by Philip Short
The President-elect observed the rites, too, but in his own fashion.
On the morning after the election, Mitterrand went to the cemetery at Montparnasse where Georges Dayan was buried. Normally he prided himself on mastering his emotions, always finding the right words to comfort the distress of others. But two years earlier, at Dayan’s funeral, he had been so overcome that he could not speak. Georges had often teased him: ‘What a shame to think that François Mitterrand will never be President. What a gap in his biography! Mind you, in a few years’ time he’ll be so old that we’ll be able to tell him he used to be President and he’ll believe it.’ Now at last it had happened and Georges was not there to see it.
Mitterrand wanted the ceremonies for his inauguration to give a sense of the Socialist programme, ‘To Change Life’. After the formal handover at the Elysée, which Giscard, ill-advised to the end, chose to leave on foot, exposing himself to boos and catcalls from the crowd gathered outside, the new President was driven across the Seine and through the Latin Quarter to the rue Soufflot, opposite the Luxembourg Gardens. There, accompanied by the luminaries of the Left, he walked up the hill to the Panthéon, the abbey church which had been converted into a mausoleum during the Revolution to honour France’s great men and women. Arm in arm, gathered in a joyous confusion behind him, were not only French socialists but the former West German Chancellor, Willy Brandt; the widow of the assassinated Chilean President, Salvador Allende; past and present heads of government from all over Europe, among them Olof Palme of Sweden, Felipe González of Spain, Mário Soares from Portugal and the Italian, Bettino Craxi; as well as a clutch of Nobel prize-winners, writers and artists, including Gabriel García Márquez, Arthur Miller, William Styron and the Greek actress, Melina Mercouri. As the crowd chanted Mitterrand’s name, the orchestra and massed choirs of Paris, directed by Daniel Barenboim, played the ‘Ode to Joy’ from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. People climbed lamp-posts, photographers jumped barriers, policemen struggled to hold back the crowd. When the President reached the square before the mausoleum, the procession halted and he entered alone, carrying a single red rose. Inside, as millions watched on television, he laid roses on the tombs of Jean Jaurès, his socialist forerunner; Jean Moulin, symbol of the Resistance; and the nineteenth-century humanist, Victor Schoelcher, who had fought for the abolition of slavery in the French colonies.
By then the timing had gone badly awry. The motorcycle escort, finding its agreed exit route blocked by the crowds, had passed directly in front of the orchestra. A furious Barenboim threw down his baton and stopped conducting. The crowd was making so much noise that no one noticed. But when, with much difficulty, the maestro was persuaded to resume, he insisted on starting again from the beginning.
As a result, when Mitterrand emerged from the crypt to stand on the steps of the mausoleum, still holding a red rose, instead of approaching the end of the piece the orchestra was only halfway through. Defferre, the Interior Minister-designate, panicked. The President, immobile, framed against the vast stone portico, made a perfect target for a sniper on the roofs. An urgent message was sent to Barenboim asking him to stop. But having been interrupted once already, he was in no mood to be messed about again. The orchestra played on. Imperturbable, Mitterrand stood in the drizzle for nine interminable minutes, savouring his triumph. Then the great Spanish tenor, Placido Domingo, sang the Marseillaise. As the closing notes resounded across the square, the heavens opened in a downpour, the barriers collapsed, the police lost control and the President was engulfed in a frenzy of popular exultation. It took 20 minutes before they could get him to his car and the cortège was able to leave.
It was not an inauguration. It was an apotheosis.
Earlier, at the Elysée, Mitterrand had spelt out his goals. ‘I wish to convince, not to conquer,’ he told the assembled dignitaries. ‘There was only one victor on May 10 1981: Hope! May it become the most shared quality in France! . . . My aim is to bring the French people together, as the President of all, for the great causes which await us, creating . . . a true national community’ based on ‘a new alliance of socialism and freedom’.
Alongside reconciliation he sketched out other priorities: social justice – ‘[amid] injustice [and] intolerance there can be no order and security’, he said; and overseas development – to end a situation where ‘two thirds of the planet . . . provide men and goods and receive in return hunger and contempt’.
