Mitterrand: A Study in Ambiguityby Philip Short (Bodley Head, £30)
In his magisterial history of the French left, the journalist Jacques Julliard tells an amusing story about a meeting that he arranged, some time in the early 1970s, between François Mitterrand, then First Secretary of the Socialist Party (PS), and Günter Grass, who’d been an advisor to the German Chancellor, Willy Brandt. Grass was expatiating on the need for a “return to Bernstein,” which puzzled Mitterrand. He wondered why the German novelist should be taking such an interest in Henri Bernstein, a popular French playwright of the interwar years for whom he felt mostly disdain.
As discreetly as he could, Julliard told Mitterrand that Grass was in fact talking about Eduard Bernstein, the former associate of Marx and Engels who, in the early 20th century, became the intellectual progenitor of revisionist social democracy.
The point of the story is to show how unfamiliar Mitterrand was with the “family traditions” of the left. Unlike his great rival for the leadership of the non-Communist left in the 1950s and 60s, Pierre Mendès France, Mitterrand was not born a man of the left; he had to become one. Philip Short’s extremely thorough new biography is designed to show how this “bourgeois intellectual from a solidly right-wing background” was able to save the French left from itself and become, in 1981, the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic.
Short’s subtitle is “A Study in Ambiguity,” and Mitterrand’s rare sinuousness, temperamental as well as ideological, is the leitmotif of the book. The satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné described Mitterrand, during his first run for President in 1965, as “so labyrinthine that he gets lost in his own diversions.” Laurent Fabius, Mitterrand’s dauphin who served under him as Prime Minister, attested to his “deep-seated metaphysical ambivalence” (not a phrase you can imagine one British politician uttering about another). Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist Prime Minister with whom Mitterrand was forced to endure an intermittently harmonious “cohabitation” between 1986 and 1988, advised a colleague to “never let Mitterrand impress you” and then exclaimed, with a mixture of frustration and admiration: “What an artist!”
Then there are Mitterrand’s more straightforward deceptions—the “Observatory affair” of 1959, for example, when he was accused of faking an attempt on his life by French Algerian extremists (the suspicion that Mitterrand set the whole thing up lingers to this day); the declaring of his cancer a state secret (he was diagnosed not long after becoming President); and the byzantine complexity of his personal life, including a second family whose existence he managed to keep from even his closest associates. As was the case with the Observatory affair, Mitterrand’s obfuscations often backfired and on several occasions led to a premature death sentence being pronounced on his political ambitions. There’s a whiff of Richard Nixon in this tale of serial defeat preceding belated triumph, though without the self-pity or the paranoia.
One consequence of the Observatory affair was that Mitterrand’s political past became the subject of intense public scrutiny and suspicion. It was alleged, for instance, that he had been a member in the mid-1930s of La Cagoule, a violent right-wing groupuscule responsible for bomb attacks on members of the political and financial elite. Short concludes that Mitterrand was not a member of La Cagoule, though a number of his intimates undoubtedly were. “Fidelity to his friends,” he suggests, trumped any misgivings Mitterrand might have had about their allegiances. It was his intellectual curiosity that led him to maintain an “eclectic range of contacts.”
That’s one way to describe the cranks and anti-semites in Mitterrand’s circle when he was a student, I suppose. And this is not the only occasion on which Short is more generous in his judgements than he might have been. The question of Mitterrand’s conduct under the Vichy regime during the Second World War is another.
After escaping from a German prisoner of war camp in the late autumn of 1941, Mitterrand went to Vichy to work for a veterans’ organisation. He was later awarded the Francisque, Marshal Pétain’s personal decoration. At the same time, Mitterrand was cultivating links with the resistance. “Was he keeping a foot in both camps?” Short asks. “Or, as he maintained later, using his official persona as a cover for resistance activities?” Neither, says Short. “He was horribly confused.” Evidently there were limits to Mitterrand’s cultivation of the pose of ambiguity. (Suspicions about Mitterrand’s calculations in Vichy dogged him until the end of his life. I remember arriving in Paris as a student in the autumn of 1994 to find the French capital horrified and enthralled by Pierre Péan’s book Une jeunesse française, which revealed Mitterrand’s enduring friendship with René Bousquet, the Vichy chief of police who had been responsible for rounding up French Jews for deportation.)
