by Philip Short
21. Mitterrand, Ma part de vérité, p. 47.
22. According to Laurence Soudet, the office in the rue du Louvre had originally belonged to the UDSR but after the party collapsed in the early 1960s, Mitterrand had sublet it to her to produce Mendès’s journal, Les Cahiers de la République. Mitterrand took it back for the duration of the campaign.
23. Alain Peyrefitte, the Information Minister, had tried hard to prevent it, telling the heads of French television and the radio stations, all of which were under state control, that ‘the General, considering that he already has historical legitimacy, has decided not to campaign on radio or television . . . In order to maintain equality of chances, you are asked not to broadcast the voices of any of the other candidates.’ Threatened with a strike, Peyrefitte backed down. Each candidate was allowed two hours of air time. Georges Fillioud, then editor-in-chief of the radio station, Europe 1, was among those who rejected Peyrefitte’s proposal. After the election he was fired on the instructions of de Gaulle’s communications adviser, Pierre Lefranc.
24. At a Cabinet meeting on December 8, de Gaulle acknowledged: ‘I was mistaken. It was I, and I alone, who confused election and referendum.’
25. There could have been no greater contrast with the attitude of Pierre Mendès France, who in 1954 had announced that he would refuse the Communists’ support, even if they voted for him, because he disagreed with their policies. Mitterrand said afterwards he felt Mendès had been wrong: the Communists had asked for nothing in return, so why reject their votes? His attitude to the extreme Right in 1965 was the same. Jean Lacouture wondered whether he lost more votes from ‘democrats’ – meaning those from the Centre and the Centre-Left – than he gained from Tixier’s supporters, but the results appeared to show that he did not. The episode gave André Malraux the occasion for a quip at Mitterrand’s expense, deploring that he was ‘the candidate of the three Lefts, one of which is on the extreme Right’.
26. The ‘seven fundamental options’ of Mitterrand’s campaign, announced at his press conference on September 21 1965, included ‘genuine democracy; expansion and progress; the building of the European Community; social justice; and basic freedoms’. It would be hard to be more bland.
27. In the parliamentary elections in 1962, left-wing candidates had received 8.15 million votes, equivalent to 10.2 million in 1965 had the abstention rates been the same; in 1967, the total would be 10 million with a slightly lower turnout, equivalent to 10.4 million with the same abstention rate. Mitterrand in 1965 received 7.7 million in the first round (and 10.6 million in the second round, when he benefited from the votes of the anti-Gaullist Centre and Right). The first-round shortfall, 2.5 or 2.7 million, or three million by an alternative calculation based on individual constituencies, represented the number of left-wing voters who stayed at home, cast blank votes or supported de Gaulle. The last group were estimated at 500–800,000.
28. To this end Mitterrand proposed the creation of a shadow Cabinet on the British model to provide spokesmen who would counter Gaullist policies in parliament and put forward alternatives. Guy Mollet on behalf of the Socialists and René Billères for the Radicals reluctantly agreed on condition that they had the final say over the naming of the shadow ministers. The result was a dosage of posts – Mollet as shadow Foreign and Defence Minister; a Radical Party leader for Planning and Public Works; a member of Mitterrand’s Convention for Economic Affairs – that was lampooned in the press as a return to the bad old ways of the Fourth Republic. There was another, more fundamental reason why the shadow Cabinet was a flop. Such a system worked when the opposition, as in Britain, was united. The Federation was not.
29. The first time had been in July 1934, when the Socialists and the Communists signed a unity pact against fascism which led two years later to the formation of the Popular Front. The pact collapsed at the end of 1938.
30. When Mauroy suggested, at the meeting on March 16, that the components of the Federation fuse into a single party, Mollet whispered to Mitterrand, ‘Don’t take that seriously. He’s young, he has no authority to say that.’ Charles Hernu commented: ‘The Federation is dead.’
