by Philip Short
At Souzy-la-Briche, a small, very private château, 25 miles south of Paris, belonging to the State, where Mitterrand and Anne liked to spend weekends, the young officers played with Mazarine and took her horse-riding. In the pine forests at Latche and the olive groves at Gordes, and at his other favourite weekend retreats – François de Grossouvre’s manor house in the Bourbonnais, north of Clermont-Ferrand; the home of Robert and Elizabeth Badinter in Picardy; and a hunting estate in the Sologne owned by Patrice Pelat, his mentor at the PoW camp at Ziegenhain – they formed an invisible presence, ‘a protection so watertight,’ Gilles Ménage wrote, ‘that even the Interior Minister, [officially] responsible for his security, [often] did not know where he was’. They guarded not only the President but all those within what had become his extended family cocoon.
While the GSPR quickly won acceptance as part of the presidential establishment, the ‘anti-terrorist cell’ did not.
When first mooted it had seemed a sensible enough idea. A means of coordinating the anti-terrorist struggle and the intelligence that resulted was sorely needed. But the ‘cell’ existed outside the established hierarchies, which provoked ill feeling and rivalry, and, after a series of well-publicised blunders by one of Prouteau’s more uncontrollable associates, it came close to being shut down.38
Mitterrand maintained it for reasons which had little to do with its original functions. In August 1983, the extreme right-wing weekly, Minute, began publishing a series of articles touching on his private life, culminating in December with a story entitled, ‘The President’s Swedish Lady Friend’, about Christina Forsne, an attractive young journalist working in Paris whom Mitterrand had met through Prime Minister Olof Palme a few years earlier and with whom he had been having a long-running affair. Minute respected the conventions. There was no explicit suggestion of illicit amours. Nonetheless the President was alarmed.
Much worse was to come. In December that year, Jean-Edern Hallier, a gifted but wildly eccentric writer whose hopes for an important cultural post had been disappointed after Mitterrand’s election, announced that he was working on a new book to be called Tonton and Mazarine.fn5
It was to be a fictionalised exposé of Mitterrand’s depravity – ‘political porno’, as Hallier put it – in which the story of the ‘bastard child’, Mazarine, was mixed with anti-Semitism, a homosexual love affair between the President and one of his ministers and graphic descriptions of orgies in which Mitterrand and the author had supposedly taken part.
Minute was manageable: it represented a part of the political spectrum which was deeply hostile to the Left but which behaved rationally. Jean-Edern Hallier did not.
In 1982, he had staged his own kidnapping, claiming to have been taken hostage by terrorists. Soon afterwards he arranged for a powerful bomb to explode in a flat vacated shortly beforehand by Régis Debray, a left-wing writer who advised Mitterrand on Third World affairs. From the balcony of his sumptuous apartment in the Place des Vosges – the French equivalent of Berkeley Square or Central Park West – Hallier used to shoot at the pigeons in the square below with a heavy-calibre pistol. On one occasion he had arrived at the Elysée, demanding to see Mitterrand, in a monk’s habit and handcuffs; on another, claiming that he had come to seek the President’s pardon, he wore a white robe with a rope round his neck, like one of the Burghers of Calais surrendering to King Edward III in 1347. He refused to pay his taxes or parking tickets and, when summonsed, presented the government with a bill of three-quarters of a million francs for services as ‘an ideological mercenary’. In other times he might have been a court jester, but in 1983 he was a jester whose antics no longer amused.
France is traditionally tolerant of eccentric intellectuals, but Hallier had gone too far. Mitterrand told his police chief, Pierre Verbrugge, that he was not concerned if Minute published ‘a photo [of me] with a pretty woman’; he was not even particularly exercised by what Hallier might write about him. Roland Dumas remembered his first comment, after skimming through the manuscript: ‘It’s quite something. What an ordeal! [Reading] it will be like undergoing psychoanalysis.’ But the idea that anyone should take aim at his nine-year-old daughter revolted him.