Short is right to point out, however, that many of those who condemned Mitterrand after the Péan revelations were looking back at Vichy and the resistance through the “comforting prism of Gaullist myth”—myths that Mitterrand himself spent a great deal of energy (as well as political capital) trying to undo. He always complained, with some justification, that there was a difference between resistance carried out on French territory and resistance conducted at a distance, from the safety of London and Algiers.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that his attitude towards General de Gaulle, both as a wartime commander and peacetime leader, helped to define Mitterrand politically after the war and, as Short argues, to propel him leftwards. During the chaotic, politically unstable years of the Fourth Republic, which lasted from 1946 until 1958, he belonged to the Union Démocratique Socialiste de la Résistance (UDSR), which, despite its name, was a broadly centrist grouping. It was only after de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958, at the behest of the military in the midst of the crisis in French Algeria, that Mitterrand threw in his lot definitively with the left (his colleagues in the UDSR supported the General).
Mitterrand denounced the “coup d’état” that had led to de Gaulle’s restoration. He would come to style himself, in Short’s words, as the “bête noire of the Gaullists” after the introduction of the constitution for the new Fifth Republic, which assigned extraordinary powers to the office of President. In 1964, Mitterrand published a book entitled Le coup d’Etat permanent, in which he accused de Gaulle of replacing the idea of democratic representation with that of the infallible strong man. His misgivings about the system notwithstanding, he ran for President the following year, and again in 1974, before he beat Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1981.
One of the great paradoxes of Mitterrand’s presidency is that once he was established in the Elysée Palace, he took advantage of the same quasi-imperial powers that he had denounced de Gaulle for introducing. During his election campaign, he had promised to restore to parliament its “constitutional rights,” but in practice he circumscribed its room for manoeuvre as assiduously as de Gaulle ever had.
Short gives an extremely vivid account of the way Mitterrand exercised the office of president, cultivating courtiers, manipulating cliques and dispensing favours. It was, he writes, “the stance of a sovereign.” One of the President’s advisors described exasperatedly how the system encouraged “agitated types of behaviour... excesses of love, unflagging admiration [and] theatrical displays of fidelity.”
When François Hollande promised, during the 2012 presidential election campaign, that he would be a “normal” president who would govern in the interests of the “exemplary republic,” it was assumed that he meant he was going to break with the hyperactive style of Nicolas Sarkozy. But, having worked as a special advisor at the Elysée in the early 1980s, he surely also had the Machiavellian excesses of the court of Mitterrand in mind.
The shadow of the “Florentine,” as Mitterrand was known, has loomed over Hollande’s presidency in other ways, too. March 2013 marked the 30th anniversary of the “turn to austerity,” when the Mitterrand government finally abandoned the statist model of economic management that it had adopted on coming to power. After 18 months of rising unemployment, high inflation and exchange-rate difficulties, Mitterrand knew that the franc would have to be devalued against the deutschmark yet again. The question was whether this would take place within the European Monetary System (EMS) or outside. The 10 days of fevered deliberation over this dilemma were, Short argues, “the most critical and among the most criticised” of his 14 years in power. Part of the problem was that Mitterrand had no interest in economics. One of his inner circle, Michel Rocard, complained that he was “allergic to economic and financial arguments.” Eventually the decision to remain in the EMS was taken and a package of spending cuts and tax rises put together by the Finance Minister, Jacques Delors, was approved.
Today, the PS is still divided between those—and Hollande is one of them—who regard the U-turn of 1983 as the beginning of political maturity and those, further to Hollande’s left, who see it as a historic mistake. As for Mitterrand, he lost interest in domestic questions once the decision to remain in the EMS had been taken. The project of European integration and France’s relationship with Germany came to consume him. But that, too, has turned out to be an ambiguous legacy.
