The Mitterrand paradox

The Mitterrand paradox

François Mitterrand, September 1953

Book Details

Philip Short

MITTERRAND

A study in ambiguity
692pp. Bodley Head. £30.
978 1 84792 006 5

A study of the 'absolute narcissist'

SUDHIR HAZAREESINGH

François Mitterrand was one of the most emblematic – and enigmatic – figures in French politics during the second half of the twentieth century. His career began right after the Second World War, when he was the youngest minister to hold office since the French Revolution; he served in eleven cabinets under the Fourth Republic, and thereafter became one of the principal leaders of the progressive opposition to the Gaullist Fifth Republic. After two unsuccessful attempts in 1965 and 1974, he was elected to the French Presidency in 1981. By the time he retired in 1995, he had become the very symbol of institutional continuity and political longevity: his was the longest period of rule since the reigns of Napoleon III and Louis Philippe. The comparison with the golden age of Bonapartism and Orleanism in the nineteenth century is apposite in more ways than one: both in its substance and its style, this first Socialist presidency marked the apogee of the republican monarchy in France – a delicious irony given that one of Mitterrand's most captivating pamphlets in the early years of the Fifth Republic was Le Coup d'état permanent, in which he vigorously denounced the excessive concentration of power in the hands of the executive. This is precisely the kind of paradox which makes Mitterrand such an appetizing subject for a biographer: hence the well-taken reference to "ambiguity" in Philip Short's subtitle.

Raised in a conservative provincial Catholic family where showing one's emotions was frowned upon, Mitterrand was renowned for his aloofness and sense of detachment, compounding his inscrutability with an aura of mystery – as attested by such nicknames as the Florentine (which dates back to his school days) and the Sphinx. As a politician he was supremely gifted at concealing his hand, thriving in the murky years of the Occupation, when he long maintained a foot in both the Vichy and Resistance camps (he was decorated by Pétain, but later became an active figure in the underground movement in France). He was likewise in his element in the mercurial atmosphere of the Fourth Republic, with its plots, scandals and dodgy politicians, and in the no less labyrinthine world of French socialism, where he achieved the singular feat of capturing the Socialist leadership in 1971 without ever having joined the party. Similarly, as President, he was at his most effective during the first period of "cohabitation" government between Left and Right: though deprived of many of his formal powers, he successfully drew on his Machiavellian skills to outflank and eventually neutralize his opponents. Most remarkable of all was his capacity to compartmentalize his public and private lives. His staff at the Élysée Palace was completely balkanized, each person reporting directly to him, with little idea of what his overall priorities were, or indeed what he made of their work: his typical comment, scribbled on the margin of their submissions, was "vu" (seen). For most of the post-war decades, he successfully concealed his extreme right-wing sympathies during the 1930s. He also hid the fact that he had been diagnosed with (and treated for) advanced prostate cancer in the early 1980s, after his election to the presidency – even from his wife Danielle. His private life was, to put it mildly, unconventional: Danielle's lover Jean Balenci for a while lived with the Mitterrands in their home in Paris (he would fetch the papers in the morning and have breakfast with François). Alongside his official family, and the inevitable retinue of mistresses, François also shared his life with Anne Pingeot, who was twenty years younger than him and with whom he had a child, Mazarine. Her existence was revealed to the wider public only in late 1994, when Paris-Match published photographs of the President with his daughter.

