by Philip Short
‘Normalisation’ with Iran, the centrepiece of Chirac’s strategy, had been a delusion.
Moreover the 27-year-old interpreter at the Iranian Embassy in Paris, Wahid Gordji, whose father had been Khomeini’s doctor, had been in contact with Saleh’s group and was suspected of acting as coordinator.
The government was divided. The Interior Minister Charles Pasqua advised breaking off diplomatic relations and expelling the Iranian mission. His colleague at the Foreign Ministry, Jean-Bernard Raimond, proposed negotiations.
While Chirac hesitated, Gordji took refuge in the Iranian Embassy.
At the end of June, the building was surrounded by French police. Iran responded in kind. Faced with the possibility that French diplomats in Teheran might be taken hostage in reprisal, Chirac blew hot and cold. ‘At 9.15 this morning in my office,’ Mitterrand complained, ‘I found the Prime Minister full of bravado towards Iran, telling me: “We should break off diplomatic relations within 48 hours.” At 10.45 he was saying: “We must break relations by the end of the week.” Three minutes later, [he wanted] just to declare [the Iranian chargé d’affaires] persona non grata. Half an hour afterwards he said, “Maybe we should wait . . .”’
Meanwhile, without informing Mitterrand, Chirac authorised secret talks with an Iranian envoy in Geneva. Agreement in principle was reached to allow Gordji to return to Iran in exchange for the release of two French hostages.
On Monday, July 13, when Chirac told the President what was planned, Mitterrand objected. He would agree reluctantly, he said, to exchange Gordji for all the hostages but not for just two. That afternoon, at a second meeting, the President demanded that the Iranians be given an ultimatum: if they did not lift the siege of the French Embassy within 48 hours, their chargé d’affaires would be declared persona non grata after which, failing an accord, France would break diplomatic relations. The Prime Minister complied.
A few hours before the deadline, Iran issued a matching demand. Unless Gordji were allowed to leave and the siege of the embassy in Paris lifted, Teheran would break relations. At Mitterrand’s insistence, France acted first, announcing the severance of diplomatic ties with immediate effect. The embassy sieges continued. Forty Iranians were confined to the mission in Paris, eleven French diplomats and staff in Teheran. Iranian gunboats attacked a French cargo ship in the Gulf. France complained to the Security Council and sent an aircraft carrier to the region.15
But behind the gesticulation, there were signs of change.
Diplomatic telegrams were intercepted suggesting that the Iranian authorities were concerned about what Gordji might reveal if he were questioned by a French judge and about the international repercussions if France were to publish evidence of Iran’s use of terrorism as a diplomatic tool. Years later it would become known that a debate was under way in Teheran. Iran’s leaders were about to conclude that hostage-taking and the use of terror were not advancing their cause.16 But none of that was apparent at the time.
Mitterrand was resigned to a long stand-off.17 Chirac was not.
The Prime Minister was convinced that if he could obtain the hostages’ freedom, his chances in the presidential election, now barely nine months away, which had been badly damaged by the student crisis, the dispute over privatisation and, above all, the government’s failure to reduce unemployment, would be greatly improved. Without informing the Elysée, he initiated fresh negotiations, both with Iran and, through unofficial intermediaries, with the hostage-takers in Lebanon. On August 5, at their regular tête-à-tête before the weekly Cabinet meeting, he tried for the second time that summer to prepare Mitterrand for the possibility that Gordji might be freed as part of a hostage exchange:
CHIRAC: You know, in the [Gordji] dossier, for the investigating magistrate there’s really not very much . . .
MITTERRAND: Have you any idea of the implications of what you have just said? We’ve broken off diplomatic relations, there have been threats of terrorism and even of war . . . and all that for nothing? You can’t think the government will be let off lightly if that’s how things are going to be . . . Remember, at a meeting which I called in this office, Mr Pasqua said the dossier [against Gordji] was very weighty.18
In fact it had never been that straightforward. Pasqua had indeed told Mitterrand that Gordji was ‘a point of reference for Iranian agents both in France and in Europe’ and that there was solid evidence against him in the shape of wire-tapped telephone conversations and intercepted radio communications from the embassy.19 The problem was that none of that would be admissible in a court of law.