In his magisterial history of the French left, the journalist Jacques Julliard tells an amusing story about a meeting that he arranged, some time in the early 1970s, between François Mitterrand, then First Secretary of the Socialist Party (PS), and Günter Grass, who’d been an advisor to the German Chancellor, Willy Brandt. Grass was expatiating on the need for a “return to Bernstein,” which puzzled Mitterrand. He wondered why the German novelist should be taking such an interest in Henri Bernstein, a popular French playwright of the interwar years for whom he felt mostly disdain.
As discreetly as he could, Julliard told Mitterrand that Grass was in fact talking about Eduard Bernstein, the former associate of Marx and Engels who, in the early 20th century, became the intellectual progenitor of revisionist social democracy.
The point of the story is to show how unfamiliar Mitterrand was with the “family traditions” of the left. Unlike his great rival for the leadership of the non-Communist left in the 1950s and 60s, Pierre Mendès France, Mitterrand was not born a man of the left; he had to become one. Philip Short’s extremely thorough new biography is designed to show how this “bourgeois intellectual from a solidly right-wing background” was able to save the French left from itself and become, in 1981, the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic.
Short’s subtitle is “A Study in Ambiguity,” and Mitterrand’s rare sinuousness, temperamental as well as ideological, is the leitmotif of the book. The satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné described Mitterrand, during his first run for President in 1965, as “so labyrinthine that he gets lost in his own diversions.” Laurent Fabius, Mitterrand’s dauphin who served under him as Prime Minister, attested to his “deep-seated metaphysical ambivalence” (not a phrase you can imagine one British politician uttering about another). Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist Prime Minister with whom Mitterrand was forced to endure an intermittently harmonious “cohabitation” between 1986 and 1988, advised a colleague to “never let Mitterrand impress you” and then exclaimed, with a mixture of frustration and admiration: “What an artist!”
Then there are Mitterrand’s more straightforward deceptions—the “Observatory affair” of 1959, for example, when he was accused of faking an attempt on his life by French Algerian extremists (the suspicion that Mitterrand set the whole thing up lingers to this day); the declaring of his cancer a state secret (he was diagnosed not long after becoming President); and the byzantine complexity of his personal life, including a second family whose existence he managed to keep from even his closest associates. As was the case with the Observatory affair, Mitterrand’s obfuscations often backfired and on several occasions led to a premature death sentence being pronounced on his political ambitions. There’s a whiff of Richard Nixon in this tale of serial defeat preceding belated triumph, though without the self-pity or the paranoia.
One consequence of the Observatory affair was that Mitterrand’s political past became the subject of intense public scrutiny and suspicion. It was alleged, for instance, that he had been a member in the mid-1930s of La Cagoule, a violent right-wing groupuscule responsible for bomb attacks on members of the political and financial elite. Short concludes that Mitterrand was not a member of La Cagoule, though a number of his intimates undoubtedly were. “Fidelity to his friends,” he suggests, trumped any misgivings Mitterrand might have had about their allegiances. It was his intellectual curiosity that led him to maintain an “eclectic range of contacts.”
That’s one way to describe the cranks and anti-semites in Mitterrand’s circle when he was a student, I suppose. And this is not the only occasion on which Short is more generous in his judgements than he might have been. The question of Mitterrand’s conduct under the Vichy regime during the Second World War is another.
After escaping from a German prisoner of war camp in the late autumn of 1941, Mitterrand went to Vichy to work for a veterans’ organisation. He was later awarded the Francisque, Marshal Pétain’s personal decoration. At the same time, Mitterrand was cultivating links with the resistance. “Was he keeping a foot in both camps?” Short asks. “Or, as he maintained later, using his official persona as a cover for resistance activities?” Neither, says Short. “He was horribly confused.” Evidently there were limits to Mitterrand’s cultivation of the pose of ambiguity. (Suspicions about Mitterrand’s calculations in Vichy dogged him until the end of his life. I remember arriving in Paris as a student in the autumn of 1994 to find the French capital horrified and enthralled by Pierre Péan’s book Une jeunesse française, which revealed Mitterrand’s enduring friendship with René Bousquet, the Vichy chief of police who had been responsible for rounding up French Jews for deportation.)
