Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  65. Until early February 1944, Cailliau hoped to persuade de Gaulle to reverse the decision – for which Cailliau blamed Frenay – to appoint Mitterrand, Bénet and himself to a collegial leadership. In his letter to his uncle on February 1, which was not received until mid-March and to which the General did not deign to reply, he demanded that Pinot and Mitterrand be excluded from the new unified organisation; denounced Mitterrand as a Pétainist, a collaborator and a follower of Charles Maurras; declared that his own movement ‘refuses to obey [the decision communicated by] Frenay’; and requested the General to arbitrate. After Frenay’s telegram of February 16, he was forced to accept that de Gaulle’s decision was final.

  66. Michel Cailliau had initially proposed meeting at the Observatory, near the gardens where, fifteen years later, Mitterrand’s career would risk coming to a premature end. Charles Moulin suggested a more discreet venue, the studio of the painter, Georges Goës, at 117, rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.

  67. In the autumn of 1943, Mitterrand had become an advisory member of the National Resistance Council’s Social Commission, headed by Maxime Blocq-Masquart.

  68. Védrine, Jean, Dossier PG-Rapatriés 1940– 1945, privately printed, Asnières, n.d. but 1981, Vol. 2, pp. 544–5. These extracts are from a tract issued in August 1944, shortly before the liberation of Paris. According to Védrine, the MNPGD had been urging its members to take up arms against the Germans since April that year.

  69. Bénet wrote later that they had been detained for a month in Spain and reached Algiers only in mid-June. Mitterrand asked them to stay on to represent the MNPGD at the Consultative Assembly, but they refused because they wanted to get back to France. However Cailliau, still determined to thwart Mitterrand in any way he could, used his influence to prevent their return until after Paris had been liberated.

  70. Munier originally said his repatriation was ordered by ‘the authorities of the German Army’ rather than by Hitler personally. Afterwards he amended his account to bring it into line with Mitterrand’s version. Whatever signature was on the document, it was sufficiently impressive to make the German patrol back off.

  71. Many aspects of this episode remain unclear. Marguerite Duras reworked her diary entries of that year into a semi-autobiographical book, La Douleur, published in English as War: A Memoir, in which the character named Rabier represents Delval. After the liberation of Paris, opinion within the MNPGD was divided about the guilt of Bourgeois and Médina. Philippe Dechartre and Georges Beauchamp believed they were innocent, and accused Duras of having spread false charges against them. Edgar Morin concluded, probably correctly, that Bourgeois had been careless but not a traitor, but Médina’s case was more difficult. Mitterrand was also unsure. Other than circumstantial elements, the main grounds for suspecting them were that their apartment had been searched by the Gestapo and placed under seal shortly before the June 1 raids. In an interview in the 1990s, Médina told Pierre Péan that he found, when he returned there surreptitiously some days later, that photographs had been taken. Delval told an investigating magistrate in the autumn of 1944 that ‘lists’ containing complete information about the movement (not photographs, as Médina maintained) had been found by the two German agents who had carried out the search. At other times, Delval gave different versions. In La Douleur, Duras quoted him as saying there was ‘a traitor’ in Mitterrand’s movement who had talked under threat of deportation. To Dionys Mascolo, in September 1944, he said there were two traitors in the movement. At his trial in December, he spoke again of ‘one traitor’. Delval was executed in January 1945, having been convicted on the basis of testimony from Duras, who wrote later that she had wanted to see him dead (apart from Delval’s role in her husband’s arrest, her lover, Mascolo, was by then having a passionate affair with Delval’s wife, Paulette: both women bore Mascolo’s children a year later). Delval may have invented the story of ‘traitors’, initially as part of the game of seduction he was playing with Duras in the summer of 1944, and later, at his trial, to minimise his own guilt: had they really existed, it would have been in his interest to give a much more detailed account. But the claim that compromising documents were found in the two men’s apartment is plausible. The Gestapo had to have obtained its information from somewhere, and the chronology is suggestive: as well as the two raids on June 1, the Gestapo’s arrival the following day at the apartment where Munier had hidden arms, the arrest on June 7 of Steverlynck’s contact, Jakub Scheimowitch, who had worked closely with Médina, and the killing of Steverlynck on June 8, all came in quick succession after the apartment had been searched. Médina left Paris, apparently without telling his colleagues, shortly before the city was liberated and for a time disappeared from sight, leaving behind conflicting versions of what he had been doing. When Péan questioned him in the 1990s, he found him ‘ill at ease’, becoming more so as the conversation progressed. Perhaps the likeliest explanation is that Médina did indeed have papers at home which put the Gestapo on Mitterrand’s trail, but failed to tell his comrades exactly what they were, making it a case of imprudence, exacerbated by concealment, rather than outright betrayal.