31. Anne Pingeot, interview, March 25 2013.
32. When Mitterrand bought it in 1965, the gallery, or loggia, led to an attic under the eaves, hardly tall enough to stand up in. Danielle kept the gallery, installing a television set and a couple of easy chairs, but opened up the rest to give the house more volume.
33. Since their marriage, they had lived at Auteuil, at Neuilly and in the Latin Quarter, each time in comfortable, standard-issue bourgeois Parisian apartments. The small seaside villa they had built at Hossegor was practical but characterless. Latche was a real home.
34. This sometimes took absurd forms. Anne called it Latché, with an accent on the final syllable, which was how the locals had referred to it before the Mitterrands took possession. Danielle insisted that it should be Latche, with no accent (which is how it is spelt here on the grounds that, whatever the etymology, the owner has the final say over what a house should be called). In the abundant literature in France on the Mitterrands’ retreat, half the authors – including Danielle’s brother-in-law, Roger Hanin – use the accent; the other half do not. (Similar controversy, though for different reasons, surrounds the spelling of Touvent. The road sign by the hamlet says ‘Toutvent’; the Mitterrands called it Touvent. Such discrepancies, stemming from the differences between the old southern and northern languages, the langue d’oc and the langue d’oï, are not unusual in France.)
35. They stayed at l’Ombrellino in 1970, to celebrate Anne’s passing the concours to become a museum curator, and returned frequently to Italy thereafter.
36. The figure of one million was given by the CFDT. The police estimated 300,000. Two and a half weeks later, on May 30, the Gaullists claimed a million participants in their counter-demonstration while the police estimated a third of that number.
37. Mitterrand addressed meetings at Vichy on May 5, at Chambéry on May 10 – the night when the worst rioting occurred and Charles Hernu urged him, without success, to return to Paris at once – and then in Gap, Digne, Niort, and Château-Chinon. He claimed later that in these speeches (of which no texts survive) he spoke of the social and political changes which the agitation portended, adding that while ‘youth is not always right, . . . society is always wrong to strike back’.
38. At a meeting on the evening of May 13, Cohn-Bendit denounced a long list of politicians, including Mitterrand, before adding: ‘but that one might at a pinch be useful to us’.
39. Mendès maintained that he had not been informed beforehand. Claude Estier, however, remembered having been sent to Mendès’s home on the morning of May 28 to give him an advance copy of the statement Mitterrand would make.
40. François Flohic wrote afterwards that Massu’s intervention was ‘decisive’.
41. Jean Lacouture’s interpretation was that de Gaulle flew to Baden Baden in order to ‘take everyone by surprise’. The General himself later acknowledged that he had had several options in mind: to resign his post and retire; to withdraw for a time and reflect while seeing how France would react; and to use Massu as a sounding board to evaluate his choices. But ‘creating a surprise’ was not among them: the surprise was incidental, not the purpose of the manoeuvre.
42. On May 13 1958, the night of the barricades in Algiers paved the way for de Gaulle’s return to power. On May 13 1968, ten days of student demonstrations peaked with a million-strong march across Paris. On May 29 1958 Coty summoned de Gaulle from retirement; he was sworn in on June 1. On May 30 1968, the demonstrations on the Champs-Elysées signalled that de Gaulle was back in control; a month later he obtained an unassailable parliamentary majority.
43. In an interview some months later, Mitterrand maintained: ‘I have never been against [the movement]. If I was outraged by certain errors of leadership on the part of the students’ chiefs, I never dreamed of being against the youth as others were, o
n the Right.’
44. Gaullist propaganda, he wrote, had ‘lied about the events of May as no one has been able to lie since Goebbels’. The June elections were no more honest than ‘elections under Franco.’