The meeting on August 5 was the last time the Prime Minister and the President discussed the hostage issue. Thereafter Chirac dropped any pretence of cooperating with the Elysée. From then on it was each man for himself.
At the end of November, two hostages – Roger Auque and Jean-Louis Normandin – were freed and flown back to France on a government jet. The Prime Minister was at the airport to meet them. Two days later, with Teheran’s agreement, Gordji was brought before an investigating magistrate in Paris, who found there was insufficient evidence to charge him. In a matching procedure in Teheran, a French diplomat, Paul Torri, who had been accused of espionage, was brought before an Iranian judge who found that there were no charges to answer. The following day, a Sunday, they were exchanged on the airport tarmac at Karachi. Later it became known that the French government had paid the hostage-takers a ransom of US $3 million. The other countries with hostages in Lebanon, notably Britain and the United States (though it had secretly done the same thing itself), were furious, accusing the French of betrayal.
Mitterrand, who had been kept in the dark, was not pleased either. The outcome – the return of two hostages in exchange for the release of Gordji – was exactly what he had forbidden Chirac in July. But the approaching election had overwhelmed all other considerations. It was not the time or the topic for a confrontation with the government. The Prime Minister insisted that the release of Auque and Normandin was part of a larger deal and that the remaining three hostages would be home for Christmas. However the end of the year passed and Carton, Fontaine and Kauffmann remained in captivity.
Throughout the period of cohabitation, the prospect of the coming election formed a constant backdrop to the relationship between Mitterrand and Chirac. The Prime Minister thought that two years in office would give him a decisive edge over his right-wing rival, Raymond Barre. Mitterrand had made the opposite calculation: that after two years as Prime Minister, Chirac’s appeal would wear thin. As the months passed, it looked more and more as if the President would be proved right.
But would Mitterrand stand for a second term?
As always, the President played his cards close to his chest. This time he had a good reason. The moment he confirmed that he would stand, he would lose the benefit of being above the fray. But if he ruled out a second term, he would be ‘reduced to watching the trains go by’. So he sheathed himself in ambiguity, which, as he would have been the first to admit, was how he always felt most at ease. It was ‘not his intention’ to stand, he kept repeating, only to add: ‘Will something happen to make me say, “Oh, that’s a mistake”? I cannot suppose so.’
In retrospect it is clear that he made up his mind in stages. The first question – would he be in a position to win a second term? – was soon answered. Perhaps as early as August 1986, certainly by December that year, he was convinced that he could be re-elected if he wanted it. But the next question was: Did he want it? One of his oldest friends, Pierre Guillain de Bénouville, remembered: ‘His hesitation went on for a long time. It was sincere. He said to me: “But Pierre, look at my age, my private happiness, my life . . .”’
Age was an excuse. Mitterrand would be 71 in May 1988. De Gaulle had won a second term at the age of 75. Clemenceau had been named Prime Minister when he was 76.
More serious was the question of Mitterrand’s health.
He was still under treatment for prostate cancer
. It had been in remission for six years and he told himself that he had been cured. His doctors, aware of the importance of ‘positive thinking’, did not disabuse him. But statistically, as Claude Gubler wrote later, the chances of his finishing a second term were close to nil. Already it was a medical miracle that he could finish his first term. What was the point of pushing his luck?
But the real problem lay elsewhere. Did he want to sacrifice the remaining years of his life to another presidential term? At 70, every man and woman knows that there is only a finite span ahead. The question of how to spend it is no longer a distant hypothesis but a binding choice. Mitterrand adored his daughter. If he stood again she would be thirteen, about to start out on the quicksands of adolescence when parents need to be more present than at any other period of their children’s lives. As President he would have little time for her, for Anne, or for his ‘official family’.
