by Philip Short
But the root cause lay elsewhere.
In the final days, France had hesitated, holding its breath. When the moment came to vote, fear proved more powerful than the desire for change. Giscard represented continuity. Mitterrand, in alliance with the Communists, in the middle of the Cold War, meant a leap into the unknown. The country was still not ready. The corollary, given the closeness of the result, was that next time round, the Left could expect to win. Mitterrand said the following week: ‘It came too early . . . The situation needed to ripen a bit more. If the presidential election had been held at the normal time, in 1976, I believe I would have been elected without too much difficulty.’
The defeat was all the more painful because Mitterrand had been convinced that victory was within his grasp. ‘I felt myself ready,’ he said. ‘I felt at one with the movement of history.’ On election night, he thanked those who had voted for him, whose sorrow, he said, was ‘on the same scale as their hopes’ but urged them ‘to remain united and share my resolution’. Afterwards he told his colleagues: ‘Our fight continues. Because you represent the world of youth and labour, your victory is ineluctable.’
Your victory? Had he decided to pack it in? In the weeks that followed, he was sorely tempted. He told Jean Daniel of the Nouvel Observateur:
Let’s be clear. I will never find circumstances like that again. I was in a position to govern. Physically I had all the faculties to do so: now they may start declining. And honestly, it doesn’t excite me that much any more . . . Do you think I dream all the time about being President of the Republic? Of course . . . I would have enjoyed being Head of State, but it’s not fundamental, not at all. [Do I want to keep battling away at the head of the Socialist Party?] No, I’d rather be doing something else . . . I have a duty . . . to those who voted for me. But there are many things which would please me better than having to debate with Giscard d’Estaing and his men. He certainly has qualities, but he interests me less than three oak trees in a field or a good novel. I sometimes wonder why I should want to stay shut up to the end in that closed universe. I don’t say that from weariness, but seventeen years of struggle – it’s beginning to feel long.13
A month later, he was still debating what to do. One evening during a visit to Normandy, he told Louis Mexandeau bluntly: ‘I am wondering if it wouldn’t be better to stop.’ When Mexandeau protested that he could not do that, he answered, ‘Yes, but you know better than anyone what this means as a way of life. To go on means the daily sacrifice of every single day I have, Sundays included.’
It was the same cri de coeur that he had addressed to Georges Dayan, shortly after the birth of his first son, Pascal: ‘What is the point . . . if you have no time for your private life?’ Now, twenty-nine years later, another new and compelling reason was about to come into his life to prompt that question again.
Her name was Mazarine Marie and she was born on December 18 1974 at a private nursing home in Avignon. Eighteen months earlier, Anne Pingeot had given Mitterrand an ultimatum. She was thirty years old, she told him. She had her own career – in 1970 she had passed the examination to become a curator and had started work at the Louvre inventorying nineteenth-century sculpture, a field in which she would become an authority. She knew that she could never become his wife. But she wanted their child. François at first demurred. At 57, was it right to bring into the world a child whose father, in the nature of things, might not live long enough to see him through to adulthood? Anne was adamant. If he refused, she said, it raised questions about whether they should continue their relationship. He capitulated. During the election campaign, she told him she was pregnant.
It was a courageous choice. Single motherhood in the 1970s, even in tolerant France, was not as socially acceptable as it is today. That autumn François, with Danielle in tow, travelled to Cuba at the head of a Socialist Party delegation. ‘I was in despair,’ Anne remembered. ‘There I was, [seven months] pregnant, and he was off with his wife in Cuba!’ To keep busy, she went to London to improve her English, and found herself one day in Highgate cemetery, meditating before the tomb of Karl Marx, without whose baleful influence François might never have gone to Cuba at all. In the event, the trip left a bad taste in his mouth too. While there, Danielle met Fidel Castro, the first step in an enduring love affair with left-wing movements in Latin America which her husband would later have cause to regret.