9: Union of the Left
1. Mitterrand, Ma part de vérité, pp. 163–8.
2. Mitterrand wrote in 1969: ‘Over twenty-five years, as I observed our society, I often believed that under the pressure of rival interests it was changing. Today I have to admit that nothing whatever has changed anything . . . This implacable [resistance to change] is a constant of capitalist society.’ (Emphasis added)
3. ‘Speech to the Socialist Party Congress’, June 13 1971, in Mitterrand, Politique, Vol. 1, pp. 531–42.
4. Ibid.
5. Under an agreement signed in February 1968, the Communists and the FGDS undertook ‘to examine together measures to be taken to prevent attempts of whatever kind to stop a government of the Left from implementing its programme’. Despite the convoluted wording, it was the first time the Communists and the non-communist Left had gone beyond a simple electoral accord and it marked an important step towards an eventual alliance – or would have done, had it not been overtaken by the events of May and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
6. Giesbert, Mitterrand: une vie, p. 260 and Poperen, Jean, l’Unité de la gauche (1965–1973), Fayard, 1975, p. 393.
7. Cited in Nay, Catherine, Le noir et le rouge, Grasset, 1984, p. 203.
8. In 1969 Guy Mollet’s party claimed to have some 87,000 members, a figure reduced to 70,000 during the preparatory negotiations for Épinay. The Convention claimed 10,000 members. In reality, according to Mitterrand, the Socialists had 56,000 members at Épinay and the Convention, 8,000. The new party born of their merger claimed more than 80,000 members at the end of 1971 and 100,000 a year later.
9. Roland Dumas offered a similar judgement: ‘I do not know whether François Mitterrand was at the bottom of his heart a man of the Left,’ he wrote, ‘but I can testify that, in politics, he behaved like a man of the Left.’
10. L’Expansion, July–August 1972.
11. According to Roland Leroy, who was present that night, Mitterrand was ‘shattered’ by the result. When he arrived at the Tour Montparnasse his first words were ‘Those who no longer believe may leave.’
12. Mitterrand had announced that, if elected, he would name a Socialist Prime Minister. Defferre, as a known moderate with plenty of government experience behind him, was the obvious choice to reassure opinion ahead of the parliamentary elections which would have to follow. The same logic made Mendès France an ideal candidate for the Foreign Ministry. Marchais had made clear that the Communists would not ask for any of the four key ministries – Defence, Foreign Affairs, Interior or Justice – but, like the Socialists’ other allies, they would expect a role appropriate to their status.
13. Cited in Giesbert, Mitterrand: une vie, p. 277.
14. Ibid., pp. 295–6.
15. Mitterrand formed a limited partnership with Roland Dumas to acquire the house and subsequently bought him out. Danielle, in her account of the purchase, did not mention Dumas’s participation. A simple oversight? Or did François omit to tell her that he had had to seek help from his wealthy friend and colleague?
16. Anne bought the apartment for 60,000 francs (£5,600 or US $13,000) in 1973, when prices were at rock bottom during the first Oil Shock. Her parents, who had at first been furious over her relationship with Mitterrand, were by then reconciled to the arrangement. She and François started building the house at Gordes in 1972.
17. Madeleine Séchan, a country doctor in the Luberon whom François and Anne met through Laurence Soudet, delivered the baby and declared the birth at the town hall the following day. One other couple were in on the secret: Charles Salzmann, who pioneered psephological analysis in France and would later become one of Mitterrand’s political advisers, and his wife, Monique.
18. Roland Dumas gave a vivid account of having met Mitterrand one day, when Mazarine was about a year old, pushing her in a pram along the banks of the Seine. ‘Solemnly, like a patriarch from the provinces,’ he recounted, ‘he showed me a small bundle wrapped up against the cold. [After a while] he raised his hat and went on his way. He did not say it was his daughter but I understood at once.’ The story is revealing not because it was true – Anne Pingeot demolished it in a few well-chosen words: ‘Are you out of your mind? Pushing a pram? In Paris? Never! That would be completely out of character’ – but because so many of Mitterrand’s colleagues liked to pretend afterwards that they had been in on the family secret. In reality, very few were.
