by Philip Short
Already at the time of the parliamentary elections in 1978, the French had hesitated over whether to keep him in power.
Then came the affair of Bokassa’s diamonds. Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the Idi Amin of French-speaking Africa, had risen through the ranks of the French army before seizing power in his country, the Central African Republic, in 1965. Seven years later he proclaimed himself President for life and in 1976 was consecrated Emperor. He was considered pro-French, which was felt to compensate for the violence of his regime, and in the early 1970s, at Bokassa’s invitation, Giscard had gone big game hunting there. After his enthronement, amid sumptuous Napoleonic pageantry which cost an estimated £10 million (US $20 million) in one of the world’s poorest states, Giscard tried to back away. But it was too late. Soon after the Emperor fell, in 1979, Le Canard enchaîné revealed that he had made the French President gifts of diamonds which, under French law, Giscard should have turned over to the State. The President’s supporters protested that the gems had little value, but the harm was done. Henceforward he was implicated in an unsavoury tale of corruption involving a murderous buffoon whom his government had foolishly patronised. It was not an ideal situation in which to embark on a re-election bid. Giscard proceeded to make it worse by trying to dismiss the affair as being of no importance.
Georges Marchais had his troubles too. In 1981, being tagged as ‘the Party of Moscow’ did not give the French Communists widespread appeal. The Soviet leadership was geriatric; the Soviet army was occupying Afghanistan; Cuban troops were acting as Soviet proxies in Angola. To add to Marchais’s troubles, his war record was under attack. It had been discovered that he had worked in Germany under the Nazis for much longer than he had admitted and that for at least part of that time he had been a volunteer, not a forced labourer as he had claimed. Marchais had been unable to offer a convincing rebuttal.
Jacques Chirac had no skeletons in the cupboard. But nor did he have any illusions that he would make it through to the second round. He was there to assert himself against Giscard and to position himself for the next election, in 1988, by which time, he devoutly hoped, the President would have left the scene.
That left Mitterrand.
His problem was his image: tricky, unreliable, too-clever-by-half, a has-been who could not be trusted further than you could throw him. Changing that, Charles Salzmann wrote, was ‘the number one priority’. Salzmann recommended that he emphasise his provincial roots, depicting himself as a man with his feet on the ground, close to nature, whose dominant traits were contemplation, tranquillity, inner strength and willpower. ‘Three escapes from PoW camps – third time lucky,’ Salzmann assured him. ‘It will be the same with the presidential election.’
As though to test that proposition, Mitterrand spent the beginning of March with the West German Social Democrat, Willy Brandt, retracing the itinerary of his first escape attempt, from Kassel to the Swiss border, forty years earlier.
Mitterrand’s stroke of genius, however, was in his choice of the man to orchestrate Salzmann’s proposals.
Jacques Seguela was a flamboyant publicist who headed a leading French advertising agency, drove around Paris in a pink Rolls-Royce and had recently published a best-selling memoir entitled Don’t Tell My Mother I’m in Advertising: She Thinks I’m Working as a Pianist in a Brothel. He had offered his services the previous year to Mitterrand, Chirac and Giscard. Only Mitterrand had accepted. The result was the first truly modern election campaign in French history. Seguela did what Claude Perdriel had hoped to do in 1974 but had been unable to put into practice because Pompidou had died too soon.
Mitterrand underwent what today would be called a makeover. Seguela made him change his wardrobe. ‘No one will listen to what you say about solidarity if you dress like a banker,’ he said. ‘Dress to the “Left” – gradations of colour, and unstructured materials like wool.’ A dental surgeon reshaped his eye teeth, which had a slightly vampirish look. When Mitterrand had objected, Seguela told him: ‘If you don’t [fix them], you’ll always excite mistrust . . . You’ll never be elected President of the Republic with teeth like that.’ He was instructed to ‘hold your back straight, with your chin out’; to move his hands naturally when speaking on television; to get into training for interviews and, above all, ‘never to learn a line by heart because you can’t be spontaneous twice’.
For once in his life he did as he was told.