This was brought home to him in July 1987, in the middle of the crisis with Iran, when his younger son, Gilbert, and his two granddaughters, Justine and Pascale, were involved in a car crash in northern Spain. The driver of the oncoming vehicle, a Spanish woman, was killed. Gilbert and his elder daughter escaped with light injuries. But Justine, then aged six, was in a critical condition with a fractured skull. The President and Danielle flew to Girona, where they arrived as the little girl was coming out of surgery. She survived. But Mitterrand was shattered. It was the same dilemma as had triggered his lament to Georges Dayan, forty years before: ‘What is the point of working if you have no time for your private life?’
Family apart, he had other interests than politics. A shared love of rare books had created an improbable bond between him and Helmut Kohl. The Chancellor had given him a scarce original edition of poems by Apollinaire. Mitterrand had given him in return a seventeenth-century letter from the German-born Duchess of Orleans, pleading with the French War Minister, Louvois, to spare her birthplace, Heidelberg – a gift which Kohl, a native of that area, had particularly appreciated. Almost every day, accompanied by Attali or Patrice Pelat, the President would take an afternoon stroll through the Latin Quarter or along the banks of the Seine, browsing in his favourite bookshops. During Cabinet meetings, when a minister made a particularly tedious presentation, he annotated catalogues from antiquarian booksellers. Literature was an essential part of his being. No matter what else might be happening, he tried to read for two hours a day to ‘oxygenate the mind’. When travelling he would sometimes send word to the pilot to circle round a couple more times before landing, so that he could finish a chapter.
Cohabitation had lightened his workload. He was able to play golf more often and to spend more time at Latche, where he took long walks in the forest, planted trees in the autumn and cared for his two donkeys, who reminded him of the mules of his childhood at Touvent. He had an almost carnal relationship with the soil, drawing energy and solace from the unchanging rhythms of the countryside.
‘Why on earth would I want to stand again?’ he asked a visitor to the book-lined sheepcote at Latche in the autumn of 1986. ‘Look around you. What more do I need than I have here?’
For years he had collected walking sticks. ‘He always used to say,’ Danielle remembered, ‘when I retire my dream is to sit on a bench in a town square, with my walking stick between my legs, and rest my chin on the handle and look at the people.’ She tried hard to persuade him not to stand again.
But power is a drug. When you have it and you know you can keep it, it is hard to let go. ‘It’s a bit like the gamblers in a casino,’ Mitterrand said later. ‘After a while, it’s not for money that they’re there, glued to the table, it’s simply that they like playing.’ Dreams aside, sitting on a park bench and watching the world go by was not his style.
By the summer of 1987, he was persuaded not only that he could win but also that the next-best-placed Socialist, Michel Rocard, could not.20 And in any case, would he have wanted Rocard, who irritated him beyond measure, to be his successor?
Only one question remained: did he want Jacques Chirac to become the next President of France?
Mitterrand’s relations with Chirac’s Cabinet, frigid in the first few weeks, had gradually thawed. The young Commerce Minister, Michel Noir, had inadvertently helped break the ice by complaining publicly that he had not been presented to the President. The following week, Mitterrand had gone up to him, held out his hand and, amid laughter, introduced himself: ‘I’m François Mitterrand.’ Not long afterwards, the President accidentally sat down in the Defence Minister’s chair. When Giraud pointed out his error, ‘You’ve taken my place, Mr President, and since I don’t wish to take yours . . .’, he shot back: ‘You are the only one who doesn’t.’
It was an exercise in seduction of the kind at which Mitterrand excelled. The more he could charm Chirac’s ministers, the more he could divide the government and single out the Prime Minister as his primary opponent.
As his relationship with the Cabinet eased, so that with Chirac deteriorated. The Prime Minister’s energy, which at first he had admired, he now found exasperating. ‘He’s like a spinning top which doesn’t know why it turns,’ Mitterrand complained. He detested the younger man’s dissembling. Chirac’s spokesman, Denis Baudouin, who had known him since they had worked together for Georges Pompidou, twenty years earlier, explained: ‘Mitterrand never forgave Chirac his constant lying and his encroachments on the presidential prerogatives in foreign policy and defence. I imagine that Chirac, because I know how he is, always said yes to Mitterrand and did the opposite behind his back. It’s his weakness.’ Maurice Faure had a similar impression. Mitterrand ‘realised that Chirac could not be relied upon’, he said. ‘He constantly went back on his word, from one day to the next, without even knowing that he was doing it.’
