TWENTY
. . . Mitterrand as an individual incarnated the French people in all their shades of opinion, rules, certainties and misjudgements.
—from M. Maclean, The Mitterrand Years—Legacy and Evaluation
LIKE MANY OTHER FRENCH LEADERS in the past, “le grand Charles” left office largely unregretted. In the elections of June 1969, Georges Pompidou easily defeated his Socialist opponents. As he moved seamlessly into the Élysée, Gaullism carried on: “Le Roi est mort; vive le Roi!” Until de Gaulle brought him out of merchant banking to replace Debré in 1962, Pompidou had never been in politics. Born in 1911 of robust peasant stock in the Cantal, inheriting all its virtues, a plump, bonhomous, easygoing figure, he hated upheavals such as May 1968. He had been a schoolmaster until the Liberation, teaching at the Lycée Henri IV throughout the Occupation (he once reprimanded a pupil for taking down a portrait of Pétain). The mythology and pretensions of the Gaullist barons of the Resistance irritated him. After the Liberation, rising to be a director of Rothschilds, he found it a career that opened his eyes to what he called the “industrial imperative” for modernising France. For his prime minister, he selected Jacques Chaban-Delmas, a much-decorated Gaullist baron who had risen to the rank of brigadier-general aged twenty-nine, and had been Mayor of Bordeaux since 1947.
Derided in the latter years of the Gaullist regime as de Gaulle’s “poodle,” but out of favour with de Gaulle, who operated ruthlessly behind his back, Pompidou had nevertheless struggled on. Now Gaullist policies were faithfully followed under Pompidou: tweaking the tail of “Uncle Sam,” Pompidou pursued France’s goal of national independence between the two superpowers, and equally the Gaullist dream of a third force “super-power” Europe of 250 million people (led, of course, by France). The large part of French exports—notably arms—continued going to the Arab world (not least Iraq); Pompidou visited the Soviet Union three times, while Brezhnev came to France twice. But his Soviet policy got nowhere, whereas in a trip to Chicago in 1970 Pompidou was booed by a pro-Israeli demonstration, prompting Mme. Pompidou to return immediately to France, and blighting Franco-US relations. The only deviation from Gaullist foreign policy was to permit, under heavy pressure from the zealous pro-European Edward Heath, Britain at last to enter the marché commun, in 1973.
In September 1970, Chaban launched his American-style “New Society,” creating widespread interest but annoying Pompidou with its challenge to presidential policy. Two years later, under a cloud of tax evasion charges, Chaban was sacked. Otherwise, on the domestic front, dedicated to practical reform, Pompidou’s “industrial imperative” achieved the greatest successes of his period. If the well-favoured Pompidou resembled anyone, it would have to be Louis-Philippe’s François Guizot. Pompidou oversaw the culmination of what came to be known as the “Thirty Glorious Years.” These were years of unparalleled growth and prosperity, when—between 1946 and 1975—France’s population had risen by 12 million, equalling growth over the previous century and a half. To borrow Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s oft-miscontrued remark, France had “never had it so good.” The figures proved it: between 1960 and 1973 gross domestic product increased at an unprecedented annual rate of 5.8 per cent; between 1968 and 1973 France (now the fourth largest exporter in the world) doubled her exports, achieving the highest industrial growth rate in Europe. With living standards up by 25 per cent, France left Great Britain trailing, was now neck and neck with Germany, and had reached a level of technology achieved by the USA and Japan. In almost all sections of society, prosperity was now so visible that it gave an immense boost to the morale of ordinary Frenchmen and -women. Abroad, for perhaps the first time, France’s “techno-structure” was widely envied. Those French with a sense of history could see that, beyond Pompidou’s input, it might have had something to do with de Gaulle’s mystical resurrection of the grandeur de la France.
Consumerism took off. In 1964, only one in four French houses had a fridge; more than double that by 1972. Television, especially new colour television, made a huge impact; households with television rose from a wealthy minority of 13 per cent in 1960 to 80 per cent in 1974. It had become modern-day France’s equivalent of running water on every floor—or Henri IV’s historic ambition of a “chicken in every pot.” On 21 July 1969, 10 million viewers watched the US landing on the moon— with the result that Électricité de France had to switch on emergency power. Prosperity also revealed itself tangibly in the style of life. “Panty girdles” were replaced by panties tout court, while young men took to parading in open-neck shirts, le pull-over and suede “desert-boots.” The most powerful invasion of all, from the USA, came with the arrival of the blue jean, although the practical idea for denim had come centuries back “de Nîmes.” This was not the only loosening up in the pant department: in domestic life, surveys showed that, while in 1969, 17 per cent of couples had lived together before marriage, by 1974 this figure had risen to 37 per cent; while the increase in the rate of premarital conception had jumped from one child in five to one in four.
As of 1954, 58.6 per cent of the French lived in urban, or suburban, areas. By 1975, this figure had risen to 72.8 per cent; a staggering rate of increase of almost 2 per cent a year. A building “frenzy” gripped the country—not all of it by any means felicitous. Infamous high-rise suburbs, anathema to many, continued to girdle Paris, creating a new kind of slum that would have challenged a Haussmann; while in its very centre there shot up the barbaric Tour Montparnasse, “crushing the city” with its 210 metres. As mentioned previously, to link the new banlieues with the centre came the most brilliant, but formidably expensive, modern express rail system, the RER, envy of all Europe—certainly of perennially gummed-up London. Then there was the La Défense complex, dominating the view from the Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe, a great wind-tunnel, an arch commemorating no triumph in either battle or peace. The name of Pompidou was to be attached to only one (singularly unfortunate) building. A devotee of modern art, he will be forever associated with the appalling British-designed Centre Pompidou, built on the site of the former Halles. In 1990, a poll conducted among Parisians ranked it as the first monument they wished to see pulled down.
On 2 April 1974, stricken by cancer, which he had bravely struggled to conceal for over two years, Pompidou died in office. At the same time, France plunged into economic crisis, sparked off by soaring oil prices that had followed the Yom Kippur War (Pompidou had given clear support to the Egyptians, thereby increasing disfavour in Washington). So the era of conspicuous prosperity, the Thirty Glorious Years, expired with Pompidou.
THE UNSCHEDULED ELECTION caused by Pompidou’s untimely death brought in Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who had enraged de Gaulle in 1962 by founding a splinter party of independent republicans. A young man in a hurry to leap-frog Chaban, thus had he put himself forward clearly as a potential candidate for the presidency, with strong backing from private sector banks as well as senior civil servants. The 1974 election was a near-run thing. Against Mitterrand’s threat of a newly united left, Giscard nipped home with a mere 50.8 per cent of the vote.
Grandson of a member of Vichy’s National Council, Giscard (he allegedly added the “d’Estaing”) joined the French Army just in time for the invasion of Germany in December 1944. He married well, into the Schneider steel fortune, and became de Gaulle’s Minister of Finance at the youthful age of thirty-five, serving from 1962 to 1966, and again under Pompidou in 1969–74. As lean and ascetic as his predecessor was plump and comfortable, Giscard was a typical