Seguela came up with a slogan – La Force Tranquille (‘Calm Strength’), a term which had first appeared in Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Misérables, more than a century before, and had subsequently been taken up by Blum and Jaurès – and a campaign poster showing a close-up of a statesmanlike Mitterrand with a country village and its church tower in the background. Mitterrand jibbed at the church tower. ‘I don’t want to look like the village priest,’ he complained. It was made less prominent, shading into the haze. But the message of reassurance was intact. Mitterrand was ‘part of the landscape of France’, as he had written in Içi et maintenant the previous autumn. He could be trusted with the country’s future.
In interviews and speeches he made that his theme. The Communists would not be part of the government if he won, he said . . . at least, not initially. Society would be changed ‘by contract, rather than by decree’. The working week would be reduced to 35 hours and hundreds of thousands of civil servants would be recruited to reduce unemployment; government spending would increase by 5 per cent a year; and, as he had promised before, everyone would get an extra week of paid holiday. How it was to be financed was not stated but, after five years of austerity under Giscard and Barre, a lot of middle- and working-class French people thought it sounded rather good.
The only issue on which Mitterrand took a risk was the abolition of the death penalty. Although it figured among the ‘110 Propositions’, nearly two out of three French people were against it. In March, he told an interviewer that if elected he would do it anyway. Whether by calculation or good luck, it worked to his advantage. Mitterrand, voters discovered, was willing to take a stand on an issue he believed in, even if it was unpopular.
On Sunday, April 26, when the results of the first round came in, Giscard was in the lead, as expected, with 28.3 per cent, Mitterrand came second with 25.8 and Chirac third with 18 per cent. The surprise was the collapse of the Communist vote. Georges Marchais obtained 15.3 per cent, a million and a half votes fewer than in the parliamentary elections three years earlier and the first time since the war that Communist support had fallen below 20 per cent.
To the uninitiated, Giscard looked to be a shoo-in.
Right-wing candidates had won nearly 50 per cent of the vote. Mitterrand had only 26 per cent and could count on perhaps another 5 or 6 per cent from those who had voted for the ecologists and for three minor left-wing candidates. But that made at best 32 per cent. Georges Marchais did the arithmetic. ‘The Left does not have a majority in this country,’ he told the Politburo after the first round. ‘The Right will mobilise and pull ahead.’
But on both sides, treason was in the air.
Publicly Marchais appealed to communist voters to support Mitterrand. But through the Party’s internal channels, Communist officials were urged ‘to act with true revolutionary courage and get out the vote for Giscard’.
Chirac announced that ‘personally’ he would vote for Giscard but refused to call on his supporters to do the same. Philippe Dechartre, Mitterrand’s old partner in the Resistance who had later become a Gaullist minister, took care of the rest. At the beginning of May, he issued a public appeal to the RPR rank and file and the right-wing electorate generally to vote against Giscard, who he said was a traitor to the Gaullist cause:
What choice do we have? . . . [Mr Giscard d’Estaing] based his political career on General de Gaulle’s departure, which he [himself] provoked . . . The result of his seven years in power can be summed up in three phrases: record unemployment, galloping inflation, and the weakening of French influence in the wo
rld. Are we going to continue for seven more years to drain our country of its substance, to drive our youth to despair, to paralyse our democracy, . . . to dilapidate the heritage of General de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou, . . . to tie a rope around our own necks? . . . I appeal to you without hesitation to vote for François Mitterrand. [His] election does not carry the risk of a change of social system or a threat to our freedoms . . . It is the condition for the renewal of our country.4
Giscard was relying on the same argument that had helped him to victory in 1974 and had produced a landslide for de Gaulle and Pompidou in the parliamentary elections of 1968: if the Left won, the Communists would take power.
The problem was that it did not work any more. As Dechartre noted, with only 15 per cent of the vote the Communists were no longer a danger. He might have added that if they were in decline, it was largely Mitterrand’s doing.
