by Philip Short
Complicating his task was the fact that he was a recent convert, surrounded by men (and the occasional woman, in what was then still a male-dominated party) who had paid their dues to Marx for years or decades. He had mastered the jargon and was able to make the appropriate responses but it often sounded strained. ‘Mitterrand did not become socialist,’ Guy Mollet mocked, ‘he learnt to speak socialist’.9 Gilles Martinet, a long-time critic who was among the first to defect from the PSU after Épinay, was more perceptive. ‘When [Mitterrand] talked about “the exploitation of man by man”’, he wrote, ‘I used to look at my feet. [But] he is the best strategist that, up to now, the Left has ever had . . . He was the first to analyse [how to reach our goal] with the cold, lucid eyes of a wartime Commander-in-chief.’ Mitterrand was well aware that his socialist rhetoric rang hollow and some years later, when there was no longer a need to act the part, references to capitalism and class struggle disappeared from his vocabulary. Ideology was another constraint that he preferred to do without. In an interview with the magazine, l’Expansion, shortly after the Common Programme was signed, he explained:
A lot of Marxists are not really Marxist, in the sense that Marx’s thinking was spontaneous and rich, while they spend their time making it sterile . . . The dogmatism of all the Communists and of certain Socialists is very irritating. I find none of that freedom of the spirit which is the first of freedoms, from which all the others follow. You should know that I will die a liberal in every sense and especially in intellectual matters. I do not believe that there is a revealed truth in the life of human beings.10
Mitterrand’s problem was how to weld a party with such disparate origins into a single organisation, capable of winning power. To enforce ideological unity, as Mollet had done, was not his style and in any case, as even Mollet had admitted, it was often impossible: the Socialists were simply too divided.
Poperen and Savary had spent years at the head of separate small parties, or groupuscules, as the French describe them. Within the mainstream, Chevènement and his colleagues, who called themselves the ‘Centre for Socialist Study and Research’ or CERES, were crypto-communist; Mauroy and Defferre, heading semi-independent fiefdoms, were moderate social democrats; while another group, including Max Lejeune, the erstwhile champion of the French army in Algeria, was so far to the Right it was hardly socialist at all.
The answer, he decided, was to do what he had always done: to forge unity not around a programme but around his own person.
In France this was much less unusual than it would be in an Anglo-Saxon country. Whereas in America or Britain you are first and foremost a Democrat or a Republican, Conservative or Labour, and only afterwards a supporter of a particular leader, in France a new party comes into being when a new leader appears, and then disappears or changes its name or merges with another movement when that leader leaves the scene. Hence the bewildering proliferation of ephemeral groups which flower and fade along with the fortunes of the political personalities whose ambitions they are created to serve.fn1
The first months were difficult.
After Épinay, where Mitterrand had won control by the narrowest of margins, the defeated factions denounced a ‘hold-up’ by an unnatural alliance of Chevènement and Mauroy–Defferre, the far Left and the Right. ‘The Party has been hijacked,’ headlined the Nouvel Observateur. When the Common Programme was signed, a few inveterate anti-communists from the early days, including the unreconstructible Max Lejeune, packed their bags and left. But their departure was more than made up for a few weeks later when dissidents in the Radical Party, calling themselves the MRG or Mouvement des Radicaux de Gauche (Left-Radical Movement), led by Maurice Faure, René Billères and Robert Fabre, joined the new alliance.
Gradually even the most sceptical acknowledged that Mitterrand had been the only possible choice.
