Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  29. In Paris-Presse at the end of February, Georgette Elgey had written that de Gaulle was planning to return, ‘preferably by statutory legal means’.

  30. Elgey, Georgette, Histoire de la 4ème République, 5ème Partie: La Fin – La République des Tourmentes, troisième tome, 1954–1959, Fayard, 2008, p. 773.

  31. De Gaulle admitted as much to Pflimlin. When the Prime Minister urged him to disavow the sedition, he refused to do so, saying, ‘after all, these people want things to change. They think the [present] regime is bad. I cannot say they are wrong.’ If he spoke out before this change occurred, he said, ‘I will lose to no purpose all the credit I might have’.

  32. At his press conference of May 19, de Gaulle said: ‘I understand very well the attitude and the action of the military command in Algeria . . . The Army . . . is normally the instrument of the State and it should remain so. But for that, there has to be a State.’

  33. On the morning of May 27, de Gaulle’s emissary, the same Colonel Paillole whose services had helped Mitterrand to leave Morocco with Montgomery in January 1944, asked Massu to postpone the operation, which had been scheduled for the following day. However, that evening the Socialist group in parliament voted to oppose de Gaulle’s investiture. On May 28, at the General’s request, Salan’s Chief of Staff, General André Dulac, who had flown from Algiers during the night, arrived at Colombey to discuss the situation. According to Dulac, after hearing a detailed briefing on ‘Resurrection’, de Gaulle gave the plan his approval, insisting, however, that within a few days of the operation being completed he must be ‘called in as an arbiter, a man of reconciliation’. Dulac quoted de Gaulle as saying: ‘It would have been immensely preferable that my return to office take place by a [regular] process . . . But we must save the ship.’ That night, de Gaulle met the President of the National Assembly, André le Troquer, who reiterated the Socialist group’s rejection of his candidature. ‘If parliament follows you,’ the General replied, ‘there will be nothing else for me to do but let you explain yourself to the parachutists while I nurse my sorrows in my retirement.’ ‘Resurrection’ was finally launched on the afternoon of May 29, but, according to the Air Force Commander, General Jouhaud, it was countermanded in view of Coty’s speech after the aircraft had already taken off from Algiers. Significantly, de Gaulle had written to his son that morning: ‘According to the information I have, action is imminent from the South towards the North . . . It is infinitely probable that nothing more can be done under the present regime.’ The best reading of this dramatic and extremely confused period is that, while de Gaulle did not want the military to intervene, he had decided to resign himself to it if there were no other choice.

  34. Mitterrand, Ma part de vérité, pp. 39–40.

  35. Mitterrand also told Charles Hernu that they faced twenty years out in the cold. He made a ‘very brief’ journey to the Nièvre with Jean Pinel on Friday, May 30, having been in Paris on May 28 and 29, and returned in the early hours of Saturday, in time to meet Coty that morning and de Gaulle at 3 p.m. According to Pinel, Mitterrand made his decision to vote against de Gaulle on the evening of May 30. Mitterrand himself dated it to the afternoon of May 29. He probably revisited the issue constantly throughout this period.

  36. In March 1981, Mitterrand told Pinel: ‘You remember I told you it would take twenty years. I was wrong. It will have been twenty-three.’

  37. There are three extant versions of Mitterrand’s remarks: Duveau’s notes, taken at the time, cited in Giesbert, Franz-Olivier, Mitterrand: une vie, Seuil, 1996, p. 179; Mitterrand’s account to Georges-Marc Benamou, thirty-five years later (in Mémoires interrompus, pp. 180–90); and an article in Combat on October 22 1962, which contains no direct quotation. This extract conflates the first two.

  38. Journal officiel, June 1 1958.

  39. Mitterrand’s friend, Charles Moulin, remembered him saying that in the Berry, the area of central France from which his paternal grandparents hailed, the local peasants were always puzzled when a traveller stopped to ask the way. ‘In our country,’ they said, ‘you don’t start out on a journey unless you know where you are going and how to get there.’