In the ritual television debate, the ‘communist danger’ failed to give Giscard traction. The previous summer, the President had broken ranks with the rest of the West and travelled to Poland to meet Brezhnev, then the subject of a diplomatic boycott in retaliation against the invasion of Afghanistan. Mitterrand had lampooned him as ‘the little messenger boy of Warsaw’. On economic issues, too, the Socialist candidate had done his homework. When Giscard began to lecture him on exchange rates, he let him continue for a while before rattling off the relevant figures as though they were something a child would have known.5 Systematically, he quoted Chirac’s attacks on Giscard’s administration. It was the incumbent’s greatest vulnerability and Mitterrand exploited it for all it was worth.
As the campaign drew to a close, it became clear that the result would hinge on a paradox. Which would be greater: the number of right-wing voters supporting the left-wing candidate, Mitterrand? Or the number of Communists voting for the right-wing candidate, Giscard?
At 8 p.m. on Sunday, May 10 1981, France discovered that it had a Socialist President.
Mitterrand had been certain of the outcome for several days. When the first exit polls came through early that evening, he telephoned Anne in Paris to tell her. At Château-Chinon, where he had voted and waited for the results, Danielle was with him. For both women, it was a moment in which joy, fear and anguish were equally mixed. Their lives were about to change in ways over which they had no control.
‘Do you understand what this means, a President of the Republic from the Left, today, in France?’ Mitterrand had asked Paul Quilès as they had flown back from the final campaign meeting in Nantes two days earlier. ‘Do you realise what this means for History?’ It was a question he would keep repeating on Sunday night as the results started to come in. In the end he had 51.76 per cent of the vote, Giscard 48.24 per cent – within a quarter of a percentage point of Charles Salzmann’s prediction nine months earlier. Although he had known it was going to happen, it was as though, after thirty-five years of political struggle, he had not dared to let himself believe. Not to tempt fate, he had drafted a statement to read if he lost, but not if he won. Now he jotted down a brief declaration thanking those who had voted for him and calling on the people of France ‘to find the path to needed reconciliation’. To Danielle, as they stood together at the town hall, looking out at the ecstatic crowd, he said: ‘Oh, my Danou, what is happening to us?’
She wrote later that it only really dawned on her that François had won when, heading back to Paris through the pouring rain, an escort of police motorcyclists materialised from nowhere and the toll gates of the motorway opened before them. She went home to the rue de Bièvre. The President-elect stopped briefly to join the festivities at the Socialist Party’s new headquarters in the rue de Solferino, on the Left Bank of the Seine, just across the road from de Gaulle’s old offices. Then he, too, turned in for the night. At the Bastille, the symbol of the Left’s victories since the French Revolution, where the Socialists had organised a mass celebration, 100,000 people caroused in the rain. Anne’s brother tried to persuade her to accompany him there. She shook her head. Mazarine had to be up for school next morning.
11
The Novitiate
ON MONDAY MORNING, May 11 1981, half of France – the half that had been up till 5 a.m. dancing in the Place de la Bastille, the Champs-Elysées and their equivalents in the provinces – went to work with a hangover.
The other half was panic-stricken.
More than thirty years later, it is hard to conceive the degree of alarm and disarray among the Right and its supporters which Mitterrand’s victory provoked. Much of it was completely irrational but that did not make it any less real. ‘There was real terror,’ Anne remembered. ‘People thought it would be the French Revolution all over again and they’d bring out the guillotine. You can’t imagine how frightened they were.’ Businessmen cancelled plans for new investment. Wealthy families were caught driving to Switzerland with the boots of their cars stuffed with jewellery and gold bars. The franc was in free fall. Mitterrand had sent emissaries secretly to West Germany before the election to discuss measures to stabilise the currency in the event of a left-wing victory, as he had done seven years earlier in 1974. But the fire sale was beyond the power of central bankers to stop. In the ten days between his election and investiture, the Bank of France spent $5 billion, a third of the country’s reserves, in a fruitless effort to stop the haemorrhaging of capital. Newspapers like Minute, reflecting the views of the extreme Right, warned that the country would be sovietised: the Communists would pull the strings behind the scenes; private property would be confiscated; and a punitive wealth tax would expropriate the rich.
