by Philip Short
Mitterrand was still disgusted by the idea of going to war to save the Emir of Kuwait. ‘How am I going to explain to the French peasants that I have imperilled the lives of their children to restore to power a billionaire?’ he asked the US Secretary of State, James Baker. ‘How can we be sure that using force won’t just protect their bank accounts in Switzerland?’ But the decision had been taken. Two days later, on November 20, he told Thatcher, in what proved to be their last meeting before her resignation, that, contrary to American predictions, he did not expect a long war. Iraq was less strong than it seemed.
It was Helmut Kohl who posed the question to which no one had an answer: ‘Yes, but afterwards? Who is going to occupy the country? What’s going to happen with the rest of the region?’
On the night of January 16 1991, Operation Desert Storm began. France had pre-positioned 10,000 ground troops, the third largest Western contingent after the US and Britain, as well as air and naval forces. It was more than a symbolic presence. The French General Staff estimated that when ground combat began, they risked losing 100 dead and 300 wounded a day.
A week before the ultimatum to Saddam expired, an opinion poll found that 79 per cent of the French people opposed participation. But Mitterrand argued that, however unpopular the war might be, France had to take part to preserve its status in the world. ‘If we are absent from the conflict, we will be absent from the settlement,’ he told his ministers. ‘What is more, we won’t justify our role as a permanent member of the Security Council . . . Germany is still a political dwarf. The proof of that [is] that the Germans won’t be there. As for the British, they are too much under the heel of the Americans.’ It was a war, he told his critics, ‘which touches both the conscience and the balance of the world . . . Were we not to participate militarily . . . people would speak of [our] decline.’
Not everyone agreed. On January 29, Chevènement resigned as Defence Minister to be replaced by Pierre Joxe. Chevènement had opposed the war from the outset, but Mitterrand had endeavoured to keep him in the government to silence the pacifist fringe of the Socialist Party, of which he was the spokesman. It proved a wise precaution. By the time the Defence Minister left, the coalition air bombardment was well under way and public opinion, in France as in America, had swung massively behind the government.
Three days after the launching of Desert Storm, both Bush and Mitterrand saw their popularity boosted by almost 20 per cent, among the sharpest rises ever recorded. Contrary to the predictions of the Pentagon that the coalition risked losing at least 100 aircraft a week, in the first seven days 21 planes were brought down by enemy fire. When the ground offensive started on February 24, in the 100 hours of combat before Saddam capitulated, France lost not hundreds of dead and wounded, as the Chiefs of Staff had predicted, but two soldiers dead and twenty-five wounded, all victims of American ‘friendly fire’.
The Gulf War took Mitterrand back to the time, half a century earlier, when Britain, France and the United States had also fought together. When Bush telephoned him, five days before the land attack, and told him, ‘You’re the first I’ve called. Now I’ll talk to Major’, Mitterrand replied: ‘We’re a very small group of “happy few”. I’m in touch with Major too. We think the same way.’
But the war did not produce the results that the French President had hoped for.
After Iraq’s capitulation on February 28, the coalition felt it had no choice but to leave Saddam in power. Mitterrand regretted that. ‘We could have continued for another two weeks,’ he told Bush afterwards. ‘But we did not.’ The principle of non-aggression had been upheld – Kuwait had been returned to its ruling dynasty – but the mess the war had left behind was no better than what had gone before. Six weeks after hostilities ended, Bush confessed to him: ‘The Gulf War was nothing compared to the problems we have now.’
