by Philip Short
That winter Gubler, who had been Mitterrand’s doctor for twenty-five years, was replaced. Amid the intrigues and rivalries of the President’s court, Gubler’s frank assessments of his condition were not what he wanted to hear. Jean-Pierre Tarot, who succeeded him, had helped several of Mitterrand’s friends, likewise stricken with cancer, through the last months of their lives, and was as discreet as Gubler had been flamboyant. Until his arrival, Mitterrand had adamantly rejected painkillers. Anne Lauvergeon thought it was partly ‘a peasant attitude, regarding drugs as poison’ and partly his Christian upbringing which led him to equate pain with an act of redemption. Tarot was able to persuade him to take carefully dosed injections of morphine.
The four months from August to November, when Mitterrand was physically weakest, coincided with a political onslaught against him of rare violence, dredged up out of the turpitudes of French behaviour during the Second World War.
The previous year, Pierre Péan, a French investigative journalist, had asked him to cooperate on a book about his life in the 1930s and ’40s, covering his time at Vichy and in the Resistance. The President had agreed. At the end of August 1994, six weeks after the operation, Péan’s book, Une jeunesse française (‘A French Youth’), was published with a photograph of Mitterrand and Pétain on the cover – the same photograph that de Gaulle had refused to use against him in the 1965 election campaign. It was a scrupulously balanced account of a deeply troubled period, describing the conflicting wartime pressures to which young men of Mitterrand’s generation had been subjected. But that was not how the press and the political class received it. All the old accusations from the 1950s and ’60s roared back into life: Mitterrand had been a member of the Cagoule; he had frequented the extreme Right; he was anti-Semitic; he had been at Vichy and was therefore a collaborator; Pétain himself had awarded him the francisque. This time it was not the Right but the Left that was up in arms. Many of the comments showed the ignorance of the younger generation of French politicians about a time which none had experienced and most preferred to view through the comforting prism of Gaullist myth. But another factor was also at work. The ageing monarch was enfeebled and nearing the end of his reign. The revelation of his supposed perfidy was the perfect opportunity for the Socialists to turn the page, putting Mitterrand behind them and making a new virginity for themselves as the champions of political morality.
The firestorm that erupted over Péan’s book showed how much the memory of collaboration in France remained an open wound.
Two issues, in particular, fuelled the attacks.
Since September 1984, when Mitterrand and Kohl had sealed the Franco-German reconciliation at Verdun, the President had each year sent a wreath to be laid at Pétain’s tomb on the Île d’Yeu off the coast of Brittany. De Gaulle, Pompidou and Giscard had done the same, though less regularly. To Mitterrand, it was not just a matter of honouring the hero of the First World War but of trying to reconcile the two halves of France: those who had supported Pétain and those who had fought with de Gaulle. As he would learn to his cost, that was wildly premature. In July 1992, the President attended a memorial ceremony on the 50th anniversary of the round-up by French police of 13,000 Jews for deportation to Auschwitz. As he rose to speak he was greeted with boos and whistles. The Justice Minister, Robert Badinter, whose father had died in the gas chambers in Poland, berated the crowd: ‘You make me ashamed. Shut up, or leave this place of sorrow! You dishonour the cause you think you serve.’ The protests were against Mitterrand’s refusal to apologise publicly for the anti-Semitism of the Vichy regime. Like de Gaulle, he argued that Pétain’s government had usurped the powers of the French State, and those who had spent the war fighting against it could not now be expected to accept responsibility for its misdeeds. To his Jewish critics, that amounted to defending Pétain’s policies, the proof being the wreath laid each year at his tomb.
The following year the wreath-laying ended. Emotions were still too raw. But Mitterrand drew the line at an apology. There was no question, he said, of ‘France going down on its knees . . . and apologising for Vichy’s crimes. I tell you solemnly, I will never accept that because it is wrong.’fn2
The other neuralgic issue awakened by Péan’s book was Mitterrand’s relationship with René Bousquet, the Vichy police chief responsible for the round-up.
