Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  Anne Lamouche introduced me to Danielle, with whom I spent many hours, in Paris and at Latche, and whom I found, at the end of her life, at peace with herself and reconciled to the extraordinary roller-coaster ride on which her impossible husband had led her. Mitterrand’s niece by marriage, Anne-Marie, offered a characteristically idiosyncratic view of her adopted family, while her husband, Olivier, persuaded his uncle, Jacques, then the last of the four Mitterrand brothers still living, to break his long silence and deliver some choice comments on the misdeeds of his sibling. Olivier’s mother, Édith Cahier – Robert Mitterrand’s first wife – and her husband, Jacques Maroselli – also provided instructive insights.

  Not all are cited here: a book is only as good as the parts that are left out. But all helped to fashion the portrait of a complex, puzzling, exasperating and highly important European leader.

  So did Mitterrand himself, whom I met from time to time at the Elysée during his years in power and whom I found, as did many others, intimidating – a trait which he shared with de Gaulle – subtle, stealthy, artful and determined. Many of his contemporaries whom I interviewed in the 1980s also shed light on his character, among them his friend, Georges Beauchamp; his colleagues, Robert Badinter, Claude Cheysson, Edith Cresson, Roland Dumas, Laurent Fabius, Lionel Jospin and Pierre Joxe; his bête noire, Michel Rocard; and his principal right-wing opponents, Raymond Barre, Jacques Chirac and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing – not to mention Jean-Marie Le Pen.

  My thanks are due, also, to Hubert Védrine; Gilles Ménage and Georges Saunier of the Institut François Mitterrand; to Pascal Genest and Zénaide Romaneix of the French National Archives; and to Dominique Bertinotti, for their help in making available documentation from Mitterrand’s time as President and, in the case of the Institut, from his private papers.

  It would be vain, however, for a writer to pretend that a book depends only on himself and his sources. This book, like my earlier forays, owes much to Jack Macrae in New York, to my agents, Veronique Baxter and Emma Sweeney, and to Jacqueline Korn in London. My editor at The Bodley Head, Will Sulkin, nurtured the project through the six years it has taken to bring to fruition and, in the final months, used his blue pencil to good effect, skewering imprecise arguments and infelicities in the text. Stuart Williams and Katherine Ailes showed a merciful understanding of repeatedly missed deadlines, while Beth Humphries waged war on delinquent syntax and punctuation. I am in their debt.

  Paris – La Garde Freinet, June 30 2013

  Acronyms

  ASALA L’Armée secrète arménienne de libération de l’Arménie (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia) was founded in Beirut in 1975 by members of the Armenian diaspora, led by Hagop Hagopian, to press Turkey to recognise the Armenian genocide. By 1988, when Hagopian was assassinated in Athens, it had carried out more than 80 attacks, mainly against Turkish targets, killing 46 people. Its last known actions were in the 1990s.

  BCRA Le Bureau Central de Renseignement et d’Action (Central Bureau of Intelligence and Operations) was the Gaullist intelligence service, created in London in July 1940 and headed by André Dewavrin, better known as Colonel Passy. In November 1943, it was merged with the Giraudist special services to become the Bureau de Renseignement et d’Action de Londres (BRAL) and placed under the authority of Jacques Soustelle.

  CERES Le Centre d’études, de recherches et d’éducation socialiste (Socialist Education, Study and Research Centre) was founded by Jean-Pierre Chevènement and others in 1966 as a left-wing pressure group. Unlike the Militant tendency in the British Labour Party – which in some ways it resembled – CERES formed part of the mainstream of the French Socialist Party until 1991, when it broke away in protest against French participation in the coalition against Iraq.

  CFDT La Confédération française démocratique du travail (French Democratic Confederation of Labour) is the country’s main non-communist trade union organisation. Unlike the Trades Union Congress in Britain, it has no organic link to any political party.

  CGT La Confédération générale de travail (General Labour Confederation), founded in 1895, is the largest French trade union movement, historically dependent upon and directed by the French Communist Party.