Mazarine, André Rousselet liked to say, ‘is a gift that they gave to each other’. Anne used to joke that ‘she was the one real gift he ever gave me’. Since they could not marry, it was their way of plighting their troth. François Mitterrand might not be sentimental, but he was romantic. All his life he wrote poems, with which he was never satisfied, which were never published and which were often not very good, but which betrayed a spiritual longing. One of the better ones, in praise of ancient Greece, written before he met Anne, was a metaphor for a love which was forever out of reach:
Your face,
For centuries
I have set out on its quest . . .
Is it a veil or the forest,
Which, on your forehead, flames and falls back,
Like a black tress with a golden fold? . . .
Your face, for centuries
I touch with my hand.
What strange absence is there of myself in you,
That, like water in the desert at a time of great heat,
He who leans above it sees no reflection of his face.
The sand which runs between my fingers
Has the softness of a river that never ends . . .
For centuries I have searched.
Who is the prey?
You, her or me?14
Mitterrand had wanted a daughter. For the next twenty years, Mazarine would be the light of his life. He and Anne named her after Cardinal Mazarin, the great seventeenth-century statesman whose Breviary for Politicians was among his pillow books. Marie was for the Catholic faith they both honoured in the breach.
Danielle was informed of Mazarine’s birth almost at once by the inevitable ‘well-meaning friend’. She absorbed the blow. It did not really change anything. Over the years, her relationship with François had stabilised. She busied herself with the family home at Latche, gardening and looking after the dogs and the two donkeys, Noisette and Marron (Hazelnut and Chestnut), which François had acquired after a friend had convinced him that an effort was needed to preserve the race.
In Paris, they decided to leave the rue Guynemer: rents were rising and Danielle felt that when François retired they would no longer be able to afford it.
She was attracted to an area just behind the Boulevard St Germain, close to the banks of the Seine and Notre Dame. But it was due for redevelopment. Then in 1971 a preservation order was issued. Shortly afterwards a sixteenth-century house in the rue de Bièvre came up for sale. It had an impressive gateway, big enough for a carriage to pass through, leading into a pocket handkerchief of a courtyard. The house itself was a ruin, with squatters occupying the first floor. The building next door had collapsed altogether – a small garden now occupies the place where it once stood – and the outside wall leaned alarmingly into the void. But Danielle had made up her mind. She said afterwards that she had found her vocation: breathing new life into dying homes – first at Latche, now in Paris – so that they could welcome a family again. With the money from the sale of the villa at Hossegor and a mortgage, they bought the property in partnership with Roland Dumas, who was then a successful lawyer, representing among others Picasso and Giacometti. One of François’s Resistance colleagues who needed an apartment for his daughter also contributed. After two years of restoration work, at Easter 1973, they were able to move in.15
The house, like its occupants, was eccentric: a warren of small rooms at improbable angles with not one wall perpendicular, not a single floor level, as if taken from the Victorian nursery rhyme about the man ‘who bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse, and they all lived t
ogether in a little crooked house’.
The beams were of oak from trading ships, hardened by the sea. The central stone staircase, which had twisted on its axis but still served as the pivot holding the rest of the house together, was retained, but they added a minuscule elevator, ‘for our old age’, Danielle explained. François planted a magnolia tree in the courtyard, with rose bushes and a rhododendron. Ivy covered the inner wall.
The change of residence did not go entirely as planned.
Le Canard enchaîné, which also acquired new premises that year, discovered that ‘plumbers’ from the French counter-intelligence agency, the DST, had installed microphones in the walls during the renovation, with wires leading across the roof towards a nearby police station. Almost a dozen DST officers were identified as having taken part in the operation. Subsequent investigations revealed that the Mitterrands’ new home had also been equipped with listening devices. When workmen were called in to investigate, they found bugs embedded in the plaster. As in the case of the Canard, wires led towards the local police post.
Responsibility was traced back to the then Interior Minister, Raymond Marcellin. The government and the courts hushed up the affair, arguing that the information was classified.
For Mitterrand, the move to the rue de Bièvre, like that from Hossegor to Latche, six years earlier, mirrored the changes in his life. He was back in the Latin Quarter of his youth, redolent of Moroccan couscous restaurants and echoing with the cries of barrow boys and the memory of the artisans and labourers, the carters and wine-sellers, who had populated it a century before. Over the next few decades, gentrification would sap the area of its vitality. But in the early 1970s it fitted the character of the man that Mitterrand had become, a left-wing political leader who refused to be categorised, a conformist whose sense of social propriety was equalled only by the casualness with which he broke the establishment’s rules.
