Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  The President found himself in an uncomfortable position.

  Although formally agnostic, he had had a Catholic upbringing. As he told Kohl, also a Catholic, ‘I was brought up in that environment, and I have remained faithful to what is most profound in it.’ Yet he had come to power as head of a party which believed the Church’s role in education, like that of any other public organisation, must be under state control.

  Between the two rounds of the election, Mitterrand had reassured moderate voters that ‘no [private] school will be forced to integrate . . . I intend to convince, not to coerce.’ From an electoral standpoint, that may have been wise. But it meant the government’s hands were tied when it came to introducing new legislation. Alain Savary, whom Mitterrand had appointed Education Minister, was obliged to honour the candidate’s promise that the new system would be ‘the result of a negotiation, not a unilateral decision’.

  Over the next three years, this would have profound consequences.

  Savary and Mitterrand were not close. Some suspected that, in giving him the education portfolio, Mitterrand was handing him a poisoned chalice.12 That seems not to have been the case. Whatever their differences in the past, Mitterrand respected Savary as a man of principle – in 1956 he had resigned from Mollet’s government in protest against Ben Bella’s arrest – and he was one of only a handful of Socialist leaders with previous ministerial experience. He was well qualified to handle what was clearly going to be a delicate task.

  After five months of discussions with Church leaders, representatives of the private schools parents’ associations and the state school teachers’ unions, Savary concluded that there were three main obstacles to agreement. The Church rejected the idea of making private school teachers public functionaries like their state counterparts. Cardinal Lustiger, the archbishop of Paris, said such a step would ‘imperil the identity of the Catholic school’ because headmasters and headmistresses would no longer control their staff. Secondly, the parents’ associations wanted families to have the freedom to choose which schools their children would attend. Under the government’s plan, private schools, like state schools, would be allowed to enrol children only from their own districts, a measure intended to promote social mixing. Thirdly, the teachers’ unions wanted an end to public subsidies for private education.

  With small changes, these would remain the principal stumbling blocks for the next two and a half years.

  What began as an educational dispute soon became politicised. When, in April 1982, more than 100,000 people – mainly middle-class parents, many accompanied by their children – held a protest meeting at Pantin, on the outskirts of Paris, the leaders of the right-wing parties turned it into a platform to accuse the Socialists of destroying educational freedoms. Two weeks later, twice as many left-wing demonstrators gathered for a riposte. Attitudes were hardening. Speakers who urged tolerance were booed.

  That autumn the government offered a significant concession. The terms ‘public’, ‘secular’ and ‘unified’ were abandoned. Sensing weakness, hardliners in the Catholic hierarchy insisted that that did not go far enough. In reprisal, Socialist town councils in many parts of France unilaterally halted subsidies to Church schools, provoking a rash of lawsuits. A year later, in December 1983, with the situation still deadlocked, Savary decided that, even without agreement, they should delay no longer. Mitterrand, who until then had kept his distance from the negotiations, told the Cabinet that he agreed:

  We are in the presence of a major problem in the nation’s life, the very image of a problem which is insoluble . . . The negotiations have failed because it could not be otherwise. It was not possible to make either of the two parties, whose stances were irreconcilable, accept a solution which would have undermined its position . . . Any attempt to reconcile them is doomed to failure. We should not try, it just destroys our credit. The government was excessively optimistic. It thought a compromise was possible and it isn’t. From now on, it’s a matter of taking a decision. To think that the two sides will ever agree is an illusion.13

  The government had been excessively optimistic? The government? It was Mitterrand who had insisted on negotiations which he now said had been misconceived. He was not being honest, least of all to Pierre Mauroy and Alain Savary, who had had to try to carry out what he now acknowledged to have been from the outset an impossible assignment. Such is the duplicity of princes.

  In fact Mitterrand had already decided to abandon the whole venture.14 But he was not yet willing to say so. In a best case, the government might be able to pass a limited reform, allowing Mauroy and Savary to save face. In a worst case the issue would have to be buried.

  The next six months were a calvary. While Mitterrand tried to focus on the problems of the European Community, the National Union of Parents’ Associations organised mass meetings to demonstrate the country’s opposition: 80,000 people gathered in Bordeaux in January; 150,000 in Lyon; 300,000 in Lille; 400,000 in Rennes; and more than 600,000 at Versailles in March. Two out of three French people – and, what was more, one in two left-wing voters – viewed the proposed measures as an attack on their freedom of choice.

  The Left’s argument that a two-speed education system was inherently unjust came across as intolerant and archaic. All France’s main partners, including the US, Britain and Germany, allowed private and public schools to coexist. Education was education. In the end, what did it matter, when the curriculum was the same for all, whether teachers were public servants or belonged to the private sector?

  That the teachers’ unions were blinkered was not a surprise. That Mitterrand, knowing full well the risks of such an approach, should have allowed them to take the government hostage was harder to explain.

  Much later the President offered a curious and self-serving explanation. The proponents of a unified, lay school system, he said, were so fixated on the issue that it was necessary to attempt a reform in order for them to get it out of their system. ‘It was . . . a psychoanalytical catharsis . . . If it worked, I would be able to congratulate myself on putting an end to such a long-standing quarrel. If it didn’t . . . the country would be inoculated against it for a long time to come.’ Even as post hoc justification, it was singularly unconvincing. The truth was that Mitterrand had decided from the start that whatever he did would rebound against him so it was better not to get involved.

