by Philip Short
3. Hence the term, coup de Jarnac, signifying a clever and unexpected winning thrust. The Catholics then used one of their own: in 1771, the Jesuits, in the Dictionnaire de Trévoux, rewrote the definition to mean a tricky, disloyal blow. A century later, the error was corrected, but by then the new meaning had stuck. Mitterrand’s opponents used it against him throughout his political career.
4. The Edict of Nantes in 1598 ended the ‘Wars of Religion’ and proclaimed religious tolerance. In 1685, it was revoked by Louis XIV, who unleashed such a wave of anti-Protestant terror that more than 200,000 Huguenots fled the country, most of them to the Netherlands, Britain and Germany. Discrimination against Protestants did not end completely until the Revolution, a hundred years later.
5. The pastor’s concern was that if young people of both confessions played tennis together, it might lead to ‘mixed’ marriages.
6. According to Franz-Olivier Giesbert, Mitterrand at the age of fourteen dreamed of entering a seminary.
7. In his book, Ma part de vérité, Fayard, 1969. François Mitterrand also used the word, ‘unclassifiable’.
8. Édith Cahier wondered: ‘Did François suffer because of that? . . . Perhaps he became what he was out of a desire for revenge, a desire to be first? There’s always a motive for everything.’ Pierre de Bénouville also remarked that the Mitterrands were ‘vinaigriers crushed by the great men of cognac’ and asked himself whether that explained François’s ‘rancour against money and capitalism’.
9. François Dalle, interview with Jean Lacouture, c. 1999, IFM typescript.
10. Towards the end of François’s schooldays, discipline at St Paul’s eased. On special occasions, students would be allowed an exeat to spend a weekend at home.
11. In a letter dated January 30 1927, Robert informed his parents that François ‘who, as you know, was down in the dumps’ and had had a difficult first term, was back to normal again.
12. Despite Chardonne’s wartime collaboration, de Gaulle was also among his admirers.
13. François’s recollection was different. He told Charles Moulin that the first film he saw was one of the earliest French ‘talkies’, Un trou dans le mur (‘A Hole in the Wall’), directed by René Barbéris in 1930.
14. The brothers spent two summers at Westgate, in 1929 and 1930.
15. Mitterrand and Wiesel, Mémoire à deux voix, pp. 43–4.
16. In January 1933, at the age of sixteen, François won an oratory contest for children from Catholic schools with a speech about the role of priests during the First World War. Like Churchill, when he was a boy, he had a tendency to stammer.
17. In an interview towards the end of his life, Mitterrand put his ‘entry into seconde’ (the fifth year of secondary education which in France marks the transition to lycée or senior high school) on a par with the death of his grandmother and the sale of Touvent as one of the three great shocks of his early life. The following year, in première, he failed the English oral in the bac. By his own account, he was paralysed by shyness: ‘I couldn’t put three words together . . . I was frozen inside’. He failed two attempts at the oral that summer but scraped through a year later. Robert, who jumped a class, spent six years at the college and obtained his bac at the unusually young age of fifteen. Jacques got his bac after seven years, François after eight, both passing the exam in the summer of 1934.
18. Jacques Mitterrand had a similar recollection: ‘We were impregnated with [the teachings of] the Church. So for us it was out of the question.’
19. After the Second World War, Charles Maurras, who had collaborated with the Nazis, was condemned as a fascist. The leaders of the other right-wing leagues, including de la Rocque, who had fought for the Resistance, were unjustly tarred with the same brush. ‘De la Rocque was neither fascist nor anti-Semitic,’ Mitterrand said later. ‘To me he was appealing . . . I was won over by [his] open character.’
20. De Bénouville acknowledged that ‘in those days my life was organised around that group [the Cagoule]’, but stopped short of saying that he was a member. Two others of Mitterrand’s friends, Claude Roy and André Bettencourt, who also lived at the hostel, supposedly ‘hung out’ with members of the Cagoule, but there is no evidence that either of them participated in its activities.
21. Bouvyer was the lover of Marie-Josèphe, the second-oldest of François’s sisters, who married and subsequently divorced a young Breton aristocrat, the marquis of Corlieu. Their affair lasted from 1942 to 1947.
22. Among them, Jean Delage, who employed the epithet ‘Negroid’ to describe Gaston Jèze and afterwards recruited Mitterrand to write for l’Écho de Paris.