But the main lesson of the election was that the ‘political majority of the French people have identified with the social majority’, giving a voice to those ‘millions and millions of men and women, the ferment of our people, who, for two centuries, in peace and in war, by their labour and by the shedding of their blood, have fashioned the History of France, without having access to it except through brief but glorious fractures of our society’.
Jacques Chirac, the Mayor of Paris, to whom he paid a formal call that afternoon, urged him to temper his actions with realism. Mitterrand replied that he would keep the promises he had made. National reconciliation was one thing. The ‘glorious fracture’ of the established order was another. That was what he had been elected for and that is what he would do.
Unlike the United States, where a transition team works for two and a half months to ensure that the incoming President is up to speed, or Britain where the Prime Minister’s Office is run by career civil servants who serve impartially both Left and Right, France adopts a scorched earth policy when a new President arrives. At the Elysée and the Prime Minister’s residence, the Hôtel Matignon, every filing cabinet is emptied, every desk cleared, every computer drive wiped clean and every senior official replaced. At the summit of the State, the new administration has to be built from scratch. The support staff – the ushers, the gardeners, the drivers, the chefs, the typists and the switchboard operators – stay on. In other ministries, so do the administrative personnel. But anyone who has anything to do with policy-making leaves. With rare exceptions, such posts are considered too political for one regime to inherit the expertise of another.
In Mitterrand’s case the break was even more pronounced. No one on the permanent staff at the Elysée could remember the last left-wing incumbent, Vincent Auriol, who had retired thirty years earlier and in any case had been a constitutional not an executive Head of State.
The President’s secretary, Marie-Claire Papegay, remembered that at the luncheon which followed Mitterrand’s investiture, a grandiose affair with foie gras aux truffes and blanquette de veau, washed down with a 1966 Château Yquem and a 1970 Château Talbot, followed by raspberry sorbet and Dom Perignon, the phalanx of liveried butlers, accustomed to the fastidiousness of the previous regime, looked askance at these ‘country bumpkins who did not know how to use a knife and fork’. Mitterrand’s brother-in-law, the actor, Roger Hanin, wrote afterwards that they had all felt like ‘squatters’.
During the handover ceremony, Giscard had told Mitterrand that the United States and Egypt were working with French intelligence on a plan to destabilise the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, and that Brezhnev would probably be succeeded by his Chief of Staff, Konstantin Chernenko. He gave Mitterrand the secret codes which enable the French President to order a nuclear attack and then they both watched as a similar exchange took place between the outgoing and incoming military advisers.fn1 Apart from a ritual request, made during all such transitions, that Mitterrand find appropriate positions for a few of Giscard’s close aides, that was it. In the evening, after the palace emptied, a young lawyer named Michel Vauzelle, whom Mitterrand later appointed government spokesman, found himself in the office where de Gaulle had once presided, alone but for a staff officer manning the telephones and telexes, with the fate of one of the world’s five nuclear powers in his hands until the President and the rest of his staff returned the following morning.
Then, within days, far faster than any of them had thought possible, it all became routine.
Mitterrand toyed with the id
ea of moving the presidency from the Elysée to the Invalides, the great nineteenth-century hospital for war-wounded on the Left Bank of the Seine where Napoleon lies entombed, just as de Gaulle, before him, had thought of moving to the fourteenth-century castle at Vincennes, east of Paris, where Louis XIV resided before the construction of his palace at Versailles. The Elysée, originally an elegant country retreat built amid parkland on the outskirts of the city, once home to the King’s mistress, the marquise de Pompadour, has an impressive courtyard, suited to formal occasions, and probably the most beautiful gardens in Paris, but it is too small and ill-adapted to house all the services required to run a modern State. In the end, however, he decided to stay put. To move would be too costly and disruptive.