In February 1973, three months before the legal deadline, the government called parliamentary elections. It was Mitterrand’s first test as Socialist Party leader. He campaigned round the clock, addressing four or five meetings a day, often hundreds of miles apart, in a France where there were still few motorways and mobile phones had yet to be invented. Louis Mexandeau, standing as a candidate in Normandy, remembered one evening when Mitterrand finished speaking in Limoges at 5 p.m. with a meeting due in Caen, 300 miles to the north, two hours later, only to discover that his flight had been cancelled because of an air controllers’ strike. A local activist volunteered to drive him. ‘He drove at 100 miles an hour, which made me worry a bit,’ Mitterrand recounted. ‘Then he said, “You’ve got to look on the bright side. I’ve had two heart attacks in the last few months.”’ They arrived at 10.30 p.m. and Mitterrand began addressing a crowd of 3,000 who had been waiting for four hours. At around midnight there was a phone call from Lisieux, a town 20 miles away, where another 700 people had gathered at 6.30 p.m., gone home to dinner and then reassembled. Mitterrand’s message to cancel because of the strike had not got through and they were still waiting. The day ended at 3 a.m.
The elections vindicated Mitterrand’s strategy. The Socialists and their allies won 21.7 per cent of the vote and 102 seats, the Communists 21.3 per cent and 73 seats, in both cases roughly double their representation in the outgoing parliament. It was almost as good a showing as in 1967.
Three months later, at the party congress in Grenoble, the last notable holdouts against Mitterrand’s leadership, Jean Poperen and his followers, laid down their arms. After the votes were counted, the First Secretary had the support of 92 per cent of the membership. Only a handful of Guy Mollet’s supporters still contested the new line. In terms of doctrine, unity was still as elusive as ever. But at least the Party was functioning as a single entity and François Mitterrand had consolidated his position as its leader.
On the evening of April 2 1974, a Tuesday, Mitterrand was dining alone at the Brasserie Lipp, working on a speech he was to give in parliament that week, when the owner, Roger Cazes, came up and whispered to him: ‘They say the President has died.’
The country had been aware for more than a year that Georges Pompidou was ill. At a meeting with Richard Nixon in Reykjavik the previous summer, his face had been swollen from cortisone treatment, he walked hesitantly and at times slurred his words. He had been diagnosed with a rare and painful form of leukaemia which affects the bone marrow. As his illness progressed, the press and the political elite could talk of little else. Mitterrand refused to join in. Asked by a journalist in March about the President’s health, he had responded sharply: ‘Pompidou cancels his appointments? So what! Anyone can have a nasty flu. Me too . . .’ The dying President, who had no love for the Socialist leader, appreciated his decorum, telling colleagues: ‘One of the few who has acted correctly in this matter is Mitterrand.’ But even though it had been widely expected, Pompidou’s death, when it came, was a shock. Roger Cazes remembered an expression of ‘almost unbearable anguish’ on Mitterrand’s face when he heard the news. It meant another presidential election, another trial of strength. The Socialist Party, which he had conquered less than three years earlier, could have done with more time to prepare.
When he reached home that night, he drafted a political obituary, insidious in its catalogue of Pompidou’s failures – ‘What will he have left as a memory of his time? Nothing or so little. That is the cruelty of his fate, not the fact that his life was cut short’ – which was published the following weekend in the party newspaper, l’Unité.
For the next few days Mitterrand lay low, leaving Pierre Mauroy to fend off his partners’ attempts to contact him. The Communists were miffed. ‘Marchais writes to Mitterrand and it’s Mauroy who replies?’ the Secretary-General complained. ‘Something’s not right.’
There were reasons for his silence. If he stood, he wanted carte blanche, the freedom to campaign not as the candidate of a party – neither his own nor, still less, the Communists – but as an independent able to appeal to the electorate as a whole. It was a huge responsi
bility. ‘It’s as though I’m on the edge of a precipice and I have to jump,’ he told Maurice Faure. This time he had a real chance of winning. If he failed he would dash the hopes that not only the Socialist Party but the whole of the Left was placing on his shoulders.