19. Mexandeau dated their conversation to the first half of June. That month Mitterrand resumed his duties as First Secretary, which Pierre Mauroy had been carrying out on an acting basis. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when he decided to continue: it probably happened gradually in the course of the summer. By September, if not before, his mind was made up.
20. Mitterrand wrote later that relations between the two parties began to go downhill three or four months after the 1974 election. In fact the Communist Party had been divided from the outset on the usefulness of the alliance. One group in the leadership, headed by Marchais’s deputy, Roland Leroy, had made no secret of its hopes that Mitterrand’s election bid would fail. Leroy’s face ‘lit up’, Mitterrand remembered, when he learnt that the Left had obtained only 43 per cent of the vote in the first round, ‘not enough to win, just enough to believe it possible’. Marchais’s position was more difficult to decipher. He had put his weight as Secretary-General behind the Common Programme while making clear privately to his Politburo colleagues that he had doubts about the alliance. He apparently felt that he could turn the situation to his advantage regardless of whether Mitterrand won or lost.
21. Lucien Sève had written in l’Humanité before the second round that ‘each one [should] determine his position by himself in the voting booth’, thus implicitly authorising communist voters to ignore the Party’s official directive to support the candidate of the Union of the Left.
22. Giesbert, Mitterrand: une vie, pp. 280–81.
23. Robrieux was speaking in December 1977, but his conclusion, that ‘for the first time since 1917 Soviet Russia is afraid of a socialist experience developing on the [European] continent which will have the support of the Communists and will be able to invent a model of society different if not contrary to its own’, was the same as Mitterrand had brought back from Moscow two and a half years earlier.
24. The description, ‘rotund and orotund’, I owe to my friend, Stephen Jessel, who covered Barre’s premiership for the BBC in the late 1970s.
10: Politics is War
1. The expression fin de règne which I have translated here as ‘the end of a reign’ is usually rendered in English as ‘the end of an era’, but in the context in which Mauroy was speaking, he plainly intended the literal implication that Mitterrand’s ‘reign’ was drawing to a close.
2. The original ‘sabras’ were Jews born in Israel who had never known any other home. Mitterrand’s ‘sabras’ were Socialist Party members who had never belonged to any other movement. Technically that was not the case of Jospin, who had been a member of a Trotskyist group and of the PSU, but it was true of Fabius and Quilès.
3. In Beijing, where I was then working, that was the explanation current among the French community, made up at that time mainly of diplomats and journalists. The word from the French Embassy was that the visit was Mitterrand’s swansong. In one of those petty acts of vengeance which politicians or their acolytes are often unable to resist, the Ambassador, Claude Chayet, who had grown up in China and had won his spurs in the negotiations which ended the Algerian war, was afterwards blamed for the defeatist mood and sent to vegetate for the rest of his career at the Law of the Sea Conference in New York. Had Giscard won a second term, the sceptics would no doubt have been proved right. Mitterrand would have ended his career, like Guy Mollet before hi
m, as a back-bench MP.
4. Philippe Dechartre in http://www.gaulliste.org/documents/dechartre_1981.pdf.
5. Giscard asked Mitterrand to give the day’s rate for the franc against the mark. He told friends next day he had had the riposte on the tip of his tongue – ‘And the rate for diamonds, can you tell me that?’ – but had bitten back the words in order not to lower the tone of the debate.
11: The Novitiate
1. Edward Luttwak, a Georgetown University professor and one of Reagan’s foreign policy advisers, had met Mitterrand during the campaign and, on his return to Washington, had also vouched for his anti-Soviet credentials.
2. In the United States, this is not regarded as a handicap. In European democracies with parliamentary systems, an up-and-coming politician is usually expected first to win election as an MP; then to serve an apprenticeship as a junior minister; and only some years later to aspire to senior ministerial office. When François Hollande was elected in 2012, he became the first French President not to have been either a minister or an MP beforehand.