In the United States, the administration swallowed hard. The US Ambassador, Arthur Hartman, had been assuring the White House that Giscard would win. Ronald Reagan, who was about to label the Soviet Union ‘an evil empire’, did not take kindly to the idea of a key Western ally being ruled by a man who had come to power with communist support. Jacques Attali asked Samuel Pisar, a highly regarded Polish-American lawyer and Auschwitz survivor who had worked for President Kennedy, to intervene on Mitterrand’s behalf. Pisar flew to Washington between the two rounds and saw Reagan on the evening the results were announced. He told the President that he was authorised to give him a formal assurance that, whatever role the Communists might play, the policy of France, as a member of the alliance, would remain unchanged. Reagan heard him out but waited 48 hours before sending Mitterrand a congratulatory telegram.1
The 1981 election reopened a social fracture in France of which Alexis de Tocqueville had written when King Louis-Philippe had been forced to abdicate in February 1848: ‘society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common greed, and those who had something united in common terror’.
Since the last authentic left-wing government under the Popular Front in 1936, the fissure had been papered over. Vichy had been right-wing. During the Fourth Republic, France had been governed by self-interested coalitions. Since 1958 the Right had been continuously in power. That the Left, in the person of François Mitterrand, should suddenly snatch away what the bourgeoisie and the economic elite had come to regard as their birthright was felt to be obscene.
De Gaulle’s son-in-law, General Alain de Boissieu, Grand Chancellor of the Légion d’honneur, declared that he would resign rather than bestow on Mitterrand the grand sash of the Order, a prerogative of the Head of State, accusing him of collaboration during his time at Vichy. In the brouhaha that followed, two members of the Council of the Order, outraged by his statement, stepped down in protest; hundreds of people threatened to turn in their decorations; Admiral Sanguinetti and nearly forty of the General’s closest companions during the war demanded de Boissieu’s dismissal; and Colonel Passy, the wartime intelligence chief in London, issued a statement pointing out that de Gaulle himself had named Mitterrand head of the prisoners’ resistance movement. De Boissieu rowed back, claiming that he had acted ‘from conscience’ because Mitterrand had called his father-in-law a dictator in his book, the Coup d’ét
at permanent. But it was a sign of things to come. Throughout his presidency, Mitterrand would be the butt of vindictiveness and vilification on the basis of his war record, principally from the Right but also, at times, from those who claimed to be his supporters.
As he set about organising the new government, he recalled being torn between ‘exaltation on the one hand, and anguish on the other [at] the magnitude of the task ahead’.
It was all the more difficult because the Socialists had been out of power for so long that only three leaders had previous ministerial experience: Mitterrand himself, Gaston Defferre and Alain Savary.2 He decided to put aside his differences with Pierre Mauroy and name him Prime Minister, as he had intended in 1978. Defferre would be Minister of the Interior, and Jacques Delors in charge of Finance. Among the twenty-five full Cabinet members were two Left-Radicals, including Mitterrand’s old accomplice, Maurice Faure, who became Justice Minister, and a solitary left-wing Gaullist, Michel Jobert, who had worked with Mendès France and then served as Foreign Minister under Pompidou. Jobert was responsible for Foreign Trade. The rest were Socialists, including Chevènement, Rocard, Mermaz and Pierre Joxe, representing the various ‘currents’ in the Party, as well as the youngest of the ‘sabras’, Laurent Fabius, who became Delors’s deputy.
On May 19, two days before the transfer of power, Giscard delivered his farewell speech on television. It was a strangely inept performance for such an intelligent man, who in private was erudite, witty and thoughtful. Blaming his defeat on ‘an economic, social and moral crisis without precedent for fifty years’ (as though France’s devastation during the war were a minor problem by comparison), Giscard portrayed himself as the victim of misunderstanding and injustice. His record, he implied, was blameless: one day the French would regret what they had done and ask him to return. Ending his address with the words au revoir, he stood up theatrically and walked slowly away, leaving the camera focussed for almost a minute on an empty chair to the strains of the Marseillaise. Mitterrand said afterwards that he had been surprised by such ‘insolence towards the people’.