by Philip Short
Chevènement’s group, CERES, which represented about a quarter of the party membership, had been up in arms since the previous summer over Mitterrand’s refusal to seek a compromise with the Communists to preserve the Common Programme. A second, more serious, threat came from Michel Rocard and his supporters on the right wing of the Party. Since the previous summer they had been staking out a position based on the values of the ‘Second Left’, the reformist tradition in France, as against the ‘First Left’, the Jacobin revolutionary heritage which Mitterrand claimed to represent. Now, on the night of the second round, Rocard declared: ‘The Left has once again missed its appointment with History. Is that our fate? Is it completely impossible for the Left to govern this country? I say: No.’
This time the gauntlet had been thrown down. Rocard was putting himself forward as the face of a modern, new, reformist Socialist Party, capable of defeating the Right where the older generation had failed. Mitterrand had no illusions. ‘This fellow wants power,’ he told Georges Dayan. ‘Well, he will get a war. It’s just starting and I can tell you it will be without mercy.’
Had it been anyone else, he might have reacted differently. But Rocard was a red rag to a bull. Their incompatibility was legendary. One was Protestant, the other, Catholic; one read Galbraith and Keynes, the other, Lamartine and Tolstoy; one was a social democrat, the other a Left republican; one was mercurial, the other reflective. None of that precluded their working together. But they constantly rubbed each other up the wrong way. Rocard, fourteen years Mitterrand’s junior, had immense qualities of intellect and charisma, arguably greater than any of the other young leaders around him. But even when he set out to win Mitterrand’s esteem, he managed to do so in a way that the First Secretary found exasperating. The chemistry was wrong. They simply loathed each other.
A few weeks before his death, questioned about those with whom he had crossed swords during his long career, Mitterrand was generous to all except one: only about Michel Rocard could he not find a good word to say.
Ever since the 1960s, he had had an intuition that Rocard’s ambition might one day threaten his own. But now that it had happened, he found himself with a problem. Together CERES and the ‘Second Left’ made up 40 per cent of the Party. To make matters worse, Mauroy, who controlled another 20 per cent, was also disaffected. For that, Mitterrand had only himself to blame. The Mayor of Lille had been instrumental in bringing him to power at Épinay. But he had never belonged to the inner circle of those who had been with Mitterrand in the UDSR and the Convention, like Dumas and Mermaz. Mauroy was a bluff, gregarious northerner for whom camaraderie was second nature. He had come to feel, not without reason, that no matter what he did he would remain a country cousin.
The last straw had been Mitterrand’s decision, shortly after the elections, to take personal control of the Party’s finances. Mauroy had devised a system of fictitious ‘consultancy bureaux’, which worked for Socialist town councils and retroceded the major part of their fees to the Party for political use. Over time he had built it into a nationwide network generating sufficient funds to ensure the Party’s financial health. That Mitterrand should have the gall to demand that he surrender that role, without even bothering to discuss it with him, Mauroy found outrageous. He had another reason to be concerned. ‘Frankly, if he gets his hands on the finances,’ he confided, ‘I don’t know where the money will go.’ It was one of Mitterrand’s weaknesses. Money as such held no interest for him, provided that it was available when he needed it. Where it came from was not his concern. It was for convenience, not personal enrichment: the ability to buy a rare edition of a book which caught his eye; to reward a favourite; or to pay court to a young woman who had bestowed her favours on him.
Mauroy refused to step aside.
For Mitterrand it was a rude awakening. Since the elections, his popularity, as measured by the opinion polls, had been in free fall. Before the year was out, Rocard would be credited with the support of 40 per cent of the electorate as a potential presidential candidate, Mitterrand with only 27 per cent. The serious press predicted that his career was drawing to a close. He wondered whether Mauroy was positioning himself for a bid for the party leadership, but dismissed the thought as absurd. ‘Mauroy is weak,’ he told friends. ‘He lacks the means of his ambition and he knows it.’
