Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  In this unpromising context, Laurent Fabius set about forming his new government. The main question was whether the Communists would continue to take part.

  Already in March 1983, when the second austerity plan had been launched, the Politburo had talked about withdrawing, but at that point Marchais had felt it was too soon. ‘If we had gone then,’ he explained, ‘we would have been the ones responsible for the split . . . The women and the men who voted for the Left in 1981 wouldn’t have understood.’ But the issue was on the table. A month later, Marchais told an interviewer: ‘I am not fond of “swallowing grass snakes”’, the French expression for humiliation. Mitterrand’s insistence that austerity be accompanied by modernisation, notably of heavy industry – coal, steel and ship-building – which government subsidies had kept limping along for years to prevent social unrest – complicated the Communists’ position still further. Modernisation meant an additional 100,000 job losses, mainly in left-wing bastions in the north-east, Brittany and on the Mediterranean coast.

  Mauroy was also unhappy at such a flagrant reversal of the policies which had brought the Left to power. But Mitterrand was adamant. ‘We must purge our industry, get it back into a fit state . . . and stop throwing away money on subsidies,’ he told the Cabinet.

  It was hard, the President admitted, but it was a matter of national survival. ‘It’s doing nothing which costs jobs and money and in the end [leads to] despair. The crisis is because [we have] not adapted to international competition.’ In April 1984 he returned to this theme at a news conference at the Elysée:

  Either France will show itself capable of meeting [this challenge] and, in doing so, will ensure its independence and prosperity, or it will be dragged down and head into decline . . . Nothing, nothing at all, will be achieved in a lasting fashion in any field unless we fulfil two essential conditions: the construction of a modern industrial machine, without which we won’t be able to sell what we produce; and the training, without delay, of qualified labour to staff this modern industry.20

  Even before the modernisation programme, industrial unrest had been growing. That spring much of the North was paralysed. Truck drivers blocked the motorways, preventing the distribution of basic supplies. Tens of thousands of steelworkers marched through Paris, shouting, ‘Mitterrand, you’re fucked!’ Mauroy compared it to 1793, the year of the Terror in the French Revolution.

  The Communists tried to keep a foot in both camps. L’Humanité claimed in a front-page headline: ‘We are both in government and with the workers’. But it rang increasingly hollow. Marchais told his colleagues: ‘Communist participation in the government has . . . become the central issue.’ Although he would never admit it, Mitterrand had adopted the policies which Michel Rocard had advocated at Metz in 1979. On the anniversary of his election, May 10, the President put in the same basket the Right, which, he said, wanted wealth without redistribution, and ‘the Left which wants to redistribute everything without bothering to produce’. It was a far cry from the programme the Communists had committed to when they had entered the government three years earlier.

  The proof, if proof were needed, that the alliance with the Socialists was working against them came in the elections to the European Parliament in June. The Communist list, headed by Georges Marchais, won 11.2 per cent of the vote, less than half what he had obtained five years earlier and the Party’s worst showing in a national election since 1932.21

  Mauroy’s resignation and the choice of Fabius to succeed him were the last straw. As Minister of Industry, Fabius had implemented the modernisation programme with the enthusiasm of a true believer. A Communist colleague in the Cabinet remembered him as possessed by the ‘zeal of a neophyte, newly converted to the virtues of capitalist restructuring’.

  In the small hours of the morning of July 19, a Thursday, the new Prime Minister received a letter from the Communist Party Central Committee, making continued participation conditional on the government’s reversion to policies of growth and full employment. A statement issued later that day said the Party did not have ‘the moral right . . . to deceive our supporters or to deceive ourselves’ by pretending that the modernisation programme would solve France’s problems. Mitterrand tried rather half-heartedly to persuade them to stay on. If the Communists remained in government, the trades unions, notably the CGT, would be slightly more restrained. Moreover the Left was facing elections which it expected to lose. It would be better able to limit its defeat if it went into battle united. But the Party’s mind was made up. Mitterrand had nothing to offer which might change it.