The Prime Minister’s problem was that he did not know how to deal with Mitterrand. ‘He was an amateur facing a professional,’ said the Social Affairs Minister, Philippe Séguin. At Cabinet meetings François Léotard, the Culture Minister, recalled moments of ‘distressing mediocrity’, when Chirac ‘behaved like a sub-lieutenant’. He was ‘ill at ease’ and ‘obsequious’. His staff remembered that afterwards he always came back looking exhausted.
As time went by, Mitterrand’s desire to settle scores with the Prime Minister grew stronger. ‘Little by little,’ Pelat recalled, ‘he started to tell me that he hadn’t completed everything he wanted to do and that the attacks [of the Right] were pushing him to take up the challenge.’ Mitterrand told Attali: ‘I’ve no desire to entrench myself, but the thought that my departure would give them so much pleasure would ruin my retirement.’ Later he was more explicit: ‘I never wanted to be a candidate again, but . . . Chirac and his people are a danger for democracy.’ The Prime Minister, he said, was ‘vulgar, loutish and wavering’. The RPR was set on gaining sole control of all the levers of power in the State.
In July 1987, Mitterrand summoned Dumas, Jospin, Joxe and Louis Mermaz to join him at Latche. ‘I haven’t yet taken a decision,’ he told them, ‘but you should now start working on the assumption that I may stand.’ He left himself room for manoeuvre. The tentative campaign slogan they chose (and would later abandon) – ‘The Mitterrand Generation’ – could apply as well to Michel Rocard as to himself. But Rocard was informed that the President’s candidacy was probable, if not yet certain, and from the autumn onward, in liaison with the Elysée, he occupied the terrain on Mitterrand’s behalf, understanding that when the moment came he would step down in the President’s favour.
At what point did Mitterrand’s decision become irrevocable? Robert Badinter dated his resolution to a day in late December when the President, in Egypt for Christmas with Anne and Mazarine, decided that they should all ascend Mount Sinai, where Moses was said to have received the Ten Commandments. The direct path to the summit of the 7,000-foot mountain consists of 3,750 crude stone steps carved into the rock. Mitterrand’s doctor, Claude Gubler, tried to dissuade him. ‘We’ll take our time,�
�� the President assured him. ‘We can stop and rest and, if it’s too much, we’ll come back down.’ They took it slowly and reached the top well after dawn. Afterwards Badinter told his wife, Elizabeth: ‘He’s passed the test. He managed it. Now he’ll stand.’
Others, more prosaic and perhaps more accurate, thought he based his decision on the evolution of the opinion polls in January and February 1988.21 Initially Mitterrand was credited with 40 per cent of the vote in the first round, against Raymond Barre with 25 and Chirac with 20 per cent. But by the end of February, to the President’s relief, Chirac and Barre were neck and neck. Barre, the President reasoned, would be much harder to beat in the second round because he was better able than Chirac to mobilise the Centre. But the former Prime Minister ran a lacklustre campaign and the UDF, which had been expected to back him, was divided and gave him little support.
On March 22, a Tuesday, three days before the deadline for candidates to register and four and a half weeks before Election Day, Mitterrand was asked on television whether he would seek a new term. ‘Yes,’ he replied.
The answer came out coyly, as though he enjoyed playing with the interviewer and was sorry the game had to end. But the harshness of the explanation which followed surprised everyone. ‘I want France to be united,’ he declared, ‘and it won’t be if it is in the hands of individuals who are intolerant, of parties which want to control everything, of clans and gangs [which] exercise domination over the entire country and risk tearing apart the social tissue and preventing social cohesion.’ These ‘clans, gangs and factions’, he went on, in an allusion to Chirac and the RPR, were ‘threatening civil peace’. One observer wrote that it was as though he were ‘pouring out against the Prime Minister [all] the rancour that had built up’ during the two years they had been forced to share power.
Next morning, Chirac and Mitterrand met as usual tête-à-tête before the Cabinet meeting. ‘Your words last night were offensive to me,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘Over the last two years, your actions have sometimes been offensive to me,’ the President replied.