The failure to complete the destruction of Saddam’s forces had left the Iraqi leader free to crush dissent, which he did with characteristic brutality. In the South the Presidential Guard put down an uprising by Shiites, who had hoped the coalition would support them. In the North, at the end of March, it was the turn of the Kurds, who fled to Turkey and Iran. Bush was wary of further military action. ‘We have no intention of getting involved in an Iraqi civil war that has been going on for years,’ he told Mitterrand. The French President, whose wife, Danielle, was a passionate advocate of the Kurdish cause, urged him to do more. ‘If necessary,’ he insisted, ‘military action must be envisaged’:
We have a moral duty and a political obligation to stop this man destroying and starving his own people. If we do nothing, we will undermine all the moral credit that has resulted from America’s remarkable action [in the Gulf War]. It’s a matter of avoiding genocide . . . It’s not a legal issue. We cannot allow the civilian population to be punished because they believed in our victory . . . What’s important is to put in place a temporary protection, which will last as long as necessary . . . so that in practice Saddam Hussein cannot attack his people . . . We have a right to do that because we won the war. [We did not do so] to abandon millions of people to government terrorism.34
A few days later a ‘no fly’ zone, patrolled by American, British and French aircraft, was created over northern Iraq, permitting the Kurds to establish de facto independence in October. A ‘no fly’ zone in the South followed a year later.
However, Mitterrand’s overriding concern was not so much Iraq as the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. One of the reasons he had insisted on French participation in the war was that he was convinced that it would help create the conditions for progress towards an Israeli–Palestinian settlement. There was now a window of opportunity, Mitterrand argued. Arafat, who, for reasons of internal Palestinian politics had felt obliged to support Saddam during the war, had seen his influence temporarily weakened. If an international conference were convened, the PLO would have to stay in the background, which would make it easier for Israel to take part. It was time for the United States to act.
The previous autumn Mitterrand had complained to the Defence Secretary, Dick Cheney, about what he said was a US double standard in the Middle East which undermined the West’s authority in the region. Lebanon was a case in point. While Washington was taking a tough line with Iraq, it had done nothing to stop Syria exerting hegemony over its smaller neighbour. ‘Lebanon is much more important to me than Kuwait,’ the French President said. ‘What help would the United States give us [there] if I asked for it? Compare that to the help France is giving [you] over Kuwait.’ Cheney did not reply.35 Then there was Israel. ‘I defend their right to a secure existence,’ Mitterrand had told the Defence Secretary, ‘but not to the detriment of others. Their attitude is simply intolerable. So is their oppression of the Palestinians.’
Bush had in fact already decided that, after the Gulf War, he would make a fresh attempt to relaunch the peace process. During a lengthy discussion on the Caribbean island of Martinique, Mitterrand urged him to persevere:
MITTERRAND: The only real problem is that of the Palestinians. All the rest is relatively easy. I’m not talking about . . . Iraq. That’s very important, but it’s not the key issue . . . I don’t want to apportion blame, but the latent war between Israel and Palestine will outlive both of us unless we have a resolute policy. You know my attachment to Israel . . . But I try to tell Israel the truth. By refusing every agreement, every compromise, Israel is equally responsible for the situation in the Near East . . . Unless America shows its determination, nothing will happen there.
BUSH: I know you think we have been the hostage of Israel. Well, if there’s an American President who’s been willing to try and do something about this problem, it’s me. [But] they keep trying to use Congress to push us beyond where it is reasonable for us to go . . . I realise our responsibility . . . I can only say that with this government in Israel, it’s not easy.
MITTERRAND: The main obstacle is the Israeli government. I’m not saying you
can tell them what to do . . . but we can’t continue indefinitely [like] this . . .
BUSH: I agree . . . [Palestinian] ‘State’. That’s the key word.
MITTERRAND I used to say before, ‘state structure’, ‘homeland’. Then, when I said, ‘State’, I got such a – forgive the expression – bollocking [from Israel] that I started rather to enjoy it. It’s curious how the human mind works.36
Bush kept his word. He did try. Riding high in the opinion polls, he was able for once to ignore the Jewish lobby and its allies in Congress. In October 1991 the Madrid Conference consecrated the principle of exchanging land for peace, leading three years later to the signing of the Oslo peace accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. But France’s role was limited. Mitterrand’s gamble that French participation in the Gulf War would ensure it a say in the peace process did not pay off. To Shamir’s Likud party, ‘those who are not with us are against us’. Mitterrand, who tried to be impartial, was placed in the ‘against us’ camp. But above all, the United States, having decided to take matters in hand, intended to run the show itself. There was no place at the Middle East conference table for a second-ranking European power.
Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait allowed Michel Rocard’s government to survive until the spring of 1991 – Mitterrand could hardly change Prime Ministers until the Gulf War was over – but it did not save him. Since Rennes, his fate had been sealed. The only question was who would replace him.
Many of the President’s closest colleagues urged him to call a snap parliamentary election to take advantage of the surge in his popularity brought about by the war. It was not an easy decision. The moment, he agreed, was ‘politically propitious’ but he was not convinced the Socialists would prevail. Opinion polls commissioned by the Elysée suggested that the Left was likely to do less well than in 1988, when it had failed narrowly to win a majority. The public had followed him in the Gulf, he told Fabius, ‘but it doesn’t follow me as solidly at home’. After three years of strong growth, the economy had stalled; unemployment was rising again; and there had been an epidemic of rioting by disadvantaged youths in the suburbs. Mitterrand decided to wait.37
That made sense so long as there was a reasonable chance of doing better when the normal parliamentary term ended. But it would depend on the effectiveness of Rocard’s successor. And there matters were more complicated, for the replacement of the Prime Minister had acquired such an emotional charge that the President’s judgement had become skewed. There existed between them, Attali wrote, ‘an incomprehension which had become dangerous for the functioning of the State’. The figures said it all. Seven years earlier, when Mauroy’s popularity as Prime Minister was down to 25 per cent, Mitterrand had urged him to stay on. Now, with Rocard’s popularity close to 60 per cent, he was determined to make him leave, no matter what the cost.
Naming Rocard, he told Attali, was ‘my only mistake since 1988’. In fact his mistake had been to name Rocard and then to do everything in his power to make him fail. ‘Mitterrand today,’ the Prime Minister said a few weeks before he resigned, ‘is cynicism in its purest state.’
It was the stance of a sovereign.
Like the French kings, Mitterrand had a favourite, Laurent Fabius, who enjoyed the monarch’s esteem and affection, and a pretender, Michel Rocard, who risked disgrace and exile. Much of the President’s energy in his second term was devoted to preventing Fabius’s rival, Lionel Jospin, from forging an alliance with Rocard to unseat his young champion. The Elysée came to resemble the court of Louis XVI. Mitterrand’s cultural adviser, Laure Adler, left an acid description of the ‘agitated types of behaviour’ which pervaded the ‘château’, as it was called – ‘excesses of love, unflagging admiration [and] theatrical displays of fidelity’:
The Mitterrandist courtier . . . says ‘Mr President’ at least once in every phrase he utters, exclaims at the least word the President says, bursts out into inappropriate laughter [and] anticipates his desires . . . François Mitterrand, because he is President, lives at the Elysée as though in a bubble . . . Power is first and foremost, and perhaps solely, power over men. François Mitterrand knows that, he uses it and sometimes abuses it in his palace. By the affection he dispenses, he makes those around him hostages . . . To fill the distance between a private life he can no longer have . . . and an official life which keeps him in a straitjacket and prevents him being natural, a court has been created – or he has created it – [which] is inherently unequal. He alone can ask. Generally he gets what he wants, and when he doesn’t . . . he does not understand.38
Danielle said she could never work out why he wanted to surround himself with such a hothouse atmosphere of flattery and intrigue. ‘It’s the one question to which I never found an answer. There were people who – I used to ask myself – how could François put up with them? [But when] I put it to him, “How can you keep someone like that working beside you?”, he’d evade the question and just say, “Oh, you don’t know him.”’
The monarchical aspect of the Elysian court was only one facet of Mitterrand’s presidency, but it became steadily more pronounced. André Rousselet recalled that over time it became harder to find a way to tell him what he did not want to hear. That sovereign disdain for the views of others helped to explain the choice he made in the summer of 1991.