Nevertheless, Mitterrand was aware that in order to take on Rocard he needed, at the very least, Mauroy to remain neutral. The Mayor of Lille was on good terms with the leader of the ‘Second Left’, having facilitated his admission to the Party four years earlier. It was fence-mending time. Over dinner with Mauroy in June 1978, at Gaston Defferre’s country house near Marseille, the First Secretary deployed all his charm. The Party, he agreed, should be run more democratically. Mauroy’s role was crucial and his responsibilities, including control of the Party’s finances, would be respected. By the end of the evening, amity had been restored.
But then, five days later, Mitterrand’s allies issued a manifesto, warning that the ‘modernistic, technical’ approach championed by Rocard (who was not named) was ‘a mortal danger’ to the Party and must be resolutely opposed.
Mauroy was furious. Mitterrand had made a double misjudgement. He had misunderstood Mauroy’s motives: the Mayor of Lille was neither weak nor ambitious, he merely wanted the Party to be properly run. He had also totally misjudged Mauroy’s reaction. By trying to be too clever, laying a trap to force Mauroy’s hand and make him take sides against Rocard, Mitterrand produced a result exactly opposite to that which he had intended.
All the pent-up anger which Mauroy had accumulated over the previous seven years boiled over. ‘Who do they take me for?’ he raged. ‘They want to get rid of Rocard because he overshadows someone and they expect me to be their accomplice?’
At a series of meetings, while Mitterrand sat glowering beside him, a furious Mauroy unleashed a litany of complaints. The signatories of the manifesto, he said, were guilty of ‘factional activities’. Those who had been members of the Convention were not ‘the party nobility [beside] the common herd which the rest of us represent. For myself, I don’t need your lessons in socialism.’ Addressing Mitterrand directly, he went on: ‘The climate here is of the end of a reign. To want to remove certain elements of the Party [leadership] is intolerable.’ Later, at a meeting which Mitterrand did not attend, he was still more explicit. The First Secretary, he said, violated the principles of collective leadership; took decisions without consultation; and ‘tried to make people believe that some in the Party are loyal supporters of the Union of the Left and others are not. This is a false distinction that’s been trumped up to disguise what is actually a clash of personalities.’1
Mauroy was right; Mitterrand was wrong. But politics is not about right and wrong. It is about power.
Throughout the winter of 1978 and the following spring, Mitterrand’s supporters kept up a steady drumbeat of criticism against the Rocard–Mauroy alliance. Rocard was accused of revisionism; Mauroy of parricide – having ‘killed’ Guy Mollet he wanted to do the same to Mitterrand.
Rocard retorted that Mitterrand and his brand of socialism were ‘archaic’. At the next party congress at Metz, in April, he sneered, the First Secretary would only get the ‘old-age pensioners’ vote’.
But now it was Rocard’s turn to make an error of judgement. He let slip that he expected Pierre Mauroy to be Mitterrand’s successor.
‘What an imbecile!’, Mauroy exploded. ‘He’s nice, intelligent, competent and all the rest. But he’s the kind of person who throws banana skins under your feet without even meaning to. He understands nothing of politics.’ What Rocard had failed to realise was that Chevènement’s CERES, which now held the balance of power between Mitterrand and his critics, was happy to call the First Secretary to order but had no intention of making him step down. Any suggestion that Mitterrand might go and Rocard and his allies take over could only push Chevènement and his followers into Mitterrand’s arms.
When the Socialists convened at Metz in April 1979, Mitterrand’s motion received 47 per cent of the votes; Rocard, 21 per cent; Mauroy, 17 per cent; and the CERES, 15 per cent. Mitterrand, supported by Chevènement and his followers, formed the new leadership. The rebels were punished. Mauroy and Rocard were cast out into opposition.
As though to give the lie to Rocard’s charge of archaism, the First Secretary packed the new Executive Committee with young men who had joined him after Épinay, known as the ‘sabras’ because they had never been members of any other party.2 Lionel Jospin, 41, a former Trotskyist, sometime diplomat and university professor, succeeded Mauroy as Mitterrand’s deputy. Paul Quilès, 37, an engineer, was put in charge of the Party federations. The youngest, Laurent Fabius, the son of a French art dealer, became Party spokesman at the age of 31. All were civil service high-flyers who had had blisteringly successful academic careers. All were ambitious, determined and ruthless. The leadership was ring-fenced.
