Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  For the early years there are four main published sources: Mitterrand’s own reminiscences in Mémoire à deux voix, with Elie Wiesel, and Mémoires interrompus, with Georges-Marc Benamou (Odile Jacob, 1995 and 1996); the autobiography of his brother, Robert, Frère de quelqu’un (Robert Laffont, 1988); and Pierre Péan’s meticulously researched study, Une jeunesse française (Fayard, 1994), which covers Mitterrand’s life up to the end of the war. Stéphane Trano’s book, Une affaire d’amitié (l’Archipel, 2006) and Laure Adler’s l’Année des adieux (Flammarion, 1995) contain unpublished letters from Mitterrand to his best friend, Georges Dayan. Like Mitterrand: portrait total (Carrere, 1986) by Pierre Jouve and the psychoanalyst Ali Magoudi, they also contain anecdotes that he recounted about his life before he became a politician. An essential source for his relationship with Marie-Louise Terrasse is Catherine Langeais: la fiancée des Français (Fayard, 2003), written by her nephew, Jean-Marc Terrasse, which reproduces many of the letters in which Mitterrand poured out his passion for her.

  His articles in the 1930s in the Revue Montalembert and l’Echo de Paris have been preserved, as have his writings in captivity for the PoW journal, l’Ephémère, and at Vichy for France: revue de l’État Nouveau. Many, though not all, have been reprinted in the two volumes of Politique (Fayard, 1977 and 1981), which offer Mitterrand’s own selection of his work from 1938 to 1981. Among the efforts he preferred to omit were a long poem entitled Pluie amie (‘Friendly Rain’), describing life at the front during the ‘phoney war’, and an unpublished erotic novel, Plein accord (‘Full Harmony’), written when he was 23 and madly in love with Marie-Louise Terrasse.

  After the war, Mitterrand’s reflections on his experiences as a PoW and in the Resistance were published as Les Prisonniers de guerre devant la politique (Éditions du Rond Point, 1945) and Leçons des choses de la captivité (Grandes Éditions Françaises, 1947). He returned to the subject in Ma part de vérité (Fayard, 1969) and La Paille et le grain (Flammarion, 1978). With Marguérite Duras in Le bureau de poste de la rue Dupin et autres entretiens (Gallimard, 2006), he recounted the Gestapo raids which almost cost him his life in June 1944. Other key sources for the period are Jean Védrine’s Dossier PG-Rapatriés 1940-1945 (privately printed, Asnières, n.d. but 1981), a two-volume compilation of war memoirs and related documents which offers the most complete account to date of the PoW movement in France; and Christopher Lewin’s Le Retour des prisonniers de guerre français: naissance et développement de la FNPG, 1944-1952 (Sorbonne, 1986). Michel Cailliau, in Histoire du ‘M.R.P.G.D.’ (privately published, 1987), gave a fiercely hostile account of Mitterrand’s activities, to which Cailliau’s colleague in captivity, Charles Moulin, offered a corrective in Mitterrand intime (Albin Michel, 1982). Mitterrand’s articles for l’Homme libre and its successor, Libres, are also informative.

  For the Fourth Republic, from 1946 to 1958, Georgette Elgey’s monumental six-volume series, La Quatrième République (Fayard, 1993-2008, the sixth volume yet to be published) and the diaries of President Vincent Auriol (Journal du septennat, 1947-1954, Vols 1-7, Tallandier, 2003) are indispensable. Mitterrand’s career in the UDSR is described in a monograph by Eric Duhamel: L’UDSR ou la genèse de François Mitterrand (CNRS Éditions, 2007). On the colonial problem, which was then among Mitterrand’s principal concerns, his views are set out in Aux frontières de l’Union Française (Julliard, 1953) and Présence française et abandon (Plon, 1957). François Stasse (La Morale de l’Histoire, Mitterrand – Mendès France, 1943-1982, Seuil, 1994) provides a sensitive account of Mitterrand’s complex and often uneasy relationship with Pierre Mendès France, while François Malye and Benjamin Stora have explored his much-criticised attitude towards Algerian independence (François Mitterrand et la guerre d’Algérie, Calmann-Lévy, 2010). Danielle Mitterrand’s recollections appear in two books, En toutes libertés (Ramsay, 1996) and Le livre de ma mémoire (Jean-Claude Gawsewitch, 2007).