  40. Jean Pinel, to whom Mitterrand had predicted that the Gaullists would remain in power for the next twenty years, quoted him as having said at the same time ‘I’ll do three things: I will bring the Communists down to 10 per cent; I will “hang a saucepan” on to the Right; and I will govern from the centre.’ The goal of bringing communist support down to 10 per cent was not new: he had said the same thing to Georges Beauchamp in 1947. ‘Hanging a saucepan on to the Right’ described perfectly the way Mitterrand would use the National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen to bite into the electorate of the mainstream right-wing parties after 1986, but there was no way he could have known that in 1958. If Pinel’s memory was accurate, Mitterrand presumably had in mind some other means of eroding the Right’s support, but it is not clear what. The one prediction that was not realised was that he would ‘govern from the centre’. When he became President in 1981, Mitterrand governed from the Left.

  41. Lefranc, Pierre, Avec qui vous savez, Plon, 1979, p. 129.

  42. The concept of the ‘reserved domain’, initially called the ‘presidential sector’, was first put forward in September 1959 by Jacques Chaban-Delmas, at that time President of the National Assembly.

  7: Crossing the Desert

  1. ‘Speech to the National Council of the UDSR’, May 18 1957, in CHAN, carton 412AP15 [2UDSR15 Dossier 2].

  2. The General proposed that a vote be taken four years after the fighting ‘ended’ – that being defined as meaning fewer than 200 deaths from terrorist attacks a year.

  3. Both Mitterrand and Bourgès-Maunoury had voted against de Gaulle’s return to power and against the new constitution. When Pesquet met Bourgès, he identified himself as a supporter of ‘French Algeria’ and told him that a wave of assassinations of prominent Gaullists and Fourth Republic leaders – including de Gaulle, Debré, Chaban Delmas and others – was imminent. He had come to warn him to take precautions, he added, because he approved of Bourgès’s anti-Gaullist stance. There was no discussion of faking an assassination attempt. Pesquet afterwards minimised the importance of their meeting, claiming, untruthfully, that he had wanted to see Bourgès on a matter unrelated to the political situation. Why Pesquet sought out the former Prime Minister has never been satisfactorily explained. The most plausible theory is that it was a trial run to see how a prominent politician, and the authorities, would react to a specific threat against named individuals. But it is also possible that it was a separate initiative, relating instead to some other projected machination which was afterwards abandoned.

  4. In his speech, Mitterrand alluded to the fact that the government had concealed for two weeks Bourgès-Maunoury’s meeting with Pesquet – a dissimulation which, if not ordered by Debré, certainly had his approval. ‘For my part,’ Mitterrand told the Senate, ‘I will not qualify the government’s omission [to inform the magistrate] as “contempt of court”, because I, unlike [Mr Debré], do not make accusations before I have made enquiries.’

  5. That day Debré told reporters: ‘Mr Mitterrand lied, yet again.’ A week later he offered a different version: it was true that they had met, he said, but he had not requested the meeting and it had taken place at the Senate, not the Ministry of Justice. He repeated this under oath three years later at the trial of General Salan, stating that in the course of their discussion Mitterrand ‘reassured me and told me that he would easily dispose of these accusations’. In his memoirs, written in the 1980s, he reverted to his initial denial, insisting that no meeting had ever taken place.

  6. According to Pesquet, Adolphe Touffait, the prosecutor for the département of the Seine, which included Paris, was a family friend. By his account, Touffait, allegedly at the request of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, designated André Braunschweig, who had served in the army with Pesquet in 1939, to be the investigating magistrate
.

  7. If it is accepted that Debré’s motive was not the Bazooka Affair, the only other possible reason for him to have set Pesquet on to Mitterrand would have been the desire to humiliate a political opponent. But Mitterrand, in 1959, at a time when the government was facing enormous problems in Algeria, was hardly important enough to warrant such attention. He was a gadfly, but no more. Moreover, if Debré was manipulating Pesquet with a view to discrediting the opposition, why was Bourgès-Maunoury – a man who was in no way a threat to the government – the initial target? Such a scenario is too improbable to take seriously.

  8. More than ten years later, President Georges Pompidou declared an amnesty for this and other cases, which finally brought the proceedings to a close.

  9. Pesquet told Alain Simon, who by 1965 had replaced Braunschweig, that Tixier-Vignancour had manipulated him throughout. Later he claimed that while Tixier had been involved in the plot, the principal authors were Debré and his close aide, Christian de la Malène. Pesquet’s variable-geometry accusations, each more improbable than the one before, read like pulp fiction. Where Baranès, the initiator of the ‘Leaks Affair’, was a confidence trickster primarily interested in money, Pesquet was a mythomaniac. But his claim that Tixier had been the mastermind is plausible.