The congress of Metz marked a turning point. For the first time since Épinay, Mitterrand had had to fight to keep his post. To ensure Chevènement’s support, which he needed to fend off Rocard’s challenge, he had moved sharply to the Left. Having embraced a platform calling for ‘a break with the economic structures of the past’, he was stuck with it. Accordingly the Socialist programme for the 1981 presidential election, the ‘110 Propositions’, which laid out the policies he would follow once he had been elected, was no less radical, and in some respects more extravagant, than the Common Programme with the Communists which had lapsed two years before.
The ‘110 Propositions’ accused the United States of manipulating the world economic order and brainwashing Western Europe by a ‘cultural war which aims not kill but to paralyse’ – Marx’s ‘opium of the people’ purveyed by Hollywood. The Soviet Union was portrayed as the hapless target of the Western powers which were using the existence of dissent among Soviet intellectuals as the basis for ‘a gigantic enterprise of destabilisation of the Left and ideological remobilisation of capitalism’. In terms of domestic policy, the ‘propositions’ were equally far-fetched. ‘They were the root of all the problems, all the lyricism and the ever-increasing social demands,’ Pierre Mauroy said later. Another commentator wrote simply: ‘The Socialists . . . lost all contact with reality’.
Mitterrand disagreed. The ‘110 Propositions’ would make the Left dream. Dreams, not realities, won elections.
The question, however, was would the electorate vote for him?
Mitterrand might have secured control of the Socialist Party but in the country his image was dismal. Asked for the first words that came to mind when Mitterrand’s name was mentioned, 55 per cent replied ‘a man of the past’, 41 per cent, ‘ambitious’ and 29 per cent ‘fickle’. Rocard was more popular than ever. Forty-six per cent wanted him as a candidate compared to 25 per cent for Mitterrand.
At Metz, Rocard had given an undertaking not to stand if Mitterrand did so.
That did not suit the First Secretary’s plans. He wanted Rocard to self-destruct before he entered the stage himself. For months he tried to cajole the younger man to break cover and declare himself. But Rocard was wary. The longer he held back, the more the electorate liked him. Mitterrand appeared to hesitate, asking members of his inner circle – now without Georges Dayan, who had died the previous summer – what they thought of his chances. It was pure pretence. Why crush Rocard at Metz if it were only to stand aside eighteen months later?
Finally, on October 18 1980, Rocard decided he could wait no longer. He called Mitterrand to inform him that he would announce his candidacy the next day. ‘As you like. It’s up to you,’ the First Secretary replied. ‘I too will speak soon.’ When Rocard put down the phone, his face was pale. He told his companions: ‘Mitterrand is going to stand.’ But he had gone too far to turn back.
The following evening, as Rocard prepared to make his announcement live into the television news from the town hall of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, on the River Seine just north of Paris, where he was mayor, Mitterrand twisted the knife in the wound. An aide passed Rocard a news agency despatch. That afternoon the First Secretary had warned: ‘Any candidate who declares himself before his federation has given its approval is not a candidate . . . No one can carry our colours . . . unless he can unite the Socialists and defend our programme.’
When Rocard went on the air, a few minutes later, his face was haggard and his hands trembled. He looked like a man going to his own execution. His candidature had imploded before it had even begun.
Mitterrand, who had told the Executive Committee a few months earlier, ‘under no circumstances will I be party to a fight where the knives are already out and the daggers are seeking backs to stab’, had won his battle, but by using the same methods that he had so haughtily denounced.
Three weeks later, on Saturday, November 8, the First Secretary told the Executive Committee that he had decided to stand. The same day he published a volume of conversations, Içi et maintenant (‘Here and Now’), offering an overview of the ‘110 Propositions’, leavened with anecdotes and insights into his thinking.
Rocard announced his withdrawal.
But what chance did Mitterrand have against Giscard, to whom all the opinion polls gave an unbeatable lead?