23. Le Sillon was founded in 1894 by Marc Sangnier, who later brought the Youth Hostel movement to France. It campaigned for the ending of class differences, and for political, economic and intellectual emancipation for all, notably in the workplace. François’s father, Joseph, who shared some of his brother-in-law’s ideas, introduced a system of worker participation in the family vinegar business, a revolutionary idea for the time which earned him the disapproval of conservative employers in the region.
24. According to François Dalle, ‘he scraped through. It’s not that he couldn’t have done well, but he didn’t do any work . . . His interests were elsewhere . . .’
25. Mitterrand was preparing his thesis for a doctorate in law when the war intervened.
26. In later life, under the name Catherine Langeais, Marie-Louise Terrasse became one of France’s best-loved television presenters.
27. Letter of May 28 1938, in Terrasse, Jean-Marc, Catherine Langeais, la fiancée des Français, Fayard, 2003, pp. 121–3.
28. Throughout the late summer of 1938, François pleaded with her to agree to a formal engagement. Her refusal did not deter him. On January 4 1939, he wrote to Marthe to say that ‘Marie-Louise and I love each other . . . and we would like our situation to be made clear’. That led nowhere either.
29. ‘Thus far and no further’, Revue Montalembert, April 1938, in Mitterrand, François, Politique, Vol. 1, Fayard, 1977, pp. 3–6.
30. The first mention of the international situation in Robert’s diary for 1938 was on March 4, when he received a letter from his father who was ‘worrying about Hitler’. On the 16th, another letter: ‘Very much affected by the Anschluss, he sees the future in black’. Two days later a third letter: ‘he is really worried’.
31. Details of Mitterrand’s naval aspirations are fragmentary. He told his brother, Robert, that he had passed the concours for the Merchant Marine, but did not explain why, leaving Robert to wonder in his diary whether he was ‘planning to find a way to make his military service pleasanter?’ Jean-Marc Terrasse, evidently quoting Marie-Louise, wrote that he had intended to apply to the ‘Commissariat of the Naval Reserve’, an apparent reference to the École des officiers du commissariat de la marine at Brest, where naval administrators were trained.
32. The ‘Higher Military Preparation’ (Préparation Militaire Supérieure, or PMS) lasted three weeks. In a letter to Marie-Louise’s father on April 25 1940, Mitterrand confirmed that he had attempted the PMS, but had ‘followed [the course] irregularly and very much neglected it, with the result that I was placed on the third list . . . [meaning] no admission to the officers’ training school’.
33. On October 4 1939, Robert wrote in his diary: ‘If he has chosen not to seek a deferment, at the end of which he could have been sent to the provinces as an officer cadet in reserve, it’s because he prefers to remain in the region around Paris. He seems to have good reason not to wish to leave . . . But he is going . . . to pay for it dearly, for the life of a foot-soldier doesn’t have much in common with that of an officer cadet.’ He was evidently unaware that François had already tried, and failed, to obtain a place as an officer cadet.
34. François finally introduced Marie-Louise to Robert in December 1938.
35. Libres, June 22 1945.
36. Magoudi, Ali and Jouve, Pierre, Mitterrand: portrait to
tal, Carrère, 1986, p. 73.
37. Mitterrand and Wiesel, Mémoire à deux voix, p. 139.
38. In his letter of August 6 1940, he wrote that ‘I’m leaving now, for where? Germany no doubt . . .’ He arrived at Ziegenhain two days later, not at the beginning of September as he remembered.
2: The Captive
1. His account, entitled ‘Pilgrimage in Thuringia’, published in the Pétainist magazine, France, revue de l’État nouveau, No. 5, 1942 (reprinted in Mitterrand, Politique, Vol. 1, pp. 11–14), conflated two different journeys: from Lunéville to Ziegenhain (Stalag IXA), a distance of some 500 kilometres; and from Ziegenhain to Bad Sulza (Stalag IXC). The latter segment, of 200 kilometres, through Eisenach, Gotha, Erfurt and Weimar, lies east of Ziegenhain and could not therefore have been on the route from France.
2. L’Ephémère, August 15 1941, reprinted in Mitterrand, Politique, Vol. 1, pp. 9–10.
3. Danielle Mitterrand remembered: ‘He didn’t like to expose himself to the sun. He didn’t like sand . . . I think he liked walking on the sand, but he didn’t take off his shoes. No, he didn’t like nudity.’ I am unaware of any published photograph of him shirtless or in a bathing costume.