  10. There were other troubling coincidences. Tixier’s name had been cited in the ‘Leaks Affair’ in 1954. Another protagonist of that period, the former police commissioner, Jean Dides, knew that the ‘assassination attempt’ had been faked on Tuesday, October 20, at least 36 hours before Pesquet made it public. So did Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former parachutist in Algeria who had known Pesquet when they were both Poujadist MPs. The first public reference to Pesquet’s role appeared in l’Aurore on the morning of Wednesday, October 21, which meant the newspaper must have had the information at the latest the previous evening. Pesquet testified before Braunschweig on Thursday, October 22, and gave a press conference the same day.

  11. The term ‘Young Turk’ was originally applied to those, including Mendès France, who tried to rejuvenate the Radical Party in the 1930s. Hernu and others of the succeeding generation sought to do the same in the 1950s. Mitterrand contributed to the journal, Le Jacobin, which Hernu launched in 1951, but the two men became close only after 1959.

  12. André Rousselet and Charles Moulin remembered a similar, smaller meeting having been held in a hotel at the Place de la République in Paris some time before the gathering at Poigny.

  13. L’Express, January 11 1996.

  14. When Queen Elizabeth II visited Paris in 1957, Danielle was commissioned to undertake the gilded leather binding for a presentation volume commemorating her stay.

  15. Robert Schneider, in a carefully researched account of Mitterrand’s family, claimed that in the late 1950s Danielle had told François that she wanted a divorce, but that he had refused for fear that it would harm his career. When I asked her about Schneider’s assertion, she answered immediately: ‘Oh, no. No. I haven’t read that book, but I never said that to [François]. Nor did he ever ask me [for a divorce].’ Given the openness with which she addressed their decision to ‘live separate lives’ and the fact that the only two people who knew for certain what was said between them were Danielle and François themselves, I see no reason to disbelieve her.

  16. He wrote after his return that, whatever precautions the Chinese authorities might have taken, ‘it would be inconceivable that, if a murderous famine existed in the interior provinces, there would be no sign of it in the big cities and the over-populated countryside of the eastern seaboard. No matter how powerful the Communist Party may be, it is incapable of keeping a starving population behind some latter-day Great Wall in order to deceive the guests it invites . . . While I saw nowhere euphoria or prosperity, nor did I see anywhere physiological misery and the horrible marks of hunger.’ Twenty years later, after Mao’s death, China acknowledged that the famine had indeed claimed tens of millions of lives, which the Communist Party had hidden from foreign visitors.

  17. Years later, Anne suggested calling their daughter Pascale. Mitterrand rejected the name but did not explain why. Afterwards she learnt by chance from a mutual friend of his first son’s death. Mitterrand never spoke of it to her, but when, in 1977, his first granddaughter was born, she was named Pascale in his memory.

  18. Lacouture, Jean, De Gaulle, Vol. 3, Seuil, 1986, p. 167.

  8: De Gaulle Again

  1. John Clark of the Labour Party’s International Department recognised early on the importance of the French clubs and became friendly with Charles Hernu. In the early 1960s, he organised a visit to London by a delegation including Hernu and Mitterrand, who spoke at a conference attended by Labour Party luminaries at the House of Commons. The President of the LCR, Ludovic Tron, was one of the few senators who had voted against lifting Mitterrand’s parliamentary immunity in November 1959.

  2. Journal officiel (Sénat), July 17 1962.

  3. A number of presidential candidates, including Mitterrand in 1981, promised constitutional revisions, but the only changes to date were made in 2000, when Jacques Chirac reduced the presidential term from seven years to five, and in 2008, when Nicolas Sarkozy managed, by the slimmest of margins – a single vote – to pass a series of largely symbolic measures whose stated purpose was to make the constitution more modern.

  4. The Council’s ruling against the Military Court caused, in its own words, ‘[such] very strong tension [with] General de Gaulle . . . that it seemed for a moment to be threatened, if not in its existence, at least in its role and attributions’. Likewise after Gaston Monnerville had spoken out against de Gaulle’s constitutional revision, the General refused to shake hands with him, banned him from visiting the Elysée and ordered the government to keep its dealings with the Senate to a minimum until Monnerville stepped down, six years later. Such pettiness did not enhance de Gaulle’s reputation, but it was part of the package that made up his character, just as duplicity was part of Mitterrand’s. In another example involving the Council of State, the Culture Minister, André Malraux, had tried in 1959 to dismiss the director of the national theatre, the Comédie Française. When the Council ruled the dismissal illegal, Malraux changed the theatre’s statutes and tried again to dismiss the director, only to be told that his actions were once again illegal, because he was ‘trying to allow the government to escape the authority of the courts’.