  The Observatory Affair – recently the subject of a full-length study by Patrick Lestrohan (L’Observatoire, l’affaire qui faillit emporter François Mitterrand: 16 octobre 1959, Coédition Scrineo, 2012) – can best be understood from the archival materials held by the Institut François Mitterrand, which contain not only the complete files of the investigating magistrate and the police but also Mitterrand’s handwritten notes as he tried desperately to extricate himself from the trap which his enemies had sprung.

  The years which followed were marked by the proliferation of political clubs, recounted by Jean-André Faucher in Les clubs politiques en France (Éditions John Didier, 1965), and by Mitterrand’s efforts to unify the Left, of which first-hand accounts are given by Claude Estier (Journal d’un fédéré, Fayard, 1970); Louis Mexandeau (Histoire du Parti Socialiste, Tallandier, 2005, and François Mitterrand: le militant, Cherche Midi, 2006); and Jean Poperen (L’unité de la gauche, Fayard, 1975). Contrasting perspectives are offered by Gilles Martinet (Cassandre et les tueurs, Grasset, 1986), from the standpoint of the PSU, and Etienne Fajon (L’union est un combat, Éditions Sociales, 1975), from the Communist Party. Jean-Michel Cadiot (Mitterrand et les Communistes, Ramsay, 1994) also offers useful insights. Mitterrand’s own version is given in La rose au poing and L’abeille et l’architecte (Flammarion, 1973 and 1978), in Ici et maintenant (Fayard, 1980), and in his articles for the Socialist Party journal, l’Unité, for his constituency newspaper, le Courrier de la Nièvre, and for the left-wing magazines la Nef and Dire.

  For Mitterrand’s years as President, from 1981 to 1995, two immense, and extraordinarily detailed, sources are available: the four volumes of La décennie Mitterrand (Seuil, 1990-1999) by Pierre Favier and Michel Martin-Roland, two journalists from the French news agency, AFP, who were accredited to the Elysée and won Mitterrand’s trust; and the three volumes of Verbatim (Fayard, 1993-1995) by the President’s Special Adviser, Jacques Attali. Their value for the biographer, apart from the exhaustive relation they provide of Mitterrand’s time in office, lies in the confidential documents they contain – verbatim transcripts of meetings with Reagan, Gorbachev, Thatcher and other world leaders; minutes of French Cabinet and Defence Council meetings; discussions at the G7 and at European Union summits – all of which, by law, should have remained out of public view for thirty years or, in some cases, longer.

  Favier and Martin-Roland had Mitterrand’s authorisation to publish these documents and appear to have been scrupulous in the use they made of them. Attali took a scissors-and-paste approach which led even Mitterrand to complain that he seemed ‘more concerned with the number of readers than with historical truth’. As a result, while the three volumes of Verbatim provide fascinating insights into Mitterrand’s reasoning, they cannot be relied on. In some cases, moreover, what are presented as official transcripts of conversations with foreign leaders differ significantly from the texts held by the National Archives. Therein lies the rub, for most of these transcripts, and all of the Cabinet minutes, remain officially sealed. Accordingly the only versions available are those which have been ‘leaked’ (in other words, published in violation of government regulations) and which may, or may not, be accurate.

  It is a very French problem – a double standard which allows those in privileged positions to flout the law, even if the result is to give currency to false information, just as French investigating magistrates leak the results of their investigations with impunity, even if, as in the case of Pierre Bérégovoy, the result is to drive a former Prime Minister to suicide.

  For Mitterrand’s presidential archive, there are additional complications. The sheer volume of material held by the National Archives from the fourteen years that he was in office – some 15,000 box-files occupying nearly two kilometres of shelves – is such that, at the present rate of progress, it will be another fifty years before it has all been catalogued (and until it has been catalogued, it cannot be consulted). Part of the problem is that Mitterrand’s style of rule, favouring written analysis, led to an explosion of paper
just before the advent of electronic word processing began to allow archives to be stored and searchable digitally. But over and above that, Mitterrand’s tendency to complicate further whatever was complicated already led him to introduce a double-key system for archival access. As well as authorisation from the National Archives, permission to consult presidential documents has to be obtained from Mitterrand’s nominee, Dominique Bertinotti, who worked at the Elysée as an archivist in the 1990s and has since become a Cabinet minister.