The obvious successor to Rocard was the Finance Minister, Pierre Bérégovoy. He was a Mitterrand loyalist, a competent administrator and had the confidence of the financial markets. He would represent continuity. But Mitterrand wanted change. In 1984 he had chosen Fabius as the country’s youngest ever head of government. Now he decided to appoint France’s first woman Prime Minister.
Édith Cresson had worked with him since the days of the Convention, almost thirty years earlier. She had guts. She had shown herself to be a capable minister. To Mitterrand she was everything that Rocard was not: energetic, passionate, trenchant, indiscreet, highly political and willing to make waves. She had resigned as Minister for European Affairs in October 1990, accusing Rocard of being afraid to take unpopular decisions. ‘I can no longer continue to be part of a government where I find such an absence of will,’ she told a weekly magazine. It was unfair. If Rocard was reluctant to stick his neck out, it was because he knew that Mitterrand was just waiting for an excuse to chop his head off. But it was music to the President’s ears. During the winter he saw her frequently. Each time she distilled poison about the Prime Minister’s failings. By March he had decided that she would be his choice. She told him that she would prefer to be Minister of Industry with Bérégovoy as Prime Minister. But Mitterrand insisted.
To prevent Rocard turning the tables on him and resigning of his own accord, as Chirac had done to Giscard in 1976, the President wanted to move fast. On May 10, at a private dinner at the Elysée to mark the 10th anniversary of his assumption of power, he went out of his way to make himself agreeable to Rocard and his wife, who had never previously been invited to such an occasion. The Prime Minister remembered Chirac’s parting words to him when he had taken over three years earlier: ‘Beware of Mitterrand when he smiles. It means there is a dagger in his hand.’ Five days later, after the weekly Cabinet meeting, the Elysée announced that Cresson would take over as Prime Minister.
It proved a catastrophic decision.
Mitterrand was not wrong in thinking that the government needed a kick-start and that the time to do it was when his popularity as President was at a peak following the Gulf War. The Socialist Party was in the doldrums and, with Rocard on the way out, the government often seemed to be sleepwalking. But Édith Cresson, for all her verve and dynamism, was not the person to turn that around.
At the Elysée, Mitterrand’s advisers were appalled. Most found her uncultured, brash and incompetent. Attali summed up the prevailing sentiment. The President, he wrote, had interpreted as a will to reform what was in fact Cresson’s ‘taste for novelty’. He had confused ‘straight talking with boldness, disdain for others wit
h freedom of judgement and an appearance of decision with decisiveness’. In part, that reflected the sour grapes of a predominantly male establishment mortified that ‘Édith’ had been considered a better choice than any of them. In part it was the frisson of a Latin country confronted with a woman who had dared to break the political glass ceiling. One young right-wing MP compared her to Louis XV’s mistress, the marquise de Pompadour, an oblique reference to an affair Cresson had with Mitterrand in the 1960s. Rocard’s Chief of Staff, Michel Huchon, nicknamed her Calamity Jane.
Public opinion was initially more positive. Seventy-seven per cent of those questioned said they were pleased that Mitterrand had named her.
But the President then repeated the same error that he had made with Rocard.
Cresson had wanted to replace the Socialist Party ‘elephants’ in the government – Bérégovoy at the Finance Ministry, Charasse at Budget, Jospin at Education, Joxe at Defence – with new faces so as to have her hands free to make the ‘new start’ Mitterrand wanted. He refused. The ‘elephants’ were furious that she had tried to get rid of them. As a result she had been fatally weakened even before she began. To add to her troubles, unlike her predecessors, she lacked the backing of a party faction. Mitterrand said afterwards it was one of the reasons he had chosen her. Her independence was ‘a necessary virtue for the difficult period for which she was destined. She was not accountable to anyone except me.’ But that was not enough to enable her to succeed. Instead of ‘giving her the means to carry out her policy’, Attali wrote later, ‘he put her down like a cherry on top of the cake’.
Part of the damage that followed was self-inflicted. Cresson’s outspokenness, disparaging the Japanese for ‘working away like ants’ and British men as ‘mainly homosexuals’, made the French smile but also cringe.