  72. Parodi held the rank of Commissioner in his own right as well as being Secretary-General for the Liberated Territories pending the arrival of François Billoux, who reached Paris with de Gaulle. Including Parodi, there were sixteen secretaries-general.

  73. Mitterrand and Wiesel, Mémoire à deux voix, p. 213.

  74. L’Homme libre, August 22 1944, reprinted in Mitterrand, Politique, Vol. 1, pp. 18–19.

  75. This speech, with de Gaulle’s appeal of June 18 1940, is remembered in France as one of the two emblematic addresses of the war years. The text is available at http://www.charles-de-gaulle.org/​pages/espace-pedagogique/le-point​-sur/les-textes-a-connaitre/​discours-de-lrsquohotel-de-ville-25-aout-1944.php

  76. In a speech in the 1980s at a banquet hosted by Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Mitterrand asserted that Chaban, not de Chevigné, had been his companion that night. He confessed later that the original version was correct. It had been a case of not letting the facts get in the way of a good story.

  77. Mitterrand wrote later: ‘There was good humour and a kind of smile in his remark. It could have been meant to say, “Hmmm. You really aren’t easy to get rid of!”’

  78. Mitterrand, La paille et le grain, pp. 11–13.

  79. On August 31. The official handover took place on September 5.

  80. Frenay’s account was written years later, when his relations with Mitterrand had cooled. At the time he had no problem with Mitterrand’s refusal, inviting him and Maurice Pinot to dinner that night to discuss the Ministry’s future.

  4: Loose Ends, New Beginnings

  1. Danielle liked to tell this story but Mitterrand himself denied it.

  2. The description, Don Juan, is from André Rousselet.

  3. Marie-Louise had seen Mitterrand again during the war, when he was with Marie-Claire Sarrazin, but their new relationship as ‘intimate friends’ appears to have dated from 1945, after his marriage to Danielle.

  4. In the English marriage ceremony, the vow is ‘for better or for worse’. The French, more realistically, say ‘for better and for worse’.

  5. The French historian, Robert Aron, in his three-volume Histoire de l’épuration, estimated that between 30,000 and 40,000 alleged collaborators were killed without judicial process after the war. It is now widely accepted that that figure is too high.

  6. L’Homme libre, September 6 1944, reprinted in Mitterrand, Politique, Vol. 1, pp. 20–21.

  7. Cartier provided the Resistance with 43 million francs (more than US $1 million, equivalent to $16 million at 2013 rates) in 1943–44.

  8. Writing in Libres in February, Mitterrand sympathised with Frenay’s ‘solitude’. Six weeks later he paid tribute to ‘the immense work of clearing up and reconstruction’ that the Minister had undertaken.

  9. Libres, May 28 1945.

  10. Danielle Mitterrand, interview, Ma
rch 19 2009. Elsewhere she wrote that her last moments of unblemished happiness were in May 1945.

  11. Pascal Mitterrand was born on June 10 and died on September 17 1945.

  12. In Neuilly the Mitterrands had had an apartment in the Boulevard Maurice Barrès at the northern end of the Bois de Boulogne. The move to rue Guynemer in the winter of 1946 provoked a short-lived scandal. The house had belonged to the Vatican before the war and during the Occupation had been requisitioned by the Germans. In 1945 it was taken over by a deportees’ association led by Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle. The following year the Vatican demanded it back with a view to dividing it into apartments for commercial letting. The association petitioned the government to intervene on its behalf. But either the government failed to state its case with sufficient vigour or the Vatican’s agents turned a deaf ear. The association was forced to pack its bags, only to discover, a few weeks later, that among the new tenants were Henri Frenay and François Mitterrand. From there it was but a short step to insinuate that the deportees had been pushed out to make way for the ex-Minister and his colleague. For decades after, Gaullists held up the episode as an example of Mitterrand’s lack of morality. The truth was simpler: the Vatican wished to recover its property and put it to commercial use in order to replenish Church funds. Could Frenay or Mitterrand have prevented that? The interim Prime Minister, Léon Blum, had been approached a month earlier and had been unable, or had failed, to intervene. Was it an error of political judgement to rent an apartment which had come on to the market in such circumstances? In retrospect, the answer was yes. But morally there were no grounds for reproaching either Mitterrand or Frenay.