Until the late 1970s, Bousquet had been a respected member of the Paris establishment. He had been cleared by the Special Court, amnestied by René Coty, and his Légion d’honneur had been restored. His circle of friends included men like Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Edgar Faure, Pierre Mendès France and Henri Queuille, a representative selection of the great and the good. As well as helping to run the Banque d’Indochine, he was a board member of the French airline, UTA, chaired by Antoine Veil, whose wife, Simone, an Auschwitz survivor and prominent member of the French Jewish community, was Giscard’s Health Minister. As such he was a frequent guest at the Veils’ table. Attali claimed to have been at a lunch in 1977, attended by Bousquet as well as Henri Frenay and other former leaders of the Resistance, at which Mitterrand said: ‘Without him, none of us would be here today’. Not everyone was won over. Roland Dumas, to whom Mitterrand introduced Bousquet in 1968, saying he was ‘a very decent fellow’, found him ‘Odious! Arrogant!’ But Mitterrand liked him, appreciated his wit and respected his intellect. ‘Had it not been for the war,’ he told Dumas, ‘he would have been a minister, maybe Prime Minister.’
In 1978, the façade of respectability began to crack. The former Commissioner for Jewish Affairs at Vichy, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, who had been living in Spain since the war under the protection of one of Franco’s generals, gave an interview to l’Express in which he accused Bousquet of having been in charge of the Jewish deportations. The Veils refused to see him again and he was removed from the UTA board. Afterwards a Jewish researcher, Serge Klarsfeld, found further evidence of Bousquet’s involvement in the persecution of Jews. Mitterrand then also broke off their relations. Finally, in 1989, a Jewish deportees’ association initiated court proceedings against him for crimes against humanity.
Political opinion was divided. Simone Veil and Chaban-Delmas, among others, thought that a trial would merely reopen old wounds. So did Mitterrand. In February 1990, he wrote that he was ‘extremely reticent’ about letting the case go forward. ‘Things that happened nearly half a century ago, no matter how tragic they were, should not be stirred up again today . . . The great events which have torn apart our country have always been followed by amnesties or a necessary forgetfulness, for a nation cannot keep on simmering its resentments.’
In this, Mitterrand followed de Gaulle. To both men, reconciliation was more important than retribution. Not only after the Second World War but also after the war in Algeria. In 1982, over howls of protest from the Socialist Party, the President had insisted on an amnesty for the former leaders of the OAS, Salan and Jouhaud, and six other generals who had participated in the attempted putsch in 1958. ‘We must know how to forgive,’ he had told Pierre Joxe. ‘It is time to close the Algerian chapter. [They] have the right to have the French flag on their coffins.’
He had made an exception for Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo chief of Lyon, whom US intelligence had helped to escape to South America after the war in order to use his ‘anti-communist expertise’. Barbie had been arrested in January 1983 in Bolivia, which offered to extradite him to France. Mitterrand at first hesitated. Badinter insisted that morally there was no choice. ‘In the name of what would we refuse this offer?’ he asked, ‘and so grant Barbie an unjustifiable impunity.’ Mitterrand was persuaded. Barbie, after all, was not French. But the Gestapo chief’s conviction and sentence of life imprisonment for crimes against humanity in 1987 broke a decades-long taboo on war crimes trials in France. Two years later Paul Touvier, a leader of the pro-Nazi Milice, who had been protected for years by the Catholic Church, was arrested and became the first Frenchman to be convicted of crimes against humanity.
Bousquet never stood trial. He was shot dead in the doorway of his home in 1993 by an unstable young man who apparently wanted to use the case to win publicity for himself. But Maurice Papon, the Paris police chief under de Gaulle and afterwards a minister under Giscard, was later imprisoned for his role in the deportation to death camps of some 1,500 Jews from the area around Bordeaux.
Apart from Barbie, all these men were in their eighties. That alone made Mitterrand reluctant. ‘I have no sympathy for Touvier,’ he said. ‘[But at that age] it’s juridically absurd . . . I call that hounding people . . . They are more relentless now than fifty years ago. We were the ones who suffered and perhaps that’s why we were not as harsh.’ He had a point. ‘Men are neither black nor white, they are grey,’ he said. The most unforgiving were those who came after, unable to accept that an idealised past should have been sullied by the weakness of their forebears. ‘You’re too young,’ he told the journalists who questioned him. ‘You can’t understand because you didn’t live in that time. It belongs to those who lived it.’
Ten days after the publication of Péan’s book, Mitterrand decided that the fallout was such that he would have to intervene directly. He agreed to a live discussion on television on Monday, September 12 1994, after the evening news. That day, Anne Lauvergeon remembered, ‘he was at his worst, lying in bed, barely able to speak . . . He had a nosebleed caused by the chemotherapy. The doctors wanted him [to cancel], fearing that his nose would start bleeding again on camera.’