4. Although Mitterrand registered at Stalag IXA, his PoW number was for Stalag IXC, presumably because, like many others at Ziegenhain, he was destined for a kommando there.
5. Mitterrand, François and Benamou, Georges-Marc, Mémoires interrompus, Odile Jacob, 1996, pp. 13–14.
6. The chronology of Mitterrand’s stay at Ziegenhain is contradictory. He stated repeatedly that the rule of the gangs lasted three months. But he left Ziegenhain for Bad Sulza after only eight weeks, so it must have ended sooner.
7. L’Expansion, July–August 1972. At the end of his life he wrote that ‘it was in captivity that I started fundamentally to call into question the criteria by which I had lived until then’.
8. Pierre Péan, in his book, Une jeunesse française (Fayard, 1994), maintained that Ziegenhain was ‘different . . . It was heaven compared to other camps’. In fact the majority of the Stalags and Oflags – with certain exceptions like Stalag IXB, near Frankfurt, and the so-called disciplinary camps, Rawa Ruska and Kobierzin in the Ukraine and eastern Poland, where repeat offenders were sent – afforded the inmates facilities to keep them occupied outside working hours. There was no comparison between the PoW camps and death camps like Auschwitz.
9. Cited in Péan, p. 135.
10. L’Ephémère, September 1 1941.
11. In the early months he had to put his plans on hold because, until December 1940, his wounded arm was too stiff to move without difficulty.
12. In addition to Stalags IXA and IXC and the disciplinary camp, IXB, the region contained four Oflags where allied officers were imprisoned.
13. In what order, and for how long, he worked at which job is unclear. Paul Charvet wrote in his diary that Mitterrand began work at the hay station on November 11 1940. Mitterrand himself remembered working for the carpenter for six months. But since his entire stay at Schaala lasted only five months – from early October 1940 to March 5 1941 – and in that period he did many other jobs, that was impossible. He probably worked at the carpenter’s shop for a few weeks, although at the time no doubt it seemed much longer.
14. They were captured on March 23 1941 and were still in Spaichingen on Easter Day (April 13), when their jailer announced to them the fall of Yugoslavia. Mitterrand completed his three-week sentence at Bad Sulza and was sent back to Ziegenhain in May. Marie-Louise Terrasse’s parents received a letter from him on May 20 (or, more likely, dated May 20), informing them that he had just returned there.
15. He wrote to André Terrasse in July 1941 that his efforts to escape were ‘only for her [Marie-Louise]’. Towards the end of his life, he acknowledged that although he had suffered from the loss of liberty, ‘I had adapted to my lot pretty well, and I wasn’t the only one. Force of habit prevented many escapes. I didn’t want to leave my companions. I got used to living in the places where I was put. I no longer wanted to change all that. The idea of escaping, the need to escape, stems from other impulses. Even today I couldn’t tell you what they are.’ Elsewhere he wrote that the arrival of a parcel from home, containing a pair of slippers, almost made him change his mind and call off the escape.
16. Letter written in early July 1941, cited in Terrasse, Catherine Langeais, pp. 230–34.
17. Medical orderlies were sometimes repatriated as escorts for seriously ill PoWs who were sent home under the accords the Vichy government had negotiated with the Germans.
18. L’Ephémère, November 15 1941.
19. His estrangement from the Church was gradual and incomplete. As late as the summer of 1960, he still sometimes attended services, and even when he ceased religious practice altogether, his faith was not entirely lost: he doubted and asked questions but did not find answers.
20. It was the first and last escape by prisoners crossing the perimeter fence of Stalag IXA during the five years the war lasted.
21. Mitterrand wrote later that he had crossed the demarcation line on December 15 1941. In fact, that appears to have been the date of his arrival in Mantry (after spending three nights hiding in Boulay, which he left with the owner of the newspaper shop, Maya Baron, at 5 a.m. on December 13; that night crossing into the Occupied Zone; and the following night in a hayloft in the Free Zone). Marie-Claire Sarrazin remembered him spending three days at Mantry, which is consistent with his having applied for demobilisation on December 18 at Lons-le-Saunier. He was given two months’ leave of absence, starting on December 20, and his demobilisation was made effective by the regional centre in Bourg-en-Bresse on February 20 1942.