  CHAN Centre Historique des Archives Nationales (French National Archives).

  CNPG Le Comité national des prisonniers de guerre (National Committee of Prisoners of War) was a PoW movement, controlled by the French Communist Party, founded in the autumn of 1943. Nine months later it became part of the MNPGD.

  COCOM The Western Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls was set up in the 1940s after the onset of the Cold War to prevent the sale of military or dual-use technologies to communist countries. It ceased to operate in 1994.

  CSCE The Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe approved the Helsinki accords on East–West cooperation in 1975. Renamed the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), it now has 57 member states. Not to be confused with the Commission of the same name, which is an emanation of the United States Congress.

  CSPPA Le Comité de soutien avec les prisonniers politiques arabes et du Proche-Orient (Support Committee for Arab and Middle Eastern Political Prisoners) waged a terrorist campaign in France from 1986 to 1987 on instructions from Teheran to try to obtain the release of Anis Naccache and four accomplices, who had attempted to assassinate the former Iranian Prime Minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, in Paris.

  DGSE La Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (General Directorate of External Security) is the French equivalent of the CIA and MI6 and answers to the Ministry of Defence. Before 1982 it was known as the SDECE (Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage).

  DST La Direction de la surveillance du territoire (Directorate for Territorial Surveillance) is under the Interior Ministry and is tasked with counter-espionage within France. Its role is similar to that of the FBI and MI5.

  EMS The European Monetary System, created in 1979, had at its core an exchange rate mechanism (ERM) which allowed member states’ national currencies to fluctuate against a weighted average by a maximum of 2.25 (later 15) per cent. After 1998 it was superseded by the Eurozone.

  ETA Euskadi ta askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Freedom) is a Basque separatist organisation, formed under Franco’s dictatorship in 1958, which was responsible for more than 800 deaths in terrorist attacks in Spain. In October 2011 it announced that it was abandoning armed struggle.

  EUREKA The European Research Coordination Agency was established in 1985 on the initiative of Mitterrand and Kohl to ensure European independence in research and development. It has 40 members, including all EU member states.

  FARL Les Fractions armées révolutionnaires libanaises (Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Fractions), a small left-wing urban guerrilla group formed by Maronite Christians from northern Lebanon, carried out a series of terrorist attacks against Israeli and American diplomats in France in the early 1980s. After the arrest of its leader, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987, its activities largely ceased. Abdallah was freed, over American objections, in March 2013.

  FGDS La Fédération de la gauche démocrate et socialiste (Federation of the Democratic Socialist Left) was founded in 1965 to unite the non-communist Left ahead of that year’s presidential election. It played a key role in the success of left-wing candidates in the 1967 parliamentary elections but broke up a year later because of rivalry among its leaders.

  FLN Le Front de libération nationale (National Liberation Front) launched the Algerian war of independence in October 1954 and later, under Ahmed Ben Bella, became Algeria’s ruling party, remaining the country’s dominant political force until a military coup in 1992.

  FLNKS Le Front de libération nationale kanak et socialiste (Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front) was founded in 1984 by Jean-Marie Tjibaou to bring together the Kanak nationalist parties in a single movement for New Caledonian independence. Followin
g the negotiation of a power-sharing arrangement between the FLNKS and the main French settlers’ party, the two communities agreed that, for the time being, the islands should remain French.

  FNPG La Fédération nationale de prisonniers de guerre (National Federation of Prisoners of War) was created in 1945 by a merger of the MNPGD and the prisoners’ mutual aid centres set up by the Vichy administration.

  GIGN La groupe d’intervention de la Gendarmerie nationale is an elite counter-terrorist force of the French police which intervenes in hijackings and hostage-taking. Its counterparts elsewhere include the Delta Force in the United States, the SAS in Britain and the German KSK.

  GSPR Le Groupe de sécurité de la présidence de la République (Presidential Security Group) is a police unit, analogous to the US Secret Service, charged with the protection of the French President and his family.