  As the French Communists retreated into their shell, so, for quite different reasons, did their sponsors in Moscow. In February 1984, as Yuri Andropov lay dying, he had recommended that his protégé, Mikhail Gorbachev, then the Politburo member in charge of Agriculture, should succeed him as Soviet Communist Party General Secretary. But the elderly clique that had come to power with Leonid Brezhnev preferred one of its own. The Central Committee named Konstantin Chernenko, who had been passed over when Andropov was appointed. Like Brezhnev, he was a transitional figure, an ageing oligarch who took refuge in the wooden rhetoric of his mentor. But beneath the surface there was movement, as Mitterrand would discover when he visited Moscow that summer.

  Over the previous three years, both countries had staked out hard-line positions. Mitterrand’s expulsion of Soviet spies and support of the deployment of Pershing and cruise missiles were a reminder that, even with a Socialist government, France had to be treated with respect. Unlike his predecessor, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, he had refused high-level meetings with the Russians. But he had also resisted US pressure for a trade boycott of the Soviet bloc and was strongly opposed to Reagan’s plans for a space-based anti-missile system, the so-called Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), popularly known as ‘Star Wars’, which he regarded as impracticable.

  In March, a month after Andropov’s death, Mitterrand flew to Washington to meet the US President, whom he found more receptive than in the past to the idea of improving East–West relations. Reagan wondered aloud whether Moscow might need reassurance that the West’s intentions were peaceful. Mitterrand replied that the Russians suffered from ‘an encirclement complex’:

  I don’t believe that [they] are warmongers. Since Peter the Great, they’ve rarely been aggressors, even if their foreign diplomacy sometimes might make one think [so]. What is to be feared is that they really believe you might be aggressors [against them]. To explain that, you almost have to resort to psychoanalysis, which teaches us that we can be affected by anything that happens to our mother after the third month of pregnancy. They’re like that. They continue to live through [the prism of] their country’s first three years, [when British and French forces backed the White Russian armies’ efforts to annihilate the new Bolshevik regime]. There is a story about a madman who thinks he is a grain of wheat . . . After a long stay [in hospital] and intensive care, he is cured. Everyone is delighted. He leaves and on the way he meets a hen. The madman is terrified and races back to the hospital. ‘Oh, but come on!’ the doctor says to him. ‘You are cured. You know very well you are not a grain of wheat.’ And the madman answers: ‘Of course I know that. But does the hen know?’22

  Reagan was intrigued but not entirely convinced. The Kremlin might not be bent on war, he conceded, but it was certainly expansionist, as witness its activities in Africa, Afghanistan and Central America. That was Mitterrand’s cue to remind him that ‘although my analysis may be different from yours’, the Russians would always try their luck when ‘circumstances favour them. Wherever there is rottenness, they will come’ – a reference to the corrupt military dictatorships that the United States supported in the western hemisphere.

  Verbal fencing aside, the meeting went well. Reagan concluded with a story of his own about a Russian woman who had approached Brezhnev, reminding him that they had once slept together and asking him to help her son to get a place at university. ‘Of course I’ll
help,’ Brezhnev replied. ‘I don’t remember the occasion, but it’s possible. Tell me, where did we sleep together?’ ‘At the last Soviet Party Congress,’ she answered. ‘We were sitting next to each other during one of the speeches and we both dozed off.’

  Such is the stuff of summit meetings. Yet even anecdotes can be illuminating about an adversary’s, or a partner’s, frame of mind. The stories Reagan had told Mitterrand about Russia in previous years had all been viscerally hostile. He returned home convinced that if Reagan won a second term, US policy towards Moscow would become more accommodating.

  In June, Mitterrand set out for the Soviet Union. The visit was controversial. It was the first by a Western Head of State or government since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, four and a half years earlier, and, as such, marked a breach in the West’s diplomatic boycott. It also coincided with a hunger strike by the dissident physicist, Andrei Sakharov, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who had been banished to the city of Gorky in the Urals and was protesting against the authorities’ refusal to let his wife travel to the West for medical treatment.