Danielle had her bedroom, which she designed with an open-plan bathroom, on the first floor. Not far away was the room of her partner, Jean Balenci, ‘no bigger than a ship’s cabin’, as a later occupant complained. François’s bedroom, lined with books, was on the second floor. The top floor, the pigeon-loft as the family called it, reached by a steep oak staircase, was his office, guarded by a redoubtable secretary ensconced in a cubby hole by the entrance, Marie-Claire Papegay, who had been with him since the 1950s.
The Mitterrands’ younger son, Gilbert, who was studying law in Paris, also had a room there. Jean-Christophe, the older boy, was in Africa, working for the French news agency, AFP. They had not had an easy childhood. Danielle was often on edge, François was rarely there. Gilbert coped. Jean-Christophe found it harder. He felt, he wrote later, that he had always been ‘the boy from next door’. Now, finally, it seemed, they had both settled down.
Jean Balenci had become a member of the family. Usually he was the one who went out to buy croissants in the morning and fetch the newspapers. He and François breakfasted together. They all spent the holidays at Hossegor and, later, at Latche. To outsiders he was introduced as a distant cousin.
The 1974 election campaign required Danielle to play a more prominent public role. Giscard had made a point of showcasing his wife, Anne-Aymone, and their four children, as a model French family. Mitterrand felt obliged to do the same. Danielle joined him at a press conference at which he addressed feminist issues, and accompanied him on his travels. Jean kept in the background. So did Anne. Occasionally she attended his political meetings, sitting discreetly two or three rows back. To his entourage, she was just one of the many attractive young women the candidate trailed in his wake.
Giscard was well aware of his rival’s delicate situation but, given his own extra-conjugal adventures, was hardly in a position to throw the first stone. The furthest he dared go was to make a series of heavy-handed references to Anne’s home town, Clermont-Ferrand – ‘a town which knows you well, Mr Mitterrand’ – during their televised campaign debate. It was a transparent attempt to put his opponent off balance. Mitterrand did not flinch.
After Mazarine’s birth, the ‘second family’ took on added importance. They finished building the cottage at Gordes. A year earlier, Anne had bought a small apartment for herself, using money which her parents had originally set aside for her dowry, in the rue Jacob, ten minutes’ walk from the rue de Bièvre.16 A few trusted friends were in the couple’s confidence: Madeleine Séchan, who had arranged Anne’s confinement at Avignon; Laurence Soudet; the lawyer, Robert Badinter and his wife, Elizabeth; and François de Grossouvre, who frequently carried out sensitive missions on Mitterrand’s behalf and became Mazarine’s godfather.17 But outside this inner circle, in theory, no one knew.18
By the autumn of 1974, Mitterrand’s doubts were behind him.19 No matter how important Anne and Danielle might be, he was not ready to give up his political career.
After the unification of the Socialist Party at Épinay, the only significant non-communist left-wing party to have maintained its independence had been the PSU. Some of its leading lights, like Gilles Martinet and his followers, had moved quickly to join Mitterrand, while others had been absorbed by Trotskyist groups on the far Left. For a long time Michel Rocard had remained convinced that the PSU had a future. But some months before Pompidou’s death he realised that ‘trying to transform this chaotic, leftist magma into a real political force’ was a waste of effort. That spring he had held discreet conversations with Pierre Mauroy about a possible merger.
The presidential election offered an opportunity to go further. On April 11, three days after Mitterrand declared his candidacy, Rocard offered his services to the campaign. For the next month, he worked with Jacques Attali, a gifted young man whose multiple talents included, in Franz-Olivier Giesbert’s cruel but perceptive description, ‘retailing other people’s ideas, droning praises and delivering flattery’. Together they got the candidate up to speed on economic matters so that Giscard could not trip him up. While Rocard was about it, he floated the idea of a conference once the elections were over to discuss amalgamating the Socialists, the PSU and several other small left-wing Christian groups with which it was loosely associated.