On Monday, April 8, when the official mourning was over, Mitterrand announced that he would be a candidate. So did the Finance Minister, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Jacques Chaban-Delmas, the Gaullist Mayor of Bordeaux, jumped in even sooner, attracting accusations of indecent haste when the President’s body was not yet cold. Chaban had little choice. It was Mitterrand’s good fortune to be the sole candidate of the Left. The Socialists, the Communists and even, for the first time, the PSU, had all lined up behind him. The Right was fielding a plethora of more or less Gaullist candidates. Edgar Faure; Pierre Messmer, who had succeeded Chaban as Prime Minister; and Christian Fouchet, Mitterrand’s colleague at the time of the ‘Leaks Affair’, all briefly entered the race only to withdraw later. Another Gaullist, Jean Royer, stood as the champion of small shopkeepers, urging a revival of traditional morality and castigating the new fashion for erotic films, which earned him fifteen days of fame as the cynosure of French cartoonists. Jean-Marie le Pen, participating for the first time in a presidential election, succeeded Tixier-Vignancour as the standard-bearer of the extreme Right.
Mitterrand had begun planning for the election a year earlier when it had become clear that Pompidou’s health was deteriorating. Claude Perdriel, the managing director of the Nouvel Observateur, had been sent to America in the summer of 1973 to study the campaign of George McGovern against Richard Nixon and had returned full of new ideas for marketing techniques, direct mailings and niche-targeting to mobilise the vote. He told Mitterrand in December that he would need a year to fine-tune a strategy. The President had died four months later.
Unlike in 1965, when Mitterrand’s campaign had been run by a handful of volunteers out of four cramped offices in the rue du Louvre, in 1974 he rented the whole of the third floor of the Tour Montparnasse, a 59-storey skyscraper, then the tallest in Europe, which had been Georges Pompidou’s parting, and diversely appreciated, gift to the elegant city laid out by Baron Haussmann a century before.fn2
Three candidates were in with a serious chance: Chaban-Delmas for the Gaullists; Giscard for the Centre-Right; and Mitterrand for the Left.
However Chaban’s campaign disintegrated almost at once, mainly because his own party stabbed him in the back. Jacques Chirac, who was then emerging as the dominant force in the Gaullist party – Georges Pompidou had nicknamed him ‘my bulldozer’ – had decided that his interests lay with Giscard and organised things in such a way that the party’s election manifesto did not even mention Chaban’s name. As though that were not enough, anonymous tracts were distributed accusing Chaban of being a homosexual, a Jew and, for good measure, of having murdered his wife.
It was never established who was responsible, but suspicion fell on Michel Poniatowski, a descendant of Polish princes who had served as Health Minister under Pompidou and was the architect of Giscard’s campaign. Ponia, as he was called, was not noted for subtlety. As soon as the campaign began, he arranged for the income tax authorities to carry out a surprise audit of Mitterrand’s tax returns. It was so crude that even Mitterrand had to smile. Needless to say, nothing was found.
Chaban’s eclipse was a blow. A tight contest on the Right would have enhanced the image of unity on the Left. Now it was down to a two-man race.
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was ferociously intelligent, quick-thinking and cultivated, a polymath with aristocratic pretensions all the more marked because they were of recent date. He was slim, tall, good-looking, attractive to women and above all, at 48, ten years junior to Mitterrand, who for the first time was no longer the youngest, brightest boy in the class. In short, he was a formidable opponent.
Their first debate, broadcast on the radio on April 25, set the tone for those that followed. Mitterrand attacked Giscard on his economic record, potentially a winning argument at a time when the US and Western Europe were undergoing the worst downturn since the Great Depression, exacerbated by a quadrupling of oil prices. The French stock market had lost 50 per cent of its value, unemployment was rising and inflation was running at nearly 14 per cent, three times the level of the 1960s. ‘You have been Finance Minister for eleven years,’ Mitterrand told him. ‘And you have been a minister eleven times,’ Giscard retorted, implying that a man of the Fourth Republic was incapable of dealing with a modern economy.
Giscard had another arrow in his quiver: the threat of communism. De Gaulle had used it to great effect in June 1968. Now, when Mitterrand accused him of representing ‘the law of the jungle . . . and the power of money’, the Finance Minister rejoined that his opponent was planning to overthrow the established order and introduce a ‘collectivist organisation’ of society. ‘In order to make men free,’ he declared, ‘we do not need to herd them into a tunnel.’