  At the first plenary meeting, on Thursday morning, June 21, Chernenko read with difficulty, frequently swallowing his words and stumbling over passages, a lengthy prepared statement attacking the US and Western Europe for their ‘unfriendly’ attitude to Moscow and specifically for the deployment of Pershing and cruise missiles. In reply, Mitterrand repeated what he had said to Reagan about the USSR not being a warmonger, before continuing:

  No one wants war, but it can happen without anyone wanting it, because each side wishes to strengthen its forces without yielding an inch to the other . . . For me, [your] SS-20 missiles are incomprehensible . . . Why do you have these missiles facing us? Why? Because you think I am going to go crazy and attack you? It’s absurd! I would prefer not to have SS-20s or Pershings. But once the SS-20s are in place, there has to be an equilibrium.23

  He went on to speak of human rights and ‘cases like that of Sakharov . . . and certain others’ where ‘the principle of the free circulation of persons should apply’. Chernenko did not respond and Mitterrand did not take it further.24 But that night, at a welcoming banquet in the Kremlin, he raised the issue again, this time in public. After noting that the Helsinki Conference on European Security and Cooperation (CSCE), nine years earlier, had set out a modus vivendi for the West and the communist bloc, the President continued:

  Any restriction of freedom could call into question the principles [we all] accepted at that conference. That is why we sometimes speak to you about the cases of individuals, some of whom have taken on a symbolic dimension . . . Such is the case of Professor Sakharov and of many whose names are unknown.25

  When he sat down, there was a deathly hush. A French Communist in the delegation remembered Chernenko ‘looking like a corpse’. To break the ice, Mitterrand asked Gorbachev, who had arrived late and was sitting on Chernenko’s left, why he had not been part of the Soviet delegation at the plenary session that morning. ‘That doesn’t depend on me, Mr President,’ Gorbachev replied. Chernenko then enquired why he had been late. The younger man explained that he had been attending a meeting on agricultural production. ‘Everyone always says [our agriculture] is fine,’ he went on, ‘but it’s not true. It’s never worked properly.’ Taken aback, Chernenko asked what he meant. ‘The peasants couldn’t care less, transport is a mess, the officials are lazy and incompetent . . .’ Gorbachev began. ‘Since when?’ Chernenko broke in. ‘Since 1917,’ came the answer. The Russian interpreter, suddenly realising the enormity of what had been said, stopped in mid-sentence.26

  It was the first encounter between any Western leader and the man who, by the end of the decade, would ring down the curtain on the once invincible Soviet empire, bringing to an end half a century of Cold War. Gorbachev’s remarks were so improbable, so unlike anything any Soviet leader had ever said publicly before, that Mitterrand wondered afterwards whether they might have been some kind of provocation.

  Next morning the Communist Party daily, Pravda, published the text of Mitterrand’s speech but censored the reference to Sakharov. Chernenko’s speech appeared with two extra sentences, which he had not uttered: ‘Those who try to teach us lessons only provoke from us an ironical smile. We shall allow no one to interfere in our affairs.’

  Reagan and Margaret Thatcher both wrote to congratulate Mitterrand on his remarks. His intuition of the US President’s changing attitude was soon shown to have been correct. In September Reagan received the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, the first such contact for five years. Three months later, Gorbachev, paying his first official visit to the West as Soviet No. 2, travelled to London and met Thatcher, who famously declared that ‘we can do business together’.

  The following spring, Chernenko, who had been suffering from emphysema and a host of related ailments, died of heart failure after barely a year in office. Roland Dumas, who had taken over from Cheysson as French Foreign Minister, happened to be in Moscow that weekend. Gromyko, a dour, granite-faced man who had entered the Foreign Ministry under Stalin, told him in confidence that Gorbachev would be the new leader, adding: ‘He has a nice smile but his teeth are made of steel.’ Back at the Embassy, Dumas phoned Mitterrand and urged him to cancel all other business and attend the funeral two days later. With some reluctance the President agreed. Arriving late, as usual, he was escorted to the front row, where he found himself being propelled towards the outstretched arms of Yasser Arafat, to be saved in the nick of time by Thatcher, who, seeing his panic-stricken expression, waved him over to join her.