Few of those who watched the broadcast were unmoved by the spectacle of a very ill, elderly man attempting, sometimes at the limits of coherence but with a dignity and conviction which grew stronger as the interview progressed, to convey his truth about a period of French history which fascinated and appalled his compatriots.
What he said added little in terms of fact. He misremembered the anti-Jewish legislation under Vichy, claiming that it affected only foreign Jews whereas in fact it covered French Jews as well. He stubbornly refused to condemn Bousquet, who, he said, was now dead and could not answer his accusers. He reiterated the Gaullist position that France had no reason to apologise for the crimes that Vichy had committed. But the significance of the broadcast lay elsewhere. Even though the President told his brother, Robert, next morning, that he had made a hash of it, his appearance drew a line under the affair. When Pierre de Bénouville proposed that a statement be issued by the surviving leaders of the Resistance – Passy, Rol-Tanguy, Dechartre and Chaban-Delmas among others – vouching for Mitterrand’s bona fides, he rejected the idea. ‘I don’t need anyone to defend me,’ he said. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong, I don’t have to apologise. That would be to play the other side’s game . . . These accusations are an extraordinary, immense . . . hypocrisy. In the end, nothing will remain of them.’
A few days afterwards, letters began arriving at the Elysée. Soon they came by the sackful, several hundred each day. Altogether 12,000 people from all sides of the political spectrum wrote to Mitterrand in the weeks that followed, the great majority to assure him of their support and urge him not to give up. The tide of public opinion was turning. But not yet the political class and the press. The former Defence Minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, described the President that autumn as a quarry which had been cornered and whose carcass the hunters were preparing to throw to the dogs.
As though Mitterrand’s cancer and the furore over Vichy and Bousquet were not enough, other ‘revelations’ followed.
His friendship with Patrice Pelat came back from the grave to haunt him. In 1982, Pelat had sold his company, Vibrachoc, to Alsthom, which was then State-owned, for 110 million francs, nearly twice its true value. At the end of 1993, Thierry Jean-Pierre, the magistrate whose leaks to the press about Pelat’s loan to Bérégovoy had provoked the former Prime Minister’s suicide, had given selected journalists copies of a lengthy report – in principle protected by judicial confidentiality – recounting the late businessman’s dealings. In it he charged that, on Mitterrand’s instructions, the State had overpaid Pelat as a recompense for financial favours the President had received before he came to power. The following September, when the frenzy about Bousquet was at its height, one of the magistrate’s allies, an extreme right-wing journalist named Jean Montaldo, published a polemical tract entitled Mitterrand and the Forty Thieves, which purported to show that, on this and other occasions, Mitterrand had misused State funds. Montaldo was an amusing mischief-maker and made his case by innuendo. The book was a runaway bestseller.
The mainstream press, led by Le Monde and the weekly news magazines, l’Express and Le Point, fearing to be left behind, adopted the same tone and tactics as its less reputable rivals.
One of Montaldo’s sources had been François de Grossouvre, Mazarine’s godfather, who, after many years as a wealthy, aristocratic factotum to the President, had become estranged from him. In 1994, de Grossouvre was in the throes of what in other times would have been called a nervous breakdown. Then in his 77th year, he was obsessed by his age and declining virility. His young mistress had just left him. He was torn between hatred of his former patron and an obsessive desire to be restored to favour. He had loathed Pelat, whom he had seen as a rival, and had been happy to give Montaldo, and anyone else who would listen, snippets of gossip about Pelat’s relationship with Mitterrand. On the evening of April 7, he blew out his brains with a .357 Magnum in his office at the Elysée. Before long it was rumoured that, like Bérégovoy, de Grossouvre had been murdered at Mitterrand’s behest to silence him. As in the earlier case, the supposed plot took on a life of its own.
Another lame duck came home to roost in December 1994 when court proceedings began against Christian Prouteau, who had headed the anti-terrorist cell at the Elysée in the 1980s, and Gilles Ménage, Mitterrand’s security adviser and afterwards Chief of Staff, for their role in tapping the telephones of the writer, Jean-Edern Hallier and others to protect the President’s private life. Again there were selective leaks to the press designed to cause the maximum embarrassment.