The ‘anti-terrorist cell’ was ordered to make Hallier their priority. One of its members, Daniel Gamba, wrote later:
We couldn’t threaten him [physically], but we needed him to think we could. [So] we filled his life with anomalies. You can’t imagine, unless you’ve been through it, the pressure of that kind of harassment. You leave home and find two tyres on your car have been slashed. You get calls at all hours with no one ever at the other end. You see the same unknown individual several times in the same day [in totally unrelated places]. Those around you find odd things happening too . . . Unless you have been trained to resist that, you become terrified. [Such] pressure was illegal . . . Jean-Edern Hallier developed a persecution complex which was in fact well-founded. [And because of his reputation as a megalomaniac,] the unanimous reaction was that it was just a new publicity stunt.39
Thousands of hours were spent by the ‘cell’ and by other branches of the security services on a massive campaign of intimidation. On Mitterrand’s instructions, Hallier’s telephone and the lines of everyone with whom he and his family were in contact were tapped round the clock. Dumas recalled the President saying, ‘I know where he is and what he is doing at every moment of the day and night’.
In the end Hallier gave up. No French publisher was willing to take the risk of issuing what was in any case a libellous book. Minute, as Mitterrand had anticipated, toned down its attacks too.
The Hallier affair was revealing for the light it cast not only on Mitterrand’s attitude but on the conduct of those around him. To his advisers at the Elysée, to the security services and to the government, it was normal for the State to mobilise its resources to protect the President’s private life. Fifteen years later, Gilles Ménage, who played a key role in organising Hallier’s surveillance, would write with a straight face, at the same time as the Monica Lewinsky scandal was raging in the United States: ‘I do not think that [the authorities] in any other Western democracy, confronted with a situation of this kind, would have acted differently.’
In such matters a gulf existed between France and most of its partners.
Even in Greece or Italy, where marital infidelity is viewed more tolerantly than in the Anglo-Saxon world, the existence of the President’s second family would have been splashed across every front page. In France the news media kept silent. One may argue that this was a good thing – politicians are entitled to privacy as much as anyone else – or one may insist, as Anglo-Saxon countries do, on the public’s ‘right to know’. Either way, French rules were different. No one remonstrated with Mitterrand that, by authorising the police to eavesdrop on Hallier and launch a campaign of harassment against him, he was breaking the law. On the contrary his aides maintained that it was necessary to ensure the President’s security – ‘in the broad sense’, as Ménage delicately put it – and was therefore justified.fn6
It was part of a larger problem. In the Coup d’état permanent, Mitterrand had exposed the regalian temptations of the system de Gaulle had created – only, twenty years later, to slip into the General’s clothes as though they had been made to measure. Every President of the Fifth Republic has artfully blurred the distinction between private means and State funds, personal and State power. The Hallier affair led Mitterrand to rely increasingly on Prouteau’s ‘cell’ and on the GSPR as a personal police force. They protected him both as President and as a private individual.
The ‘second family’ was not the only or even the most important personal secret that Mitterrand wished to keep.
During the election campaign in 1981, he had announced that, while he was in office, he would have a medical check-up and publish the results every six months as a guarantee that there would be no repetition of the last years of Pompidou’s presidency, when it had been an open secret that th
e President was dying of leukaemia but officially no one would say so.40 In July, two months after his election, the first check-up showed him to be in perfect health. He played tennis and golf; he did not smoke and drank little; and he was not overweight.
The trouble started that autumn, shortly before Mitterrand left for Cancun. He complained of backache and developed a limp. To his entourage he said he had hurt his back playing tennis. But the pain persisted.
On his return from Mexico he was taken secretly to the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris. Tests suggested prostate cancer, the disease which had killed his father.
Ten days later, on Monday evening, November 16, Mitterrand’s doctor, Claude Gubler, brought one of France’s leading urologists, Professor Adolphe Steg, to the private apartments at the Elysée. The verdict was unequivocal. As the President sat slumped in a chair in the bathroom, Steg told him: ‘It’s my duty not to hide the truth. You have a cancer of the prostate which has spread into the bone and the metastasis is significant.’ Gubler remembered Mitterrand’s reaction: ‘“I’m done for,” he muttered to himself. Steg began again: “You can’t say that. You can never say you’re done for . . .” Mitterrand interrupted. “Stop your fairy tales. I’m done for”. . . It was extremely hard, painful to see. The President’s face turned grey. He bowed his head and said no more.’