On his first full day as President, Friday, May 22, Mitterrand laid down the ground rules. There would be no meetings of advisers on his watch – no kitchen cabinet, no ad hoc committees to hammer out agreed positions for his approval. Each of the 170 or so political advisers who staffed the different services – African Affairs, Agriculture, the Diplomatic Unit, Economy and Finance, Education and Research, Environment, Housing and Solidarity, Industry, Internal Affairs, Media and Public Opinion – would be expected to produce policy recommendations, either on his or her own initiative or at the President’s request. These would transit vertically, filtered by the Secretary-General, Pierre Bérégovoy, a former trade unionist and one of the few senior socialist leaders of working-class origin, for Mitterrand to study in the solitude of his office and return by the same channel.
A favourite technique was to set two or three advisers to work on the same problem, each in ignorance of the other, to see what they would come up with. Sometimes the President would append a terse comment, written in blue ink with a fountain pen. The novelist, Érik Orsenna, who spent three years as one of Mitterrand’s speech-writers, a thankless task if ever there was one since he systematically rewrote everything that was drafted for him, remembered his first grandiloquent effort being sent back with the caustic annotation: ‘Who do you take me for? Who do you take yourself for?’
More often notes would be returned with a single word, Vu (‘Viewed’). It was then up to the writer to judge whether that meant ‘I will think about it’, or ‘Go ahead’, or ‘Wait and see’.
After thirty years in party politics, Mitterrand was allergic to the culture of conclaves and smoke-filled rooms. As head of the UDSR and then the Socialist Party, he had had no choice. Interminable committee meetings were part of the way of life. But not as Head of State. Just as he organised his circles of friendship in disparate layers to which he alone possessed the keys, so at the Elysée Mitterrand sat at the centre of a vast spider’s web in which every filament led in only one direction: inward to the seat of power.
De Gaulle had also worked like that. But Mitterrand went further. Disguising his intentions was a means of retaining the initiative. Roger Hanin recalled a conversation with Joseph Franceschi, who became Mitterrand’s Security Minister. ‘François mistrusts everything and everyone,’ Franceschi said. ‘[It is] fundamental. He trusts no one. No one at all.’ It put Hanin in mind of a passage from the Bible which Mitterrand often quoted, where Jesus made clear that he had known all along that ‘he whom I trust’ would one day betray him. The conclusion Mitterrand drew was that everyone was capable of betrayal. ‘Why such mistrust?’ Hanin asked himself. ‘No one is born like that.’
Part of the answer surely lay in the experiences of his own past: the risk of betrayal in the war; his betrayal by Marie-Louise Terrasse; his own betrayal of Danielle; his betrayal by Pierre Mendès France, whom he embraced emotionally on the day of his investiture, declaring, ‘Without you, none of this would have been possible’, but whom he never forgave for having suspected him in the ‘Leaks Affair’; his betrayal at the Observatory by Pesquet and then by so many of his friends; Mauroy’s betrayal at Metz when he joined forces with Michel Rocard . . . The list went on and on. Yet one may wonder whether his constant watchfulness did not stem as much from his character as from the cursus of his life. A man who examines each side of every question, who never takes a decision without instinctively assessing the advantages and disadvantages of making a contrary choice, is not a man to accept unquestioningly the professions of loyalty of friends or to take at face value the proposals of his aides.
At the Elysée, formal meetings were kept to a minimum. On Wednesday mornings, when the ministers gathered in the Salon Murat, the proceedings were as stylised as the gilded pillars and coffered ceilings, chandeliers and silken wall-hangings of the Cabinet room. As in Auriol’s day, no one was permitted to speak unless the President asked him to do so. Mitterrand informed the government of his views. Ministers introduced forthcoming legislation, and were often rapped over the knuckles when their presentations were long-winded. Discussion was usually limited. Cabinet meetings approved decisions; they did not make them. In the first year they were followed by a lunch with the Socialist Party leadership, but it was discontinued when Mitterrand found leaks appearing in the press.3
Wednesdays apart, he preferred to meet his advisers one-on-one. Twice a week he had a tête-à-tête with the Prime Minister. He saw Bérégovoy each evening and others as the situation required. The only exception was a breakfast each Tuesday with Mauroy and the Socialist Party leader, Lionel Jospin, to coordinate the government’s parliamentary support.
