialists favoured ‘worker self-management’ in state-owned industries to prevent the emergence of a command economy. The Communists insisted on ‘democratic management’, the system in use in the Soviet bloc. For Marchais, it was a face-saver. When the two leaders signed at 5 a.m., it was the one area in 90 pages of text where, failing to find common ground, they offered alternative proposals.

  The agreement was – to use a much-overworked word – historic. For the first time since they had split at the Congress of Tours in 1920, Socialists and Communists had agreed to govern together. No less important, between the lines, the Communists had accepted the rules of parliamentary democracy: if the government was voted down, they would leave power. Only once before had Communist ministers entered the government in France and that was at the end of the war, under de Gaulle, when Moscow was still an ally. Even in 1936, during the Popular Front, the Communists had supported Léon Blum’s administration but had not participated. To proclaim a Socialist–Communist coalition in the early 1970s, in the midst of the Cold War, when Soviet power was at its height and the Kremlin both financed and managed the communist movement worldwide, strained credulity. Nowhere else in the West was the appointment of communist ministers envisaged. Foreign socialists looked askance at Mitterrand’s heresy.

  Next morning he flew to Vienna, where the Socialist International was holding its triennial congress. There he explained to the assembled dignitaries, including the Austrian Chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, the Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, and Harold Wilson, soon to become Britain’s Prime Minister, what the French Socialists were up to. ‘Our fundamental objective,’ he said, ‘is to remake a powerful Socialist Party on the terrain which the Communist Party itself is occupying, in order to show that out of five million communist voters, three million can vote socialist.’ No one could disagree with that. But it was a gamble. Who could say whether it would pay off? Two days later the Communist newspaper, l’Humanité, proclaiming its confidence that the balance of forces would remain in the Party’s favour, dismissed the Vienna speech as wishful thinking. And that of course was the point. ґto koґo (‘Who whom?’), as the Russians succinctly say. In this fatal embrace, which one would strangle the
other?

  Mitterrand was not cut out to be the head of a large party organisation. After Épinay he had asked Pierre Mauroy to take the job of First Secretary but Mauroy had declined. So he made the best of what he could not help. But the constraints of the job exasperated him. He hated having to be on time for meetings. It was hardly new. His lateness was legendary. Françoise Giroud remembered:

  You always had to wait two or three hours before he came. And when eventually he did turn up, he would launch into such a complicated and improbable explanation that it was obvious he was making it up. The more he became entangled in his story, the more irritated he became that no one believed him . . . And if, by chance, he was on time, to go to a lunch for example, the idea of being punctual would so disconcert him that he would immediately invent something that he had to do, a file to consult or an article to read, in order to be sure to arrive an hour after everyone else.7

  In the 1950s, as Interior Minister, he had once received the Algerian nationalist leader, Ferhat Abbas. After Abbas had been waiting in an anteroom for an hour and a half, an aide went in to find the cause of the delay. Mitterrand was reading the cartoons in France Soir. It was not that he had intended a political snub. Nor was it just rudeness or thoughtlessness or even egoism – though it was certainly all those things too. The explanation was less rational. He had a visceral reaction against any kind of restriction – whether in politics, private life or the realm of ideas. Punctuality was a straitjacket he refused to accept.

  It did not make him an ideal candidate for the daily grind of running the Socialist Party apparatus, with its chores and protocol and wearisome routine.

  The UDSR and the Convention, both with limited memberships and an easy-going tolerance of internal dissent, had been simple to manage. The Socialist Party, with a membership of more than 100,000, its federations and factions perpetually jockeying for advantage, was a very different sort of beast.8 Throughout his career, Mitterrand had operated through overlapping networks of friends and followers. Now he found himself having to direct a vertical chain of command. He knew it had to be done. Socialism ‘has not the slightest chance of succeeding’, he told an interviewer, ‘without . . . big parties. Having understood that, I have drawn the necessary conclusion: it’s finished with splinter groups!’ He was as good as his word. But he did not find it particularly congenial.