  IFM Institut François Mitterrand.

  MNPGD Le Mouvement nationale de prisonniers de guerre et déportés (National Movement of Prisoners of War and Deportees) resulted from a merger of the communist CNPG; Mitterrand’s movement, the RNPG; and Michel Cailliau’s MRPGD. It was subsumed into the FNPG a year later.

  MRPGD Le Mouvement de résistance de prisonniers de guerre et déportés (Resistance Movement of Prisoners of War and Deportees) was headed by Michel Cailliau, de Gaulle’s nephew and Mitterrand’s bitter rival. Also known as the ‘Charette network’, it was smaller than Mitterrand’s movement, the RNPG, with which it eventually merged.

  OAS L’Organisation de l’armée secrète (Secret Army Organisation), created in 1961 by French ultra-nationalists determined to prevent Algerian independence, made more than a dozen attempts to assassinate de Gaulle and was responsible for at least 2,000 murders, mainly of Algerians. Its leaders, including Georges Bidault, Jacques Soustelle and General Raoul Salan, were amnestied in 1968.

  ORA L’Organisation de résistance de l’armée (Army Resistance Organisation) was formed in January 1943 after the German occupation of southern France. Initially loyal to General Giraud, it later joined forces with its Gaullist counterpart, the Armée secrète, to become the backbone of the Forces françaises de l’intérieur, the Gaullist resistance army in France.

  PSA Le Parti Socialiste Autonome (Autonomous Socialist Party) broke away in 1958 from the SFIO, as the Socialist Party was then called, in protest against its support for the return of General de Gaulle. Two years later it merged with several other small left-wing groups to form the PSU.

  PSU Le Parti Socialiste Unifié (Unified Socialist Party), whose leading members included at different times Charles Hernu, Gilles Martinet, Michel Rocard and Alain Savary, represented an idealistic, intellectual, anti-colonial strain of the French Left, advocating worker self-management and a revolution in education. After Mitterrand won control of the Socialist Party in 1971, the PSU’s influence declined. It was dissolved in 1990.

  RDA Le Rassemblement démocratique africain (African Democratic Rally) was founded in 1946 by Félix Houphouet-Boigny, later President of the Ivory Coast. Originally a pan-African movement, bringing together nationalist parties in ten French African colonies, its raison d’être disappeared after 1958, when the idea of a pan-African federation was abandoned in favour of national independence.

  RNPG Le Rassemblement national de prisonniers de guerre (National Rally of Prisoners of War), also known as Pin’–Mitt’, was a resistance movement founded by Mitterrand, Maurice Pinot and others who had worked for the Vichy administration in 1942.

  RPF Le Rassemblement du peuple français (Rally of the French People) was founded by de Gaulle in 1947. It was anti-communist and opposed to the institutions of the Fourth Republic. After initially attracting a wide following, it split and became inactive after 1954.

  RPF The Rwandan Patriotic Front was formed in 1987 by Tutsi exiles in Uganda, led by Paul Kagame, now Rwanda’s President. It won power seven years later during the Rwandan genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred by Hutu extremists. Today it plays a key role in Kagame’s ruling coalition.

  RPR Le Rassemblement pour la république (Rally for the Republic), established by Jacques Chirac in December 1976 as a vehicle for his political ambitions, was the last in a long line of political parties, stretching back to the RPF, which claimed to uphold the banner of Gaullism. In 2002 it merged with other Centre-Right and right-wing parties to form the Union for a Presidential Majority (UMP), afterwards renamed the Union for a Popular Movement, now the country’s main right-wing political force.

  SALT The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the United States and the Soviet Union, launched in 1969, led in the 1990s to the conclusion of bilateral treaties cutting back the American and Russian nuclear arsenals.