He was actually in a far worse state than Steg had told him. Prostate cancer usually metastasises to the bone only when it is already well advanced. Unless they could stop it spreading, Steg told Gubler afterwards, Mitterrand would die in a matter of months. Even if the metastasis could be halted, the average life expectancy for people with his condition was three years. Only in very rare cases did they live longer.
That night Mitterrand told Anne. But Danielle was kept in the dark and, like the rest of the country, would not learn of his cancer for another ten years.
The treatment began next morning. He received a perfusion every day for two weeks, then every two days for the next three months. After that it was a course of pills of which he was not allowed to know the content. ‘Medicine is my business,’ Gubler told him. ‘Politics is yours. To each his field.’ He accepted the treatment, the doctor wrote later, because he could feel that it was working. Within a month, the pain was gone. But the medicines he was taking increased the risk of haemophilia, bone fractures and embolism. In Hamburg for a summit meeting with Schmidt in May 1982, he developed phlebitis. Gubler was summoned to his room in the early hours of the morning to find him complaining of chest pains, which he treated with a massive dose of anti-coagulant to prevent blood clots, praying that it would not trigger internal bleeding. It did not and Mitterrand convinced himself that it had been nothing more than a chest cold.
In December 1981, when the next medical bulletin was due, Gubler was ordered to lie. ‘Whatever happens, we cannot reveal it,’ Mitterrand told him. ‘It’s a State secret. You are bound by this secret.’ That bulletin, like those which followed, affirmed that the President was in good health.
It was dishonest. But what was the alternative?
To admit that the President had cancer, six months after his election, would make him a lame duck, not only at home but abroad, where the knowledge that he might be dying would deprive France of much of its clout in international negotiations. Typically in such circumstances foreign governments hold back until they know that they have a stable partner capable of following through on agreements, even to the point of deliberately delaying decisions until the successor takes office, as Iran did in January 1980 by not announcing the release of the US Embassy hostages until a few hours after Carter had handed over to Reagan. In the public arena, the illness of a leader can have insidious effects. How much weight would the West German parliament and public opinion have given to Mitterrand’s appeal to install Euromissiles if it had been thought that he was at death’s door?
In theory Mitterrand had other options. He could have resigned. But that would have been a betrayal of a different kind, dashing the hopes, without reason if it turned out that he recovered, of all those who had put their trust in him and given him their votes. Or he could have announced that he had cancer and sought a fresh mandate from the people. In December 1981, Mitterrand was still at the height of his popularity with a 60 per cent approval rate (a situation which would continue until mid-1982). If he had revealed his illness and campaigned on a platform of truth-telling and probity, arguing that he was willing and able to continue in office to implement the programme for which he had been elected and was seeking the nation’s endorsement to do so, he would probably have been returned to office, possibly by a triumphal margin.
Given Mitterrand’s habit of exploring every alternative before taking any important decision, it is hard to believe that he did not at least consider those courses. But if so, he quickly rejected them.
A snap election would make sense only if he could wage a vigorous campaign. His next medical bulletin was due to be issued only five weeks after the cancer had been confirmed. That meant the election would be held in January when he was still under intensive treatment and it was far too early to tell whether it would succeed. At that stage, when the cancer was still spreading, an exhausting campaign might have killed him. Yet he could hardly ask the French to return him to office if he gave the impression that he was too ill to govern. In theory a new election was a possibility but in practice it was ruled out.
Once the first untruthful bulletin had been published, it was too late to turn back. Mitterrand was locked into a cycle of deceit. A year later, against all expectations, the cancer was in remission. But by then the economy was deteriorating, the opposition was regaining its spirits and public opinion was turning against him. The moment for honesty had passed.