Short is right to point out, however, that many of those who condemned Mitterrand after the Péan revelations were looking back at Vichy and the resistance through the “comforting prism of Gaullist myth”—myths that Mitterrand himself spent a great deal of energy (as well as political capital) trying to undo. He always complained, with some justification, that there was a difference between resistance carried out on French territory and resistance conducted at a distance, from the safety of London and Algiers.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that his attitude towards General de Gaulle, both as a wartime commander and peacetime leader, helped to define Mitterrand politically after the war and, as Short argues, to propel him leftwards. During the chaotic, politically unstable years of the Fourth Republic, which lasted from 1946 until 1958, he belonged to the Union Démocratique Socialiste de la Résistance (UDSR), which, despite its name, was a broadly centrist grouping. It was only after de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958, at the behest of the military in the midst of the crisis in French Algeria, that Mitterrand threw in his lot definitively with the left (his colleagues in the UDSR supported the General).
Mitterrand denounced the “coup d’état” that had led to de Gaulle’s restoration. He would come to style himself, in Short’s words, as the “bête noire of the Gaullists” after the introduction of the constitution for the new Fifth Republic, which assigned extraordinary powers to the office of President. In 1964, Mitterrand published a book entitled Le coup d’Etat permanent, in which he accused de Gaulle of replacing the idea of democratic representation with that of the infallible strong man. His misgivings about the system notwithstanding, he ran for President the following year, and again in 1974, before he beat Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1981.
One of the great paradoxes of Mitterrand’s presidency is that once he was established in the Elysée Palace, he took advantage of the same quasi-imperial powers that he had denounced de Gaulle for introducing. During his election campaign, he had promised to restore to parliament its “constitutional rights,” but in practice he circumscribed its room for manoeuvre as assiduously as de Gaulle ever had.
Short gives an extremely vivid account of the way Mitterrand exercised the office of president, cultivating courtiers, manipulating cliques and dispensing favours. It was, he writes, “the stance of a sovereign.” One of the President’s advisors described exasperatedly how the system encouraged “agitated types of behaviour... excesses of love, unflagging admiration [and] theatrical displays of fidelity.”
When François Hollande promised, during the 2012 presidential election campaign, that he would be a “normal” president who would govern in the interests of the “exemplary republic,” it was assumed that he meant he was going to break with the hyperactive style of Nicolas Sarkozy. But, having worked as a special advisor at the Elysée in the early 1980s, he surely also had the Machiavellian excesses of the court of Mitterrand in mind.
The shadow of the “Florentine,” as Mitterrand was known, has loomed over Hollande’s presidency in other ways, too. March 2013 marked the 30th anniversary of the “turn to austerity,” when the Mitterrand government finally abandoned the statist model of economic management that it had adopted on coming to power. After 18 months of rising unemployment, high inflation and exchange-rate difficulties, Mitterrand knew that the franc would have to be devalued against the deutschmark yet again. The question was whether this would take place within the European Monetary System (EMS) or outside. The 10 days of fevered deliberation over this dilemma were, Short argues, “the most critical and among the most criticised” of his 14 years in power. Part of the problem was that Mitterrand had no interest in economics. One of his inner circle, Michel Rocard, complained that he was “allergic to economic and financial arguments.” Eventually the decision to remain in the EMS was taken and a package of spending cuts and tax rises put together by the Finance Minister, Jacques Delors, was approved.
Today, the PS is still divided between those—and Hollande is one of them—who regard the U-turn of 1983 as the beginning of political maturity and those, further to Hollande’s left, who see it as a historic mistake. As for Mitterrand, he lost interest in domestic questions once the decision to remain in the EMS had been taken. The project of European integration and France’s relationship with Germany came to consume him. But that, too, has turned out to be an ambiguous legacy.