3: Schisms of War
1. The description is that of Maurice Pinot, Commissioner for Prisoners of War at Vichy.
2. When Mitterrand registered for demobilisation on December 18, he gave his address as c/o the Levy-Despas, which means that Robert must have visited him before that date. He arrived in St Tropez shortly before Christmas, probably on December 23, and travelled on to Jarnac on January 1.
3. By comparison, a print worker in Paris that year earned 4,250 francs a month; a staff member at a Mutual Aid Centre, 2,000 francs.
4. Letter of April 22 1942 to Marie-Claire Sarrazin, cited in Péan, Une jeunesse française, p. 188.
5. Favre de Thierrens’s service was ‘attached’ to the Legion, rather than being an integral part of it, but that was splitting hairs: in practice they were one and the same thing.
6. The article was to have been published in a Pétainist journal in March 1943, but never appeared.
7. Letters of March 13 and April 22 1942, cited in Péan, pp. 179 & 188.
8. The phrase is from Jacques Bénet but it also represented Mitterrand’s thinking.
9. It is impossible to ascertain exactly when Mitterrand joined the counterfeiting operation or even when it began. It may not have started until June, but a May date is plausible. Mitterrand had known Roussel since March. The latter was in charge of the workshop and trusted him enough to take him in mid-June to meet Antoine Mauduit at Montmaur to discuss more active resistance activities. A terminus ad quem is provided by Bénet, who visited Mitterrand in July by which time the counterfeiters ‘were already in action’.
10. Mauduit rented the Château de Montmaur in June 1942. He founded ‘the Chain’ three months later.
11. The maquis of the Vercors, in the mountains 40 miles further north, created in the winter of 1942, is usually regarded as having been the first in France. However the maquis of Montmaur, in the area known as the Duvelloy, was contemporaneous and possibly earlier. Mitterrand, who returned there in November 1942 and again in early 1943, remembered seeing Mauduit communicating with his men by field telephone and ‘wearing a curious outfit that was half-civilian, half-military, with an alpine chasseur’s beret on his head’.
12. He obtained the post through Jean-Albert Roussel, who said later that Mitterrand had also bee
n offered a job at the Commissariat for Jewish Questions, which would have paid three times more, but had turned it down. Mitterrand himself denied that.
13. Mutual Aid Centres, often associated with Maisons de Prisonniers (Prisoners’ Bureaux), were set up in the Occupied Zone from the winter of 1941. In the Free Zone, the first Aid Centre opened in July 1942.
14. The exact date is unclear. Jean Védrine wrote that the group around Barrois ‘which would become the Aid Centre’ started forming in March–April 1942; Pierre Coursol remembered the Aid Centre being formally established in late September.
15. Mitterrand wrote later that this second Montmaur meeting, on August 15 1942, appointed an executive committee comprising, in addition to the ‘three Ms’, Barrois, Gagnaire and Guy Fric, and ‘immediately constituted a network’ covering much of south-eastern France. It did not. He was describing history as it should have been, rather than as it was.
16. Letter of June 16 1942, cited in Péan, Une jeunesse française, p. 197.
17. Simon Arbellot de Vacqueur was from the Charente and knew Mitterrand’s family. Gabriel Jeantet commissioned articles from Mitterrand in the winter of 1942.
18. Apart from his trip to Paris to meet Marie-Louise Terrasse in January 1942, before the wearing of yellow stars became obligatory, there is no evidence that Mitterrand travelled to the Occupied Zone before November 1942, when the demarcation line was abolished. He would not therefore have seen Jews wearing yellow stars until that month or possibly later, by which time his views about Vichy had already changed. He is known to have visited the capital in January 1943, and his brother, Robert, remembered another trip the following spring.
19. The December 1942 issue of Jeantet’s journal, France, revue de l’État nouveau, in which one of Mitterrand’s articles appeared, also contained a violently anti-Semitic report by Noël de Tissot, one of the founders of the pro-Nazi Milice, later an officer in the Waffen-SS; and an essay by Lazare de Gérin-Ricard, a pillar of Action Française, describing methods to stop the ‘Hebrew invasion’. Questioned towards the end of his life about his collaboration with the journal, Mitterrand replied: ‘I wanted very much to write for a magazine . . . I didn’t ask myself what ideas that magazine was conveying, or the kinds of people who wrote for it . . . Perhaps I should have paid more attention.’ The explanation, however inadequate it may seem today, has the ring of truth. Had Mitterrand wished to, he could have claimed plausibly that writing for an extreme right-wing publication was part of his cover at a time when he was organising a clandestine movement. He did not.