Mitterrand

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Mitterrand Page 71

by Philip Short


  Attali felt that in his last years, architecture was the only thing, apart from Europe, which held his interest. The two had coalesced in a project which had a historical importance beyond all the rest combined: the Channel Tunnel linking France to Britain. It had been under discussion for almost 200 years, had been agreed between Mitterrand and Thatcher in 1986 and was opened by the French President and the Queen in 1994. For a British Prime Minister steadfastly opposed to European integration it might seem an odd decision. But it was in keeping with the two countries’ history. In the 1960s, de Gaulle, who was even more opposed than Thatcher to Britain’s presence in Europe, had joined Macmillan in launching the Anglo-French supersonic jet, Concorde. For both, bilateral amity between Britain and France – the Entente Cordiale – was to be encouraged. Britain’s role in Europe was not. To Mitterrand, for whom Europe was primordial, that was a historical reality to be reckoned with. If the British were unwilling to join the continentals in a Europe-wide adventure, at least with France they could make progress as a twosome.

  But by the spring of 1995, the time for laying down legacies was drawing to a close. The presidential election campaign was already under way. For the first time, Mitterrand was a spectator. In a few weeks’ time it would be someone else’s responsibility to make a contribution, literally and metaphorically, to the architecture of France and Europe.

  Chirac, on Mitterrand’s advice, had declared his candidature early. Balladur, who had initially insisted that he had no intention of standing, waited until mid-January, two weeks after Jospin. The opinion polls gave the Prime Minister such a comfortable lead that Le Monde reported that most of the electorate thought the race was already decided. But then a scandal developed over what appeared to be an attempt by Balladur’s office to embroil one of Chirac’s allies in corruption allegations. By the end of February, the positions had been reversed. Chirac was ahead in the polls and the Prime Minister was trying desperately to catch up. Mitterrand, like everyone else, was surprised. But he recognised Balladur’s problem. To win a presidential election you had to make people dream. Balladur, like Raymond Barre, was unable to do that.

  On Sunday, April 23, when the results of the first round came in, Jospin was in the lead with 23.3 per cent and Chirac second with 20.8. The Prime Minister, in third place with 18.5 per cent, was eliminated.

  The balance was weighted in Chirac’s favour. As well as Balladur’s followers, he could count on the support of a good part of the 15 per cent of the electorate which had voted for the National Front candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Jospin refused Mitterrand’s offer to campaign on his behalf. ‘I did not want to be the shadow cast by someone else. I wanted to be a candidate off my own bat, not the son or the lieutenant of François Mitterrand,’ he said. When Jospin’s colleagues demurred, he dug in his heels. ‘You don’t campaign looking into the rear-view mirror,’ he told an interviewer, ‘but with the headlights focussed on the future.’ It was not very elegant. On Sunday, May 7, Chirac was elected with 52.6 per cent of the vote.

  Ten days later the handover took place. As a gesture to his successor, Mitterrand had had his office restored to the same state, with the same furniture, as when General de Gaulle had occupied it, twenty-five years earlier. He handed Chirac the nuclear codes, asked him to find posts for two of his aides, as Giscard had done almost fourteen years earlier, and recommended to his care the pair of mallards which had taken up residence in the Elysée gardens. Shortly after midday, Mitterrand left the palace for the last time. Since the French Revolution, only King Louis-Philippe and the Emperor Napoleon III had held power for longer.

  * * *

  fn1 In June 1995, shortly after his election to the presidency, Chirac announced that a final series of six tests would nonetheless be carried out at Mururoa before the switch to laboratory simulations. The decision was symbolic. The Right expected it, and having argued so strongly that tests were essential, to have failed to follow through would have been an embarrassment. Early in 1996, the tests were completed. Later that year all five nuclear powers signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Since then only India and Pakistan (in 1998) and North Korea (in 2006, 2009, 2012 and 2013) have tested nuclear warheads.

  fn2 In 1995 Jacques Chirac, who had been a child during the war, offered the apology the Jewish community was waiting for. Raymond Barre, who supported Mitterrand’s position, probably came closest to the truth when he said that while the French people had been guilty, the Republic – in other words, France as a country – had not. Had Mitterrand found those words, the issue would have been defused. But, as Barre noted, that was ‘a question of generations’.