In the run-up to the first round, neither side made a serious gaffe. The Communists avoided anything which might give Giscard the chance to run a scare campaign. Mitterrand concentrated on the recession and Giscard’s handling of the economy. By the time Election Day arrived, he had spoken at more than thirty meetings before half a million people, appeared dozens of times on radio and television and given hundreds of interviews.
But would that be enough?
On the evening of Sunday, May 5, when the results came in, Mitterrand had 43.2 per cent of the vote, Giscard 32.6 and Chaban 15.1. It was a vastly better showing than in 1965. But to Mitterrand it was a disappointment. He had been hoping for another 1 or 1.5 per cent.11 The pollsters said the second round would be too close to call. Mitterrand would need at least one in five of those who had supported Giscard’s right-wing rivals to switch their votes to the Left. Not quite impossible. But difficult.
At that point Mitterrand made a tactical error. For the next four days he concentrated on preparing for the one formal television debate of the campaign, which Giscard was widely expected to win. While he did so, part of the momentum that had been built up over the previous weeks was lost.
The debate, which took place the following Friday, produced a memorable phrase. Mitterrand had been vaunting the Left’s superiority in matters of social justice when Giscard shot back: ‘Mr Mitterrand, you do not have a monopoly on the heart.’ At least one person watching – the writer, Jean Lacouture, who was rooting for the Left – felt at that moment the battle was lost. However, that was an intellectual’s reaction, not necessarily that of the ordinary viewer. Giscard came across better on the small screen – more photogenic, more relaxed – and repeatedly he got under Mitterrand’s guard. But his arrogance and his habit of talking down to his opponent as though to an obtuse student antagonised as much of the audience as his brilliance seduced.
Pierre Viansson-Ponté, writing in Le Monde, compared him to ‘the boy at the top of the class who can’t resist giving others lessons’, while Mitterrand came across as a solid peasant, ‘leaning firmly on the handle of his plough as he traces a deep furrow’. Opinion surveys shortly after the debate showed no significant change in either man’s support.
The following week Mitterrand began regaining ground. Already, on the eve of the first round, he had told a colleague that he felt he was ‘level pegging, but with a slight advantage’. Now, he said, ‘the tide is rising’.
Giscard’s camp began to panic.
Poniatowski launched a campaign to portray Mitterrand as the agent of a Soviet fifth column, warning: ‘All the European countries which have communist governments are occupied at this moment by Russian troops.’ Two days before the second round, anonymous tracts, similar to those which had vilified Chaban, were distributed throughout France, asserting that Mitterrand was being blackmailed by the Communists who were said to have discovered that he had deposited a large amount of embezzled funds in a Jewish-owned Swiss bank.
That afternoon Alain Poher,
the President of the Senate who was acting Head of State, told Mitterrand that all the information at his disposal, notably the reports of the prefêts in each département, gave him as the winner in the second round. Every other indicator was pointing in the same direction. For the first time, Mitterrand began to believe that his hour had come. He asked Gaston Defferre, whom he planned to name as Prime Minister, to draw up a list of possible Cabinet members. Pierre Mendès France was to be Foreign Minister, Mauroy would take the Interior, while the rest of the government would be made up of Socialists with two Left-Radicals and two or three Communists.12
When the verdict was announced on Sunday night, May 19, Giscard squeaked through by a margin of 425,000 votes. He received 50.81 per cent, Mitterrand 49.19.
It was the best result the Left had had since the war: 12.7 million votes compared with 10.6 million in 1965. But Mitterrand had not quite obtained the 20 per cent of crossover votes that he needed from the Centre, and the Right had done a better job than the Left of mobilising those who had abstained in the first round. In working-class areas where Mollet’s supporters were dominant, Socialist Party organisations had dragged their feet in getting out the vote and the Communists had in some cases been less supportive than they might have been.