  It turned out to be worth the journey. Mitterrand afterwards quoted Gorbachev as having told him in substance later that day: ‘What we lack here is initiative and imagination. In a word, what we lack is democracy. I shall try.’27 Gorbachev remembered the discussion as ‘the starting point of a relationship of mutual understanding that arose instantly between us’. On his return to Paris, the President told the Cabinet: ‘It really seems that with Gorbachev we have passed from one epoch to another.’

  If Russia was changing, America lagged behind. Reagan had dropped his rhetoric about ‘the evil Empire’ and appeared genuinely to want better relations with Moscow. But he remained committed to the ‘Star Wars’ initiative and increasingly viewed France – the most independent-minded of the Allies and the most sceptical about SDI – as a thorn in America’s side.

  The feeling was mutual. Not long before, Mitterrand had told the Syrian leader, Hafez al-Assad, referring to his relations with Washington, ‘We are members of the Atlantic Alliance . . . We are friends. But we are a bit like cat and dog in the same house.’

  Two weeks after Gorbachev’s appointment, in the spring of 1985, the CIA launched a disinformation campaign in an attempt to torpedo any improvement in Soviet–French relations.28 To Washington it was one thing for the two superpowers to hold a privileged dialogue between themselves, but quite another to watch from afar the emergence of a Franco-Russian entente which risked becoming a pole of opposition to ‘Star Wars’. The opening salvo came on March 29, when the newspaper, Le Monde, broke the story of Farewell, which until then had been a closely guarded secret. It turned out that the leak had come from Yves Bonnet, who had succeeded Chalet as DST chief. Summoned to explain himself, Bonnet said that William Casey, his opposite number in Washington, concerned that Moscow was reconstituting its intelligence network in France, had urged him to fire a warning shot across the Soviets’ bows. Mitterrand sacked him but the damage had been done.29 Other leaks calculated to exasperate the Russians, attributable directly to CIA sources, continued to appear in the French media and in the New York Times.

  Meanwhile the White House stepped up pressure on the Allies to join America in SDI research. A circular letter from Reagan – one of his preferred methods of communication and one which always infuriated Mitterrand, whom it reminded of a headmaster calling his staff to a meeting in the school common room – invited NATO Heads of State an
d government to make up their minds in the next sixty days whether or not to participate. Shortly afterwards the US Defence Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, arrived in Paris to try to win the French President’s agreement.

  It was a singularly unproductive meeting.

  France, Mitterrand told him, rejected the US approach for three reasons: firstly, it risked decoupling the American and European theatres; secondly, it would encourage the Russians to accelerate their own missile development; and thirdly, it would not work. If 5 per cent of the Soviet missiles reached their targets, almost every major city in America would be obliterated. Yet the best estimate was that the Strategic Defense Initiative, when it became operational in 2020, would stop only 80 per cent of the missiles. Weinberger responded that the programme at that stage was merely for research: America wanted to ‘bring together as much expertise as possible and use the talents available from its allies’.

  To Mitterrand, that was the problem. SDI was not and would never be a serious anti-missile defence system. It was a clever scheme, dreamed up by the Pentagon, to attract European money and brains to a US-led military research programme which would bring immense technological spin-offs for America and confine the Europeans to the role of subcontractors. To sidestep that challenge, he proposed setting up an independent European research programme called EUREKA (The European Research Coordination Agency). It was launched during the summer, becoming a vital platform for European innovation in fields ranging from nuclear fusion to space research. However US pressure for SDI continued and was soon accompanied by two more high-profile American initiatives to which Mitterrand was equally opposed. Reagan wanted the G7 to issue a joint statement on terrorism, which, after America’s experiences in Lebanon, was a major preoccupation in Washington. To France, that was unacceptable. The G7 was not the world’s policeman. If terrorism was to be discussed, it should be done through intergovernmental talks or through Interpol. The American President also wanted a new round of the GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, to dismantle trade barriers in Europe and Japan, particularly for farm products, in order to reduce the ballooning US trade deficit. Again, Mitterrand refused. Trade talks, he acknowledged, were needed, but if European agriculture was to be discussed, America must agree to submit transport and services to similar scrutiny.