  On Thursday, May 24 1984, a bill – of sorts – was approved by parliament.

  Parts of the text read as though they were straight out of Animal Farm. One clause, imposed by the Party’s left wing, laid down that ‘a private kindergarten may not be opened in a commune which does not already have a public kindergarten.’ The rationale was that a town council should not be forced to subsidise a private crèche if it lacked the means to finance a public one. The result would be to deprive families of any kindergarten at all. Politically it was indefensible. The ideological tail was wagging the government dog.

  A month later, on June 24, a Sunday, well over a million people marched through Paris in protest. It was the biggest demonstration in France since 1945, exceeding even the huge marches of May 1968.

  No cars were set on fire, no barricades erected, no policemen hurt. Right-wing politicians, including Jacques Chirac and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, marched with the representatives of their communes. At the Place de la Bastille, the traditional rallying point for the Left, Church leaders made unyielding speeches before the crowd dispersed as peacefully as it had come.

  The message was polite, but clear. Enough was enough.

  The following week all Mitterrand’s time was taken up with the Fontainebleau summit. But an idea was beginning to take shape. In February, Michel Charasse, a senator from the Auvergne, in central France, who had been with him since the 1960s and handled constitutional matters at the Elysée, had raised the possibility of a referendum to resolve the schools issue. Charasse was an original, a small, round, cigar-smoking ball of energy so unpredictable and hard to c
ontrol that his colleagues compared him to itching powder, but with a legal mind as sharp as Mitterrand’s was politically acute. At the beginning of July, Mitterrand decided that his idea was worth trying but with a significant twist. There would be not one, but two referendums: the first to change the constitution so as to permit the government to consult the nation directly on social issues; the second to seek a verdict on the educational reform.

  To hold a referendum, both houses of parliament had to agree. The Senate, controlled by the Right, was in favour of a referendum on Savary’s proposals, which it was confident the President would lose. Indeed, the Senate majority leader, Charles Pasqua, had suggested it himself only ten days earlier. But a referendum on a referendum, offering people greater freedom to express their opinions about the country’s affairs, which the President would win by a large margin, was a very different matter.

  It was the kind of pirouette at which Mitterrand excelled.

  The aim was not to resolve the schools issue but to kill it. If, as he expected, the Senate rejected the initiative, the referendum would never be held and the problem which had caused all the trouble, the educational reform, would disappear without trace. Moreover the Left, which was gaining an unwelcome reputation for restricting liberties, would be able to point to the referendum as proof of its desire to expand them.

  Mitterrand announced his new initiative on the evening of July 12. ‘The schools affair is over,’ he told party leaders in his office afterwards. ‘Perhaps not for ever, but at least for the next ten years.’

  As he had anticipated, the Right was caught unawares. Pasqua, having called for a referendum on the schools issue in June, found himself a month later having to argue against it. He accused Mitterrand of turning the procedure into a plebiscite on his rule, the same argument that Mitterrand himself had used twenty years earlier against the referendums organised by General de Gaulle. The Senate duly voted down the government’s proposal. The reform was dead. It remained only to tie up the loose ends. A few months later parliament passed a new law giving private schools and their teachers the same rights as before, albeit, to mollify the Socialist Party, with a little less public money.15 It marked, as one French historian put it, ‘the end of a grand republican myth’.

  The school war left scars. Savary felt, not without reason, that Mitterrand had thrown him to the dogs. On July 16 he resigned.16 A day later the rest of the government followed. Mauroy had hesitated but he had been too closely involved in the negotiations to remain in office if Savary left. Mitterrand tried to dissuade him. But they both knew that a new team was needed if the Left were to survive the parliamentary elections, now only twenty months away. Mauroy had been a tower of strength, solid, uncomplaining, always there when needed. As the outgoing Prime Minister left the Elysée, Mitterrand told Attali it was ‘the most painful moment of my presidency’.

  In his place, Mitterrand named Laurent Fabius, a month short of his thirty-eighth birthday and the youngest ever head of a French government. The appointment was intended to shock. Fabius was not William Pitt the Younger, whose nomination as British Prime Minister in 1783 at the age of 24 was greeted with a piece of doggerel,

  A sight to make all nations stand and stare,

  A kingdom trusted to a schoolboy’s care,

  but he was of a different generation from the leaders of the opposition: Barre, Chirac and Giscard. Where a more orthodox choice, Bérégovoy, Delors, or even Rocard, would have signalled continuity, Fabius symbolised modernity. He was a young man in tune with a time marked by accelerating financial, industrial, technological, social and cultural mutation, when the world, and France with it, was in the midst of unprecedented change.

  The appointment was a gamble. But Mitterrand had an intellectual and political affinity with Fabius that he had with few others, and he wanted to rearrange the chessboard in a way that the opposition would be unable to follow.