By then the object of this protection, Mitterrand’s second family, was no longer a secret. On Thursday, November 3, Paris Match published a photo-spread showing the President and his daughter leaving a restaurant together. Mitterrand had known for some weeks that the pictures existed and had sent word that he would prefer them not to appear. But the magazine’s editors told him they felt obliged to publish and he did not try to prevent them.
Afterwards it would be said that Mitterrand had organised the ‘coming out’ of Mazarine, just as he had allegedly ‘encouraged’ Péan to write about his years at Vichy, in order to clear the decks before he left power. In neither case was that true. The photographs showing the President with Mazarine were taken from 500 metres away with a high-powered telephoto lens by two paparazzi who had been awaiting an opportunity for months. Péan had approached Mitterrand to ask for his help on a book about the Vichy years, not the other way round. Nonetheless, both disclosures had a positive side. If his past were to be raked over, better that it happen now, while he was there to correct the most egregious errors, rather than after he had gone, when there would be no one to speak for him. Mazarine was ‘not enthusiastic’, he said later, and Anne, an intensely private person, ‘took it very badly’. But in the end he was not displeased. It was better for both of them, he felt, that it should come out while he was still alive.
Paris Match was widely criticised for breaking the unwritten rule that the private lives of politicians should remain private. Nicolas Sarkozy, then Balladur’s Budget Minister, who would later have his own problems with paparazzi when he became President, said the coverage was ‘lamentable’. Pasqua deplored it. Giscard regretted it. But the public was unfazed. Few were shocked that the French President should have a second, unofficial family. ‘It’s a pity I don’t have one or two more daughters in reserve,’ Mitterrand said wryly. ‘It would have helped me climb back further in the opinion polls.’
Paradoxically
, the turmoil of the previous months had also had a silver lining. It had left him exhausted but had given him something to fight against. ‘What does not kill you makes you stronger,’ he used to say to his colleagues. That autumn, he acknowledged, there had been times when he felt he would not see the end of the year. But by December the radiation treatment began to have an effect. ‘You’ve seen my new haircut?’ he asked mischievously. ‘Rather than having a few stray hairs waving about ridiculously, it would be better to . . . have it all cut off!’ Mentally he was back on form. For the first time since his operation, he invited a group of friends for a lunch of oysters, crab and roast duck in his private apartments. Physically he was still extremely weak. When he had no official engagements, he worked in his bedroom in a specially made reclining chair which eased the pain. But the months when he had been at rock bottom were behind him.
On March 30 1995, a Thursday, seven weeks before his presidency was to end, Mitterrand inaugurated the new National Library which would bear his name. All French Presidents have tried to put their stamp on the architecture of Paris: de Gaulle began construction of the city’s ring road, the périphérique, and decreed the removal to the suburbs of its ‘belly’, the food market at Les Halles; Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano were commissioned to build the ‘Pompidou Centre’ nearby; Giscard transformed the Gare d’Orsay railway station into a museum of nineteenth-century art. Leaving a legacy in stone was part of a monarchical tradition which went back to Louis XIV, who had built a palace at Versailles to perpetuate his glory as Sun King, and beyond that to the sovereigns of medieval times. But Mitterrand did more than any of his immediate predecessors, changing the face of Paris as no one else had done since Napoleon III ordered Baron Haussmann to build the majestic boulevards through which the life of the city runs today.
Fittingly, in view of the President’s love of literature, the library, built in an abandoned industrial zone in the south of Paris, the French equivalent of London’s Canary Wharf, was the last major architectural undertaking of his fourteen years in power. Spread out over six hectares between four glass towers, shaped like half-open books, the reading rooms are disposed about a subterranean cloister, replicating in minimalist, late twentieth-century fashion the ambulatory of a medieval monastery. Like the Grand Louvre, the world’s biggest museum, with its classical glass pyramid, designed by the Chinese-American architect, I.M. Pei, it was one of his more successful projects. Not all Mitterrand’s forays into bricks and mortar would work out so well. The opera house in the Place de la Bastille, the site of the French Revolution, conceived as a way to make available to the masses classical music, opera and ballet, was technically at the summit of its art but aesthetically a disaster, resembling an enormous public lavatory. Nonetheless, to Mitterrand they were all essential parts of the heritage that he left behind. ‘I appreciate architecture more than music,’ he wrote. ‘For me it is the first of the arts.’