Short's narrative is well paced and finely textured, and what emerges is a subtle and engaging portrait of Mitterrand's complex personality. The author was able to speak to many members of his inner circle – including the two leading women in his life – and he makes particularly effective use of this material. So for example when Anne Pingeot remarks that "distance" was Mitterrand's "supreme talent", one gets the full measure of his elusiveness, but also his capacity to inflict ineffable pain even on those he professed to care about. Short does not hide his admiration for Mitterrand, and sometimes tries too hard to defend his hero, as in his somewhat improbable claim that the future President did not hold racially prejudiced and anti-Semitic views in the 1930s, or when the author tries to invoke Mitterrand's "confusion" to excuse his web of compromising ties with Vichy. Also disingenuous is the account of the 1959 Observatory scandal, in which Mitterrand colluded in a fake assassination attempt against himself in an effort to revive his flagging political career: Short speaks of his being "betrayed" by his friends, as though he was somehow a passive victim. In reality, it was Mitterrand who had abused the trust of the public on this occasion (and it would not be the last time). Yet an equally important measure of a political figure's character is how he faces up to adversity, and in this respect Mitterrand was exceptionally impressive. Time and again, he was written off as a "man of the past" by his opponents, both on the Right and Left. But it was his challengers who finished on the scrapheap of history: among those he saw off were Guy Mollet and the discredited leadership of the old Socialist party; the Communists, who thought they had the measure of this economically illiterate bourgeois politician, and ended up being destroyed by his poisonous embrace; Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, whose lofty aristocratic arrogance he cleverly exploited to his own advantage; Jacques Chirac, whose impulsive naivety was no match for his cold and devious scheming; and Michel Rocard and his modernizing "deuxième gauche", swept away by Mitterrand's effective (if completely phoney) neo-Marxist rhetoric about the need for a "rupture with capitalism". Nowhere was Mitterrand's steely determination more heroically, and hauntingly, displayed than in his dance with death in those final, agonizing months of his presidency in 1994–5, when he completed his second term as President against all the odds; he died in January 1996.

Mitterrand was not only a consummate political operator: he left his mark on the Fifth Republic, notably with the abolition of the death penalty, the introduction of greater self-government at local level, and the promotion of greater European integration. But Short exaggerates considerably when he asserts that Mitterrand changed France more fundamentally than any other modern leader. His greatest constitutional innovation, the two periods of cohabitation government between Left and Right, were marked not just by a characteristically Mitterrandian ambiguity, but by widespread intellectual confusion and political stasis, and a growing public disaffection with French elites. In retrospect, this was the moment when post-1958 France came closest to lurching back towards the untidy shambles of the Fourth Republic, and it was not surprising that the Constitution was subsequently amended to make such a political configuration much less likely in the future. But there was worse. As a statesman, Mitterrand lacked something essential: that moral and political bedrock which all truly great French leaders possessed – whether it was Maximilien Robespierre's austere sense of virtue, Napoleon Bonaparte's formidable intellectual energy, Léon Gambetta's mystical communion with the republican ideal, Jean Jaurès's soaring sense of humanity, or Charles de Gaulle's consuming passion for France's destiny. To make the point more bluntly, Mitterrand's overriding obsession was with himself. As he once admitted in a letter: "I believe in no one". He was the absolute narcissist, always late for meetings because of his ultimate contempt for others, and his belief that the world was there to serve his interests.

And so all other considerations were subordinated to his personal ambition. As Justice Minister at the height of the Algerian war, he remained silent as thousands of Algerian patriots were tortured and murdered by the French Army – the only reason being his hope that he might be appointed Prime Minister. He became a Socialist not out of ideological principle or moral conviction, but because he realized this was his only viable path to the French presidency. He did not hesitate to facilitate the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National (by introducing proportional representation for the parliamentary elections of 1986) because he hoped the extreme Right would split the conservative vote, and thus allow him to retain a majority in the National Assembly. Once socialism became an obstacle to his retention of power in the mid-1980s, he discarded it without so much as an afterthought (Short's claim that Mitterrand had a lifelong commitment to "social justice" is almost comical; the gap between rich and poor in France grew wider after his fourteen years in office). He left the Socialist party bereft of any doctrine, weighed down by political and financial scandals, and in the hands of a cynically technocratic leadership fixated only with capturing national power. In this essential respect, there is little room for ambiguity: Mitterrand destroyed the soul of the French socialist movement, and it is still struggling to recover from his toxic legacy.