  To some extent he succeeded. The press caricatured Fabius as a gimmick. A slim, prematurely balding technocrat with elegant, bourgeois manners and a cold, calculating mind, he was portrayed by the cartoonists as a cooler, ‘lefty’ version of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Public opinion was kinder. During the year that followed, he had the confidence of more than half the electorate, while Mitterrand was down to little more than a third, a record of unpopularity unmatched by any of his predecessors.17

  But it was too little, too late. Fabius himself recognised that he had an impossible task. He was there ‘to prepare the elections so that they are lost the least badly possible. I knew that it would be extraordinarily difficult . . . My brief was . . . to avoid so serious a defeat as to [imperil] François Mitterrand’s remaining in office.’

  How had it come to this? Three years after a landslide victory, Mitterrand faced the near certainty of losing his parliamentary majority and having to coexist, or ‘cohabit’, as Pompidou’s former Chief of Staff, Édouard Balladur, had put it, with a government from the opposition. He could not say he had not seen it coming. Already in 1982, he had told his friend, the industrialist Ambroise Roux: ‘What a hiding we are going to get in the elections in 1986!’

  He had only himself to blame.

  Two of his key initiatives, the drive to reduce unemployment by promoting consumer-led growth and the negotiation to produce a unified schools system, had failed ignominiously, one being transformed into an austerity programme without precedent in post-war France, the other ending in a truce which, after three years of bruising combat, had left the situation essentially unchanged.

  In both cases the root cause was Mitterrand’s indecisiveness.

  Jacques Delors had called for ‘a pause’ in the Left’s economic reforms as early as November 1981: Mitterrand waited fifteen months longer before finally slamming on the brakes. Had he acted in March or even June 1982, instead of March 1983, he would still have been able to enact the symbolic measures which the left-wing electorate had been waiting for – an extra week of paid holiday; retirement at 60; an increase in the minimum wage – and the country would have been a year closer to economic recovery. Had he pushed through the schools reform in the spring of 1982, arguing, as he could have done at that time, that five months of discussion were sufficient proof of the government’s willingness to ‘convince, not to coerce’, the bill would have been put before parliament when the Left was in a position of strength and its opponents still in disarray and would almost certainly have passed.

  It is easy to be wise after the event. But the job of a statesman is to take the right decisions at the right time, not a year or two late.

  Mitterrand’s failures of leadership at home contrasted starkly with his record abroad. On European issues, on the arms race, on relations with the US and the Soviet Union, his judgement was unerring. It was in domestic affairs that he stumbled. The mistakes were not tactical but strategic. Instead of setting out unequivocally a clear policy from the outset, he hesitated, trying to reach impossible compromises between austerity and growth, between the Church and the Socialists, and as a result had the worst of both worlds.

  The explanation goes to the core of who Mitterrand was.

  He was remote, intimidating and exuded natural leadership. He subjugated those who worked for him by his intellect and culture. But he was an artist, operating by intuition, not a logician sizing up the world with arithmetical precision. Science left him cold. ‘Socialism,’ he declared, shortly before coming to power, ‘is first and foremost a cultural project.’ He could not live without novels and poetry. Spiritual questions fascinated him. He read and reread the Bible, not as history or theology but as metaphor. He saw himself as a romantic whose life was a novel in progress.

  In the first eighteen months after his election his powers were as close to absolute as exists in a democratic regime. Had he chosen to, he could have laid down any policy he liked and it would have been implemented. That was not how his mind worked. Accused of indecision, he shot back: ‘Would you prefer a President who doesn’t thi
nk before he acts?’

  But taken to an extreme, reflection becomes dithering.

  His tendency to procrastinate was reinforced by his conception of the presidency. Mitterrand-the-President was not quite the same man as Mitterrand-the-minister or Mitterrand-the-party-leader. The President was there to preside; the government to govern. De Gaulle had organised it that way, with a President above the fray and a Prime Minister who implemented his decisions and courted unpopularity in consequence. The division of roles was not watertight. It was the President, not the Prime Minister, who chaired the Cabinet meetings at which policy was approved. A balance had to be struck, and each President of the Fifth Republic, whether de Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard or Mitterrand – or later, Chirac, Sarkozy or Hollande – did so in a different way.

  Except in the ‘reserved domain’ of Defence and Foreign Affairs, where, by an unwritten rule, the President alone determined policy and oversaw its execution, Mitterrand was arguably the most ‘hands off’ of all modern French Heads of State.18 He liked to quote Cervantes: ‘Dar tiempo al tiempo’ (‘Give time to time’) – but where Don Quixote’s comment to Sancho Panza meant merely, ‘Do not rush things!’, Mitterrand meant they should be allowed to develop to their plenitude before decisive action was taken.19 That was fine when they developed to his advantage, as had been the case at Fontainebleau, where, after three years of obstreperousness, Margaret Thatcher had been ready to make peace. But over the schools issue, his refusal to intervene caused the situation not to ripen but to rot. From the autumn of 1983, Mitterrand had known that agreement was impossible. He had waited, he explained later, ‘to lance the abscess . . . to let the crisis attain its paroxysm to be able then, and only then, to resolve it’. But by that time the damage had been done. Had he acted more forcefully earlier, there might not have been an abscess to lance.