In informal settings the President was more accessible. Jacques Attali, who had been given the position of Special Adviser and occupied the office next to Mitterrand’s, often joined him on Monday mornings for a round of golf with André Rousselet, his Chief of Staff, or for a stroll through the Latin Quarter to visit antiquarian bookshops, followed at a discreet distance by a cohort of plain-clothes police. The one piece of advice Giscard had offered him during the handover was not to let himself become a prisoner of his function. The new President took it to heart, spending more nights at the rue de Bièvre with Danielle, at Anne’s flat nearby or with other female companions who had caught his eye, than in the presidential apartments. He continued to frequent his favourite restaurants, Le Divellec on the Left Bank, La Marée on the Right, Fouquet’s on the Champs-Elysées, dining with an eclectic circle of friends and acquaintances, among them Jean Riboud, the Chairman of Schlumberger, the world’s largest oil services company with its headquarters in Houston, Texas; Pierre Bergé, the head of Yves Saint Laurent; and the comedian, Coluche, an icon of left-wing disrespect who founded a network of free restaurants, now a French institution, which every winter provides millions of meals to the homeless and indigent.
Where the Elysée was organised along monastic lines – each adviser isolated in his cell, working on a masterpiece for the greater glory of God, relieved only by unauthorised get-togethers over lunch or a drink in the evening to which God (in this case Mitterrand) chose to turn a blind eye – so, in the wider world outside, the President embraced a range of influences so diverse that nothing, unless he chose to make it so, was taboo. In this way he acquired an astrologer, Elizabeth Teissier, whose clients included the King of Spain, not because he believed in her predictions – though he was far too polite to tell her so – but because it intrigued him to ‘think outside the box’.
The two strands were complementary. On the one hand, the rigidity and discipline of the presidential machine; on the other, the freedom to consider problems unconventionally, without ideological prejudice or preconceived constraints. For a man who had concentrated in his hands greater power than any of his predecessors, arguably including even de Gaulle, it was a necessary balance. While there would be abuses during the fourteen years Mitterrand spent in office, they were fewer than might have been expected given the extraordinary latitude which the institutions of the Fifth Republic allow a French President. But ambiguity, mistrust and solitude remained the foundations of the new incumbent’s system of rule. The choice of the Panthéon for his inauguration had not been innocent. From the start, François Mitterrand was set t
o become a republican monarch.
His first action on taking office was to dissolve the National Assembly and call parliamentary elections. To those who advised him to wait, he replied: ‘There’s no question . . . The momentum of May 10 gives us our best chance of winning.’ Four weeks later, that judgement was vindicated. On Sunday, June 21, the Left won 329 seats – 44 for the Communists, the remainder for the Socialists and Left-Radicals – and the Right, 151 seats with 11 independents. It was not quite the tidal wave of 1968, when the Right had won 360 seats, but it was close. ‘Take a good look,’ Mitterrand told those gathered in his office that night. ‘You will not see the like of this again.’4
That Communist ministers would join the government was a given. It was not, as was officially claimed, out of ‘fairness’ (a concept as elusive in politics as the Higgs boson in physics). While it was true that the Communists were wedded, against their will, to Mitterrand’s cause, the Socialists had an overwhelming majority on their own and could manage perfectly well without them. Rather the decision was a continuation of the policy Mitterrand had laid out in Vienna in 1972. The longer he could hold Georges Marchais’s party in a poisoned embrace, the more the strength would be sucked out of it; the more he forced it to compromise with Socialist policies of which it disapproved, the more disaffected he would make its core supporters. And this time there was a bonus. As de Gaulle and his successors had discovered in 1946, having the Communists in government meant that the CGT, which the Party controlled, was hamstrung, unable to foment strikes against government policies without appearing to disavow its own party leadership. As long as Mitterrand could keep the Communists with him and the Right in disarray, he would have a free hand to promote whatever reforms he wished.