The ‘Socialist Assizes’, as they were called, were held in Paris in October. To Mitterrand they were a continuation of the process begun at Épinay to unite the whole of the non-communist Left. But Rocard had made his move too late. The PSU split. About a quarter of its membership came over to the Socialists. The remainder decided to continue as before, on the fringes of the far Left, advocating utopian socialism based on worker-management.
With Rocard came Jacques Delors, an economist with the Bank of France who had worked with Chaban-Delmas when he was Pompidou’s Prime Minister; Edgard Pisani, a left-wing Gaullist who had also been a minister under Pompidou; and Edmond Maire, the leader of the non-communist trades union federation, the CFDT. The newcomers represented only 2 to 3 per cent of the Socialist Party’s membership, which that year reached 140,000. But they brought new blood to revivify a party still composed largely of survivors from Mollet’s era and their arrival brought the possibility of rebalancing its different factions.
This problem of factions – or ‘currents’ as the Socialists preferred to call them – drove Mitterrand to distraction. Every socialist, he grumbled at the opening session of the Assizes, is convinced that ‘he alone knows the truth of the Law and the Prophets’. In private, he was harsher. The Party was a mess of ‘socialist bric-a-brac’, worse than the UDSR twenty years earlier. ‘Each one has his prayer stool, his chapel, his religion.’
Chevènement’s faction, CERES, which had been instrumental in his victory at Épinay, was a particular bane of his existence. It was ‘a fake communist party made up of real petty bourgeois’, he snapped. At the beginning of 1975, after Chevènement and his followers had criticised Mitterrand’s leadership as not being sufficiently ‘revolutionary’, they were excluded from the party’s leading bodies. How can we govern France, Mitterrand asked, i
f we can’t govern ourselves? The Socialists were incorrigible, Mitterrand complained. In party branches all over France, ‘dogmatic mediocrities’ exercised ‘a petty reign of terror’. He told a meeting at Châtellerault in September 1976: ‘We aren’t much, are we, we Socialists? Our party is just an amalgam of individuals . . . Permit me to think that I am still a factor bringing you together. Do you want me to go? Frankly, without being coy about it, I’d like to do just that.’
The fractiousness of the Socialists was a time bomb which would one day explode. But a more immediate challenge was looming. The Union of the Left, the key to Mitterrand’s strategy for winning power, was under threat.
For the first two years after the signing of the Common Programme, the Socialists professed to take the Communists at their word. ‘It is not my problem to know whether the Communists are sincere,’ Mitterrand told an interviewer in the winter of 1972. ‘I simply have to make sure that everything takes place as if they are.’
Three months later, the success of both parties in the parliamentary elections comforted the Communists’ decision to form an alliance. That autumn, the 1973 Middle East war and the Oil Shock that followed deepened the ideological divide between them, the Communists arguing that the collapse of the capitalist system was at hand, the Socialists that capitalism was merely changing its tactics. But in practice they worked together as before.
In the 1974 presidential election, Moscow signalled its preference for Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, just as it had for de Gaulle in 1965. This time the signal was more provocative. The Soviet Ambassador, Stepan Chervonenko, paid a well-publicised visit to Giscard between the two rounds of voting. To those of Georges Marchais’s colleagues in the Communist Party who had reservations about the alliance, it was a welcome reminder that they were not alone.
During the presidential campaign, Marchais’s statements raised questions about his intentions. If Mitterrand won, he said, and ‘the government has twenty or twenty-one ministers, [only] six or seven will be Communists’. Six or seven? Any mention of Communist ministers, no matter how it was phrased, risked frightening away part of the electorate. To state publicly that a third of the government might be Communist smacked of deliberate sabotage. Or was it simply that Marchais had misread the situation? Many years later, Mitterrand would accuse the Communist leadership of ‘obvious ill-will’. At the time he was not so sure.20 His failure to win the full quota of communist votes, which had helped to produce Giscard’s razor-thin victory, may have been partly a result of dissonant signals from Marchais and his colleagues, but it also reflected doubts among the rank and file.21 Not every communist was ready to support a candidate who wanted to keep the alliance with America and work for European unity.