  13. Bugeaud, Pierre, Militant prisonnier de guerre, l’Harmattan, 1990, p. 98.

  14. Mitterrand and Benamou, Mémoires interrompus, pp. 155–6.

  15. Mitterrand told Georges-Marc Benamou that, for the Lewis mission, the General’s ‘choice fell on me’. That was deliberately misleading. The government – whether in the person of de Gaulle or Frenay is unclear – sent a three-man delegation from the FNPG, two of whose members, Bénet and Bugeaud, also belonged to the Provisional Consultative Assembly, which exercised some of the functions of a parliament pending elections under a new constitution. The Americans liberated both Dachau and Landsberg on April 29. The French delegation visited on May 1.

  16. A number of SS guards were killed by the prisoners and others by US troops before or, in a few cases, after they surrendered, which prompted a US army investigation. But that occurred in the first 24 hours after the camp was liberated.

  17. ‘What are principles? Banalities! Marvellous banalities!’ (Mitterrand, speaking in April 1980).

  18. Although Mitterrand had a law degree, he could not practise because he had not passed the certificat d’aptitude à la profession d’avocat which was necessary to join the Bar. In 1954 the law was changed to allow lawyers who had obtained their degree before 1941 to practise without the additional qualification.

  19. Mitterrand, François, Les Prisonniers de guerre devant la politique, Editions du Rond Point, 1945, pp. 36–7.

  20. This can be inferred from Mitterrand’s letter to Georges Dayan in January 1946, in which he stated that he had ‘almost stood’ in the Vosges, and then went on to deliver a litany of complaints against the Socialist Party. The implication appears to be that he considered standing on a moderate left-wing list, which included Socialists. He does not say why he did not do so, but throughout his career he was adept at judging which seats were ‘jouable’ (feasible) and which were not: in this case, presumably, he decided that the seat was not.

  21. Libres, October 26 1944.

  22. The party I have described as ‘Christian Democrat’ was the MRP, the ‘People’s Republican Movement’, whose leading figure was Georges Bidault. The MRP was in the tradition of Le Sillon of Marc Sangnier, who had become the party’s honorary president in 1944.

  23. Philippe Dechartre, interviewed in the 1990s, spoke at length of Mitterrand’s views about the Communists, quoting him as saying, during their meeting in Lyon in May 1943: ‘It’s true, I am not a commie. Far from it . . . But everything we are doing is for our country . . . [both for now and] for what will come after, for rebuilding France, to enable us to have a role in the great political debate that will take place after the war. And we can do nothing there unless we take account of communist arithmetic.’ Dechartre continued: ‘[That was] in ’43. In ’43! It was stupefying. The image of François saying that, in a completely relaxed manner but with absolute certainty, has always stayed with me. [To him] it was as ineluctable as an equinox.’ The problem is that their conversation must have taken place later, because the issue that triggered it was Mitterrand’s attitude to the communist CNPG, which was not formed until October 1943. It is plausible that Mitterrand spoke in these terms after his return from London in 1944. At that time he talked often of ‘rebuilding France’ and his remarks about ‘communist arithmetic’ were little different from what he wrote in Les prisonniers de guerre eighteen months later. However recognising the role of the Communists was one thing; working out how to deal with them was another. Nothing in his conversation with Dechartre or in his writings of this period indicated a willingness to unite with them. To describe his remarks as ‘stupefying’ was to read far more into them, with the benefit of knowing what happened in the succeeding decades, than they actually contained. In 1945, Mitterrand was on the same wavelength vis à vis the Communists as the rest of the political mainstream. As he told Dayan, he preferred to fight them.