  5. De Gaulle underwent a successful prostate operation in April 1964.

  6. The General’s references to mortality were legion, from his angry retort to Mitterrand in May 1958, ‘You want my death!’ to his proposal on September 20 1962 that ‘if death or illness interrupt my mandate’ the next President should be elected by direct suffrage. They became almost obsessive after the death of his brother, Pierre, to whom he had been extremely close, in 1959.

  7. The text of Saint-Just’s speech was posted up in towns all over France. He was guillotined with Robespierre and other Jacobins in 1794.

  8. Mitterrand, François, Le Coup d’État permanent, Plon, 1964, pp. 29–31 & 47.

  9. Ibid., pp. 153–7.

  10. Passeron, André, De Gaulle parle, 1962– 1966, Fayard, 1966, p. 92.

  11. Mitterrand, Le Coup d’État permanent, pp. 74 & 106.

  12. Journal officiel, April 24 1964.

  13. Franz-Olivier Giesbert, whose study of this period is the most complete to date, has raised the intriguing question of whether Mitterrand was already in 1958 looking ahead to the possibility of a United Front between the Communists and the non-communist Left. There were certainly straws in the wind pointing in that direction. Maurice Thorez had been calling since May 1958 for a government of union with communist participation. That same year the extreme Right – as ever! – accused Mitterrand of favouring such an arrangement. The avant-garde of the non-communist Left was also discussing, in coded language, the possibility of a Union of the Left. Moreover Mitterrand’s puzzling conversation with René Coty on May 31 1958 would
be much more understandable if Coty’s question had been, ‘Will you accept communist ministers?’ However, every version Mitterrand ever gave of their discussion referred not to ministers but to votes. All that can be said is that there is no convincing evidence that Mitterrand was thinking in ‘United Front’ terms before 1962. Most of the elements which would eventually lead him to an alliance with the Communists were already present in 1958. But he seems not to have reached a firm conclusion until three or four years later.

  14. Courrier de la Nièvre, September 28 1963.

  15. Claude Estier recalled Mitterrand telling him at the beginning of 1965, when Defferre’s campaign was already faltering, that he was thinking of standing as a candidate that year. Mitterrand himself wrote afterwards that ‘since 1962, that is to say, since it was decided that the election of the President of the Republic would be conducted by universal suffrage, I knew that I would be a candidate. When? How? I could not foretell.’

  16. Mitterrand first sounded out the Party’s intentions in June through a communist lawyer, Jules Borker, who was a member of Colloques Juridiques, a political club of which Charles Hernu was Secretary-General. Other contacts followed in July and August, notably between Claude Estier and Waldeck Rochet.

  17. Mitterrand wrote later that, before announcing his candidature, he had received assurances from both Maurice Faure and Daniel Mayer that they would not stand against him. Mayer came out publicly in support of Mitterrand on September 25. Faure’s name was still being mentioned as one of Guy Mollet’s preferred candidates at the beginning of October.

  18. Unknown to Mollet, Mitterrand had had a meeting with Pinay on September 15, arranged by his brother, Robert, at which he persuaded the former Prime Minister that, if he stood, he risked being eliminated in the first round.

  19. Le Nouvel Observateur, October 27 1965.

  20. Mendès’s son-in-law and biographer, François Stasse, attributed his reluctance to work actively for Mitterrand’s election – other than by giving verbal support, most notably in his interview with the Nouvel Observateur – to the fact that Mitterrand had no clear programme and that, in Mendès’s view, policies were more important than personalities. That may have been a factor. But was it sufficient to explain his extraordinary behaviour between the two rounds of voting, when he refused to attend Mitterrand’s campaign rallies on the pretext of previous engagements? Twenty years later, long after Mendès’s death, that still rankled with Mitterrand. Laurence Soudet, who had worked with Mendès for almost a decade before joining Mitterrand’s campaign team, insisted that, despite the two men’s differences, Mendès was ‘totally behind [him] in 1965. Totally . . . He told me: “Work for him full-time.” All of Mendès’s team, or at least [most of it], worked on the campaign.’ But apparently, for Mendès, putting all his resources at Mitterrand’s disposal and campaigning personally were two different things.