That winter he was uncharacteristically quiet. Instead of launching his campaign, he went to the United States for a conference on ‘Eurosocialism’ – a subject which interested Americans about as much as Latin hexameters – and then travelled on to Tel Aviv in December to attend a congress of the Israeli Labour Party. He stayed in Israel for Christmas with Anne and Mazarine, who was now six years old. Then in February 1981, less than three months before Election Day, he spent a fortnight travelling in China and North Korea, where he met Deng Xiaoping and Kim Il Sung. The prevailing view in the French press was that he was giving himself a pre-retirement present. Mitterrand knew that he had no hope of victory, it was said, so he was going through the motions, intending to step down as party leader in the summer, after his third and final attempt at the presidency had failed.3
By March 1981, the four principals were all in the starting blocks. Marchais had announced that he would stand the previous October. Mitterrand’s candidacy and his programme, the ‘110 Propositions’, were approved at the end of January by a special party congress which named Lionel Jospin First Secretary in his place. Jacques Chirac, representing the Gaullists, entered the race in February. Giscard waited until Monday, March 2, to confirm that he would seek re-election.
As in 1978, Giscard and Marchais were objective allies. For both, the first priority was to keep Mitterrand out of power: Giscard in order to win a second term; Marchais because he was convinced that a Socialist government would be against the Communists’ interests. ‘Under the Right,’ he assured the Politburo, ‘we can regain our health.’
The third candidate, Jacques Chirac, was the joker in the pack.
He was young – in 1981 still only 48 years old – bursting with nervous energy, a man who bounded rather than walked, a chain-smoker with a prodigious appetite, endless curiosity and a passion for primitive art. In 1974, Giscard had appointed him Prime Minister. But the President had insisted on occupying the whole of the political stage and after two years in office Chirac quit, the only French Prime Minister ever to resign against the wishes of the President who had appointed him. Afterwards he became Mayor of Paris, leading the Gaullist party, now renamed the ‘Rally for the Republic’ or RPR, in trench warfare against Giscard’s ‘Union for French Democracy’, the UDF, which he denounced as ‘the party of the foreigner’, a reference to Giscard’s alleged failure to defend French interests against the European bureaucracy in Brussels.
At the time, few realised how deeply this new fault line on the Right would transform the country’s electoral geography. One who did was Charles Salzmann, Mitterrand’s election strategist, who argued in
a note in August 1980 – at a time when every newspaper in France was giving Giscard a 20 to 40 per cent lead over his Socialist challenger – that if Chirac decided to stand, Mitterrand could expect to win the second round with 52 per cent of the vote to Giscard’s 48.
Chirac would be Mitterrand’s secret weapon.
They met discreetly over dinner at the home of Édith Cresson, a lively redhead who was at that time the only woman in the Socialists’ fifteen-member Secretariat. ‘If I’m not elected,’ Mitterrand told him, ‘it will be annoying but in the end not so serious . . . I already have my place in History . . . But for you, if Giscard wins again, it will be hard . . . He won’t do you any favours.’ Chirac listened. He could see a common interest.
Tactical considerations aside, the ‘fundamentals’, as they are called in the world of finance, were also stacking up against the incumbent.
During his seven years in power, Giscard had lowered the voting age to eighteen; raised the minimum wage; legalised abortion; launched a vast infrastructure programme – more motorways were built; the TGV high speed train service was developed; and the country’s antiquated telephone service was revamped – and he had created the G6, predecessor of the G7, G8 and G20, which brought together for the first time at Rambouillet in 1975 the leaders of the world’s main industrialised nations. But the second Oil Shock in 1979 had stunted economic growth. Inflation was eroding household income. Unemployment had doubled to exceed one million.
As if that were not enough, the President had exasperated a sizeable part of the electorate by his personal eccentricities. His punctiliousness over protocol – at State banquets he insisted on being served first, and would allow no one to sit opposite him so that he could gaze regally over the assembled gathering – made him appear ridiculous. His efforts to be close to ‘ordinary French people’, paying carefully stage-managed visits to their homes with cameras in attendance, and inviting refuse collectors to visit him at the Elysée, came across as crass. Like many highly intelligent people, he found it difficult to be natural with others less gifted than himself and the awkwardness showed.