  France being France, a way was eventually found to circumvent this cumbersome process. The Institut François Mitterrand possesses copies of many of the more important presidential documents and makes them available to bona fide researchers. But bureaucrats being bureaucrats, that has led to a monumental turf fight over who should have the right to control access to the presidential papers. None of the protagonists is at fault. But the result, as Mitterrand no doubt intended – in a last sideways jab at History – is that access to the presidential archive is an unalloyed nightmare.

  The transcripts of official conversations and Cabinet documents cited in this book have, wherever possible, been verified, either with the originals in the National Archives or with persons privy to the discussions.

  Besides Verbatim and La décennie Mitterrand, three other published works draw extensively on the presidential archive: L’œil du pouvoir (Fayard, 1999-2001), a massive three-volume series by Mitterrand’s security adviser, Gilles Ménage, describing the French government’s counter-terrorism strategy from 1981 to 1986; François Mitterrand: les années du changement (Perrin, 2001), papers presented at a colloquium, held in 1999, on the first three years of Mitterrand’s presidency; and Mitterrand et la réunification allemande by Tilo Schabert (Grasset, 2002), discussing French attitudes towards Germany and Mitterrand’s negotiations with Kohl on German reunification.

  Contemporary documents are the stuff of which history, and therefore biography, is made, because, unlike memoirs, they have not been reinterpreted – consciously or unconsciously – after the event. Mitterrand’s private papers, held by the Institut, clarify certain aspects of his military service. The National Archives, when not hobbled by restrictions on access to presidential files, contain useful material on Mitterrand’s captivity as well as the complete archives of the UDSR, deposited by Laurence Soudet after the party was wound up in 1964. The archives of its successor, the FGDS, have also been preserved (at the Office Universitaire de Recherche Socialiste in Paris). Contemporary newspaper articles are another valuable resource. Even when factually wrong, they reflect the perception of events at the time and often provide the only reliable guide to their chronology, without which any interpretation of history is impossible.

  Where contemporary evidence is not available, analysis and reminiscence must suffice. Among the former, Robert Schneider’s magisterial account of the disconnect between Mitterrand and Michel Rocard, La haine tranquille (Seuil, 1993), provides a convincing explanation of why Mitterrand consistently sidelined the socialist leader best placed to succeed him. Hubert Védrine, who was Mitterrand’s diplomatic adviser before becoming Secretary-General at the Elysée, gives a (sometimes overly defensive) account of the President’s foreign policy in Les mondes de François Mitterrand (Fayard, 1996). Alain Duhamel, who collaborated with Mitterrand on Ma part de vérité, explores the unspoken rivalry with de Gaulle in De Gaulle – Mitterrand: la marque et la trace (Flammarion, 1991).

  The memoirs of those who worked with Mitterrand and of members of his inner circle and his family are so numerous as to daunt the most assiduous reader. Some are more illuminating than others, among them François (Seuil, 1996), by Christina Forsne, a Swedish journalist with whom Mitterrand had a lengthy affair; Lettre à un ami mystérieux (Grasset, 2001) by his brother-in-law, Roger Hanin; Roland Dumas’s two books, Le fil et la pélote (Plon, 1996) and Coups et blessures (Cherche-midi, 2011); Laurent Fabius’s autobiographical essay, Les blessures de la vérité (Flammarion, 1995); Charles Salzmann’s Le bruit de la main gauche (Laffont, 1996), which includes a fascinating recollection of Mitterrand’s journeys to the Soviet Union; and Michel Charasse’s 55 faubourg St Honoré (Grasset, 1996), about his time at the Elysée. Mitterrand’s chauffeur (and confidant), Pierre Tourlier, offers a different perspective on the President in Conduite à gauche (Denoël, 2000) and Tonton (Éditions du Rocher, 2005), as does one of Mitterrand’s bodyguards, Daniel Gamba, in Interlocuteur privilégié (JC Lattès, 2003). Robert Badinter, Jack Lang, Pierre Mauroy and many others have also written instructive memoirs. But the list goes on and on and will no doubt be extended by a fresh avalanche of reminiscence to mark the centenary of Mitterrand’s birth in 2016. The interest of French readers in their enigmatic leader appears to be inexhaustible.

  The last months of his life were chronicled minutely (albeit, in places, with a tendency to be excessively judgemental) by Christophe Barbier (Les dernier jours de François Mitterrand, Grasset, 1997) and, less reliably, by Georges-Marc Benamou in Le dernier Mitterrand (Plon, 1996). Le grand secret (Plon, 1996), the publication of which Mitterrand’s family tried to prevent, is an account by his doctor, Claude Gubler, of the President’s cancer and the measures taken to conceal it.