  24 The UDSR was initially conceived by Frenay – under the provisional name, ‘Labour Union of Liberation’ – as a means of uniting the whole of the non-communist Resistance in a broad-church political party. However the left wing of Frenay’s group, led by d’Astier de la Vigerie and Pascal Copeau, split off to form a rival movement, and in practice the UDSR drew most of its strength from Combat and Franc-Tireur. It became the party of choice for moderate non-communists from the Resistance and obtained 31 seats in the 1945 elections.

  25. Each département contained several ‘sectors’, corresponding to constituencies. Votes were counted at the level of the département, but lists of candidates were established by sectors. The list on which Mitterrand figured represented the Rassemblement de gauches républicaines (RGR), or Rally of Left-wing Republicans, which despite its name catered to moderate right-wing voters. It included the Radical Party, the UDSR and five small Centre-Right or right-wing parties.

  26. Barrachin’s list came fourth, which meant he retained his seat but by a narrow margin. Mitterrand’s list received 25,580 votes, mainly from Barrachin’s supporters.

  27. According to Danielle, Queuille advised him to seek a seat either in the Nièvre or the Vienne. She said he chose the former ‘because the Vienne was dyed-in-the-wool conservative and in the Nièvre there was the legacy of the Resistance’. In later years, Mitterrand spoke of Queuille’s patronage but never mentioned Barrachin, probably because a connection with the Radicals sat better with his subsequent career as a socialist.

  28. The five parties were the Republican Freedom Party or PRL (to which Barrachin belonged); the Gaullist Union; the Peasant Party; the UDSR and the Radicals. His only right-wing rival was a Christian Democrat.

  29. Although Mitterrand secured one of the two seats the Communists had formerly held in the Nièvre, he did so, as Barrachin and Queuille had foreseen, not by winning communist votes but by uniting a substantial part of the right-wing electorate behind him. The other three seats went to a Communist, a Socialist and a Christian Democrat.

  5: The Staircase of Power

  1. Blum was elected on December 12 1946 with the support of the UDSR after both the outgoing MRP Prime Minister, Georges Bidault, and the Communist Party leader, Maurice Thorez, had been unable to obtain a majority.

  2. The Commission on the Press was important both to the Radicals and to the UDSR, for which the defence of press freedom against the Communists a
nd other interest groups was a key priority.

  3. The average life of governments in the Third Republic was 9 months and 15 days, compared with 6 months and 16 days in the Fourth Republic. One government in ten in the Third Republic remained in power for two years or more; in the Fourth Republic, fewer than one in ten lasted one year, the record of longevity being held by Guy Mollet, who held office for sixteen months in 1956–57.

  4. Georges Beauchamp, who had known Ramadier before the war, also promoted Mitterrand’s candidacy.

  5. Paul Ramadier was invested by the National Assembly as Président du Conseil (Prime Minister) on January 21 1947 and his government was sworn in a week later.

  6. This was of course also true of Mitterrand’s membership in the insurrectional government headed by Alexandre Parodi in August 1944, but that had been a provisional body.

  7. Moulin, Charles, Mitterrand intime, Albin Michel, 1982, pp. 73–4.

  8. By one account the dispute with the strikers was resolved after Mitterrand had warned Thorez at the previous week’s Cabinet meeting, on January 29, that unless a solution were found he would order the police to evacuate the Ministry by force. Thorez’s intervention is plausible and may have paved the way for Zimmermann’s acceptance of the mediation committee which Mitterrand proposed.

  9. Auriol, Vincent, Journal du Septennat, Vol. 2, Armand Colin, 1974, p. 319 (September 2 1948).

  10. Mitterrand was named Secretary of State for Information in the government of the Radical, André Marie, which lasted 33 days from July to August 1948. He kept the same post, with a slightly different title, under Queuille.

  11. It is not clear exactly what the landowner, Baron Louis Thénard, hoped to obtain from Mitterrand. He owned the main newspaper in Dijon, Le Bien Public, and may have been seeking an interest in the Journal du Centre in the Nièvre, which was then controlled by the Socialists.

  12. In 1946, the Public Works Minister, Jules Moch, was dressed down by Auriol for using the familiar tu to the President. In 1981, the Defence Minister, Charles Hernu, committed an identical faux pas. As a minister, Mitterrand was also called to order on occasion. Auriol told Marcel Haedrich: ‘Your friend Mitterrand intervenes all the time at Cabinet meetings and I am obliged to tell him: “Mr Mitterrand, you will speak when I ask you to do so.”’