  SDI The Strategic Defence Initiative, popularly known as ‘Star Wars’, unveiled by President Reagan in March 1983, proposed using land- and space-based laser weapons to create an anti-missile shield protecting the United States from nuclear attack. By 1987 the administration had been forced to recognise that the scheme was not a practical proposition.

  SOE Britain’s Special Operations Executive, set up by Churchill in 1940 to conduct espionage, reconnaissance and sabotage in German-occupied Europe.

  Super-NAP A branch of the resistance movement, Noyautage des Administrations Publiques (Infiltration of the Public Administration), which recruited informants in the Vichy government. Super-NAP was charged with introducing resistance agents into the top levels of the civil service.

  UDF L’Union pour la démocratie française (Union for French Democracy) was created in 1978 as an umbrella movement for a number of centrist and Centre-Right parties which supported the then President, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. As French politics became increasingly polarised after the 1990s, the majority of its members joined the neo-Gaullist UMP In 2007, what remained of the movement was absorbed into the MoDem (Democratic Movement) led by François Bayrou.

  UDSR L’Union démocratique et socialiste de la Résistance (Democratic Socialist Union of the Resistance) was founded after the war as a broad-church centre-left party for ex-members of the non-communist Resistance. Mitterrand became its President in 1953. It participated in almost every government under the Fourth Republic and was dissolved in 1964. UNPROFOR The United Nations Protection Force, charged with peacekeeping in Croatia and Bosnia from 1992 to 1996.

  Bibliography and Sources

  In France, more than 500 books have been published wholly or partly about François Mitterrand – a larger number than for any other historical figure except Charles de Gaulle. In English, the available literature can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand: there are two scholarly political biographies, both by American academics – Mitterrand, by Wayne Northcutt of Niagara University, New York (Holmes and Meier, 1992) and François Mitterrand: The Last French President, by Ronald Tiersky of Amherst College (St Martin’s Press, 2000) – and a small number of monographs on policy. In addition, Catherine Nay’s French-language biography, Le noir et le rouge, which is excellent on Mitterrand’s early years but ends with his accession to the presidency in 1981, has been translated as The Black and the Red: François Mitterrand, the Story of an Ambition (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), as have two of Mitterrand’s own books: La paille et le grain, with a preface by his friend, William Styron, published under the title, The Wheat and the Chaff (Seaver Books, New York, 1982); and Mémoire à deux voix, with Elie Wiesel, which appeared in America as Memoir in Two Voices (Little, Brown, 1996). Franz-Olivier Giesbert’s sensitive account of Mitterrand’s meditations on death, Le vieil homme et la mort, is also available in English under the title Dying without God (Arcade Publishing, 1998). But no substantial new work has appeared for almost fifteen years, which is alone sufficient reason to look again at a major world leader, and an unusually complicated human being, whom the passage of time now allows us to see more clearly than was the case when he lived.

  Since almost all the sources of information about Mitterr
and are in French, I have resisted – with some help from my publishers, who understand book economics infinitely better than I do – the temptation to give an exhaustive list of references which to most readers would be inaccessible. The notes which follow are therefore limited to explanatory material, intended to elaborate on the text or to clarify controversial issues, and to sources for extracts cited in extenso. For those requiring more detailed references, a complete list of sources and accompanying notes is available on request by email from mitterrandbiography@free.fr.

  That said, it may be helpful to give a brief survey of the published materials, as well as archival and other resources, on which I have relied. There are two major French-language biographies of Mitterrand, which tower over all the rest: Giesbert’s Mitterrand: une vie (Seuil, 1996) and Jean Lacouture’s two-volume Mitterrand: une histoire de Français (Seuil 1998). Both authors had extensive interviews with Mitterrand – in Giesbert’s case stretching back over twenty years – as well as with his contemporaries, and had privileged access to his personal papers. Serge July’s Les années Mitterrand (Grasset, 1986) also provides useful insights, while Roland Cayrol’s François Mitterrand, 1945-1967 (Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1967), the earliest biographical study, offers an interesting portrait of Mitterrand at a time when his national destiny was not yet assured.