  16

  The Testament

  FRANÇOIS MITTERRAND RETIRED not to the house which he shared with Danielle in the rue de Bièvre but to a nondescript official apartment put at his disposal by the State, on the Left Bank of the Seine in the rue Frédéric Le Play, named after a nineteenth-century economist who had studied the living conditions of the European working class. His visitors were often surprised that he chose such a ‘clinical, impersonal’ place. But it was a stone’s throw from the Champ de Mars, the formal gardens which stretch out southwards for almost half a mile from the Eiffel Tower, where he could walk Baltique, the black Labrador bitch who was his inseparable companion, and it meant that Anne could continue living with him, which would have been difficult had they remained at the quai Branly and impossible at the rue de Bièvre. It was not ‘home’, however, as their other apartment had been. It was the place in which he had chosen to die.

  The entrance hall was laid out like a doctor’s waiting room with black leather settees and a huge charcoal portrait of Mitterrand on one wall. On either side of the long white corridor which led from it were rooms occupied by his bodyguards and a small secretariat. Further on lay his private office, furnished as it had been at the Elysée, with a designer writing table in pale blue lacquered metal and leather and the specially made reclining chair where he could lie and work. Beyond, on the other side of a double door, were the living quarters. Anne was away at work during the day, returning discreetly in the evening through the service entrance in order not to draw attention.

  Life after the presidency revolved around lunch with friends – often at a local restaurant, D’Chez Eux, behind the École Militaire, which specialises in the hearty fare of the south-west and reminded him of his childhood – followed by an hour’s walk in the gardens or along the banks of the Seine. At the end of May, he fell, opening a cut above his eye, the first of many such mishaps, often occasioned by Baltique – ‘the worst brought up dog in France’ – whose displays of affection made him lose his balance. In June he went to Cluny, where, on Whit Sunday, he attempted the annual ascent of the escarpment of Solutré. This year he did not make it. He had just had a new catheter and was still suffering from its insertion. But trying to live normally – to do the things he had always done – was a way to dominate his cancer. And until the end of the summer, Mitterrand seemed to be succeeding. ‘Death?’ he said to Pierre Favier. ‘You need to think about it and get ready for it every day . . . But it’s not death that frightens me; it’s not living any more.’

  Quietly he began to make his farewells. A last visit to the Nièvre to vote in the municipal elections. A trip to Venice with Anne, to stay with an old friend, the Slovenian painter, Zoran Mušić, and his wife, Ida Barbarigo, in their palatial apartment beside the Grand Canal. In August, after giving Dr Tarot the slip, a last surreptitious journey with Anne to Touvent.

  But Mitterrand’s principal goal, in the months that remained, was to burnish the image he would leave behind. He had made a first attempt the previous winter with the Nobel laureate, Elie Wiesel, in a book of conversations entitled Mémoire à deux voix (‘Memoir for Two Voices’), published shortly before he left office. His aim, he said, was to use the written word ‘to give a sense of order to one’s life’. But the ‘Memoir’ became mired in the controversy about René Bousquet. Privately at first and then pu
blicly Wiesel taxed the former President with anti-Semitism. Mitterrand, he alleged, ‘never mentioned Vichy. Today I can’t stop asking myself: why?’ Afterwards, in his autobiography, the Holocaust survivor accused his old friend of ‘refusing to investigate the Nazi past of certain Frenchmen’, of ‘links with former Cagoulards and other collaborators’, of ‘secretly’ having had a wreath laid at Pétain’s tomb – even, supreme malice, of ‘making it a habit to surround himself with Jews’ – to insinuate, without ever accusing him directly, that he was and had always been a closet anti-Semite. Such an amalgam of half-truths, untruths and innuendo said more about Wiesel and those for whom he was the self-appointed spokesman than about Mitterrand or France. But above all it showed the difficulty of discussing dispassionately, even fifty years after the event, what remained – and remains – an emotionally uncontrollable issue.