In the first year after his election, the ‘glorious fracture’ Mitterrand had promised was enshrined in the laws of the land. French workers were given a fifth week of paid holidays; the retirement age was lowered from 65 to 60; the working week was cut from 40 to 39 hours with no reduction in pay; workers were given increased protection against arbitrary dismissal; the minimum wage and social security payments to the most disadvantaged families were substantially augmented; hundreds of thousands of civil servants were recruited; banks, insurance companies and key industrial corporations were nationalised; 130,000 illegal immigrants who were able to prove that they had jobs were given residence permits; and emergency laws against rioting, dating from the 1960s and ’70s, were repealed.
It was not painless. For months, parliament was locked in violent debate, reminding some elderly backbenchers of the heroic battles between Gaullists and Communists under the Fourth Republic, twenty-five years earlier. One young right-wing MP announced that he was emigrating to Austria, another compared the Left to the Nazis, bent on making factory owners ‘wear a yellow star’, while a third promised it would all end ‘with punches in the face’.
The opposition delayed the enactment of the new measures, which, verbal excesses aside, was no more than its constitutional role. But it was unable to prevent them.
‘We’ve started the true rupture with capitalism,’ Mitterrand exulted. ‘Class struggle is not dead. It is going to have a second youth!’
For a few brief euphoric months, France became a twentieth-century Land of Cockaigne, where, in the description of a medieval troubadour, ‘the houses were made of barley sugar and cakes, the streets were paved with pastry and the shops supplied goods for nothing’. There was even an ephemeral Ministry of Free Time, responsible for tourism, sport and ‘social leisure, mass education and open-air activities’.41
There were just two problems with this beguiling if slightly Orwellian vision of organised happiness.
The first was that when Mitterrand came to power in May 1981, the whole of the Western world was already in recession. In the US, interest rates neared 20 per cent, forcing other countries to follow suit to maintain the value of their currencies against the dollar, and unemployment reached the highe
st level since the Great Depression. In Britain, where three million were jobless and inflation peaked at 22 per cent, that summer saw the worst inner-city riots since 1919.
France was less hard hit: unemployment at the end of 1981 stood at 1.8 million and inflation remained in line with the peak US figure of 13.5 per cent. Nonetheless, pursuing expansion at a time when the rest of the industrialised world was committed to deflation, as Mitterrand did in 1981 and the first half of 1982, was economic madness. Pierre Mauroy admitted as much years later: ‘We had all our canvas up, sailing alone with a following wind, while our competitors had their mainsails down and were reefing the rest.’ At Ottawa and Versailles, Mitterrand tried to persuade his G7 colleagues that their insistence on deflation was doing more harm than good. ‘High interest rates are not the only answer,’ he told Reagan. ‘There is a level of unemployment beyond which the risk of a social explosion exceeds the risks posed by inflation. [The United States] must understand that [its policies] are weakening us and in so doing it is creating political and military dangers’. Reagan turned a deaf ear. He was right. Mitterrand was wrong. Mastering inflation was the indispensable precondition for recovery.
The new French President was not blind to the difficulties. He had told Jacques Attali soon after his election: ‘There will be three stages: implementing the programme of reforms; then a long and difficult period of managing the crisis; and finally, we will emerge successfully from the tunnel.’
But his strategy was predicated on having two years of consumer-fuelled growth ‘to change life’, as the Socialist Party programme put it, before recovery would kick in and the government could put on the brakes to stop the economy overheating. It was wishful thinking. The upturn in the US did not come until the winter of 1982 and most of Europe remained mired in recession for several years longer.
Had Mitterrand been an economist, he would have seen the danger signs sooner. Instead, in a long tradition of left-wing utopianism, not limited to France, he insisted that ‘by creating confidence, [political will] can modify the behaviour of economic actors’.42 ‘You can do what you like with the economy,’ he maintained. ‘Statesmen don’t need to be economists. They just have to know how to carry the people with them.’ It was un-Marxist and unreasoning, but in the halcyon months of 1981, most of the French Socialist Party thought the same way.