  My other major source for this book has been interviews with Mitterrand’s family and inner circle. Jean Lacouture and Patrick Rotman recorded some two dozen interviews in 1999 and 2000 for their television documentary series, Mitterrand: le roman du pouvoir, which provided the basis for a book of the same title (Seuil, 2000). The transcripts, large parts of which are unpublished, have been generously placed at the disposal of researchers at the Institut François Mitterrand. I subsequently undertook a number of longer interviews, some extending over many hours, with Jean Balenci (Danielle Mitterrand’s long-term partner); Édith Cahier (Robert Mitterrand’s first wife); Roland Dumas; Georges Fillioud; Dominique Hernu (Charles Hernu’s widow); Jacques Maroselli, who joined Mitterrand in the FGDS; Louis Mermaz; Anne-Marie Mitterrand (the wife of his nephew, Olivier); Danielle Mitterrand; Jacques Mitterrand; Guy Penne, another companion of the 1960s; Anne Pingeot; André Rousselet and Laurence Soudet. Without their help this book would be the poorer. Oral history cannot replace documentary sources, but it often provides the essential context that allows them to be interpreted correctly.

  In the notes which follow, IFM stands for Institut François Mitterrand; CHAN denotes the French National Archives.

  Notes

  Prologue

  1. Afterwards he had an armoured door installed. But he continued to receive letters containing death threats, and colleagues in the Senate, where he represented the Nièvre, a rural constituency in central France, warned him of rumours that he would be the next victim.

  2. In the early 1960s, the future archbishop of Paris, Monsignor Veuillot, used to telephone Pope John XXIII from the brasserie’s basement because, as he put it, ‘here I can be at ease, I know that no one is listening in’.

  3. ‘Audition verbale de M. Mitterrand à son domicile’, October 17 1959, IFM carton 41.

  4. This was the sense of the article in Paris-Presse which Mitterrand had read that evening. The writer, Lucien Neuwirth, had been one of the leaders of the Committee of Public Safety, set up in Algiers to demand de Gaulle’s return in May 1958. ‘There is mistrust and anguish,’ he warned. ‘Why? De Gaulle has committed himself personally. He has rejected [Algerian] independence. The people and the army have confidence in him. So what is missing? [The problem is the] government . . . When a government shows its authority, doubts disappear . . . In a democracy, when there is danger, the powers-that-be need to be made to face up to their responsibilities. To re-establish public confidence, the Fifth Republic must prove its authority . . . and the promises it made must be kept.’

  5. Although Bourgès-Maunoury reported Pesquet’s overtures to the police, he, too, withheld Pesquet’s name.

  6. Pesquet approached Bourgès-Maunoury’s office on August 18 and met him three weeks later, on Septe
mber 12. The Interior Minister was informed of the contact on October 22. Puzzled by the government’s silence, Bourgès-Maunoury contacted the investigating magistrate, Edgar Braunschweig, on November 3.

  7. The giveaway lines in the letter were: ‘When [Mitterrand] reaches the Avenue de l’Observatoire, he will pretend to panic, drive his car to the left side of the road, get out and run off into the night’. Pesquet might, as Mitterrand claimed, have guessed what route he would take (although even that is a stretch, for a man discovering he is followed may head in any direction to throw off his pursuers). He might even have written several letters, to cover various possible routes, releasing only the one which fitted the facts most closely. But unless it had been agreed beforehand, he could not possibly have foreseen, in terms that were almost word for word those which Mitterrand later used to the police, exactly what his victim would do when the attack occurred.

  8. The General described Mitterrand as a chargé de mission, which can mean ‘adviser’, ‘officer’ or, as in this case, ‘representative’.

  9. There were a very few exceptions, almost all of them friends from his childhood and time at college; fellow prisoners; and comrades in the Resistance, with whom the use of tu was an unwritten but ironclad rule. Even a close friend of forty years’ standing, André Rousselet, used vous to Mitterrand.

  10. Mazarin, Cardinal Jules, Bréviaire des politiciens, Arléa, 1997.

  1: A Family Apart

  1. Mitterrand, François and Wiesel, Elie, Mémoire à deux voix, Odile Jacob, 1995, pp. 11, 12, 15, 17 & 19.

  2. Mitterrand told this story so often that, even though it was true, it came to sound like an alibi against accusations of anti-Semitism.