  Despite the squabble with his co-author, Memoire à deux voix was an illuminating book. But it was not the record Mitterrand wished to leave behind. He decided to try again with a young left-wing journalist named Georges-Marc Benamou, who also happened to be Jewish. This time he wanted a book structured around the continuities and contrasts between himself and de Gaulle. But as the months passed, the same arguments over Bousquet and Vichy resurfaced. Mitterrand was appalled by what he saw as the younger man’s simplistic view of history. ‘He asks questions an ape wouldn’t ask,’ he complained, ‘and he knows nothing about Gaullism.’ Benamou was Wiesel bis minus the literary talent.1 The book which resulted, entitled Mémoires interrompus (‘Interrupted Memoirs’) and completed in December, also disappointed him. Ever the perfectionist, Mitterrand had reworked the original material again and again, sometimes rewriting the same answer as many as five times. But he was too ill to correct it as he would have wished and almost a third of the manuscript had to be scrapped because he was too weary to go through it.

  Mémoires interrompus was a testament in the sense that it offered a considered account of some of the most contentious periods of his life. But he had wanted something else – a reflective coda to the Coup d’état permanent as a verdict on the unspoken rivalry with his giant predecessor which had fired the whole of his political career. That had been beyond Benamou’s powers and, by the closing months of 1995, it was beyond Mitterrand’s too.

  Mitterrand also worked that summer on a book about Germany. On May 8, the day after Chirac’s election, he had travelled to Berlin to commemorate the 50th anniversary of VE Day. Abandoning his prepared text, he spoke of German history being ‘indissolubly linked to France [in a] strange, cruel, beautiful and powerful adventure’ and of Europe being built on ‘ruins, disasters and death’. He went on:

  Are we celebrating a defeat? Or is it a victory? And if so, what victory? No doubt it is the victory of freedom over oppression. But to my eyes it is above all – and this is the only message I want to leave you with – a victory of Europe over itself . . .

  I did not come here to celebrate the victory in which I rejoiced for my own country in 1945. I did not come to rub in a defeat because I have known [from my own experience during the war] the strength of the German people, its virtues and its courage. The uniforms of those soldiers, who died in such great numbers, and even the ideas in their heads, matter little to me. They were brave. They accepted that they would die. In a bad cause, but to them their actions had nothing to do with that. They loved their motherland. We must reckon with that. We are making Europe and we also love our countries. Let us remain true to ourselves.2

  The speech was applauded in Germany but highly controversial in France. To suggest that uniforms – SS uniforms? – and ideas – Nazi ideas? – mattered little, even with the caveats that Mitterrand attached and in the context of European reconciliation, was going too far. As always, when challenged, he refused to retract. In Moscow, next day, he told Yeltsin that he had ‘never considered the German [soldiers] as enemies’. Like the French, they had fought because it was their duty, without asking questions about why they were fighting.

  It was essentially the same problem as over Bousquet and Vichy. Jean Daniel of Le Nouvel Observateur, who had known Mitterrand for forty years, commented that the priority he attached to reconciliation, whether within France or beyond, was out of step with an age which sought moral absolutes.3 But the issue went deeper. Half a century later, France was still unable to accept the way most of its people had behaved during the Occupation. Anything which touched on the ambiguities of those years, remembered by those who had lived through them as a time of national shame, risked triggering an excessive, irrational reaction.

  ‘I work in shades of grey,’ Mitterrand told the novelist, Jean d’Ormesson. ‘There are black threads and white threads. I weave them together and with that I make grey’.

  France did not want to be reminded of the grey in its past.

  De l’Allemagne, de la France (‘About Germany, about France’), which Mitterrand completed shortly after Mémoires, was both a hymn to Franco-German reconciliation and an attempt to justify his reticence towards German reunification. Like Mémoires, it was riddled with small errors which he was too ill to correct and included a long section on foreign reactions to his election in 1981, which had nothing to do with Germany and seemed to have been tacked on to make the volume more substantial.

  But it gave him a sense of purpose. Defending his record helped him fight against his cancer.

  The same combination of reasons prompted him to accept an invitation from George Bush to join four other retirees – himself, Gorbachev, Thatcher and the former Canadian Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney – for a conference in October at Colorado Springs on the end of the Cold War. During the summer the argument over whether or not France should apologise for Vichy’s role in the deportation of Jews in 1942 had been reignited by Lionel Jospin, who contrasted Mitterrand’s refusal with the gesture made in Poland in 1970 by Willy Brandt, who had fallen to his knees before the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto. Mitterrand had been furious. ‘There’s no comparison,’ he snapped. ‘France was not Germany, Pétain was not Hitler.’ The episode persuaded him not to pass up the opportunity to put on the record once again, this time among his peers, far from the petty quarrels which exercised the political class in France, the views on East–West relations for which he preferred to be remembered.

  Until the end of September it was not certain that his health would allow him to attend. He lunched that month with his unofficial chroniclers, Pierre Favier and Michel Martin-Roland. ‘Don’t sit too close,’ he greeted them drily, ‘I’m more radioactive than Mururoa’:

  I’m at 106 grays [the standard unit of radiation absorbed by body tissue] when the maximum is supposed to be around 60. Now the cancer is in the bones. It started at the bottom of the spinal column, then it went up into [my neck] which they treated before the summer. That burnt my gullet. [This evening] they are going to do the left shoulder. Every time they do it, it leaves you exhausted. I have difficulty standing up, I’m unsteady on my legs, I lose my balance. Up to now, each time they have managed to stop it spreading further. But if it gets into the marrow, the spinal cord, I shall be paralysed.4

  Having dealt with his clinical condition – a ritual to which all his visitors were subjected – he perked up. ‘You didn’t come to hear the groans of a dying man,’ he said, ‘so let’s talk about the things you are interested in.’ Helmut Kohl telephoned him regularly, he told them, adding with a chuckle, ‘though not as often as Arafat’. Then he launched into a searing portrait gallery of his colleagues. Michel Rocard: ‘A mistake to appoint him . . . He did nothing.’ Jacques Chirac: ‘How he used to lie to me! Today I wonder if he even realised it.’ Raymond Barre: ‘Likeable, but a loser.’ Giscard: ‘Completely old-fashioned.’ Michel Debré: ‘A mediocre person.’ Jacques Delors: ‘Zero.’ Nicolas Sarkozy: ‘A talent for biting and betraying. But that’s not enough.’

  The venom was also a ritual. He had told the writer Franz-Olivier Giesbert that Rocard was ‘just good enough to b
e a junior minister for Posts and Telegraphs, or something like that’. As for Édouard Balladur, ‘I’ve rarely met anyone worse than myself, but [can he really be] as bad as that?’ Balladur, he said, warming to his subject, was ‘such a horrible person . . . that it makes me feel I’m not so bad after all and even, relatively speaking, quite sincere. If you cut his skin with a knife, you’ll see there’s only poison underneath.’ Paul Quilès, with whom he had lunch two months later, found his judgements ‘so acerbic that I promised myself I would never repeat them’.

  Playing Jupiter, hurling lightning bolts at the mortals in the world below, consoled him in his pain. Like his meticulous descriptions of the progress of his cancer, recounted ‘vertebra by vertebra, like a general addressing his troops’, as Jean Glavany put it, it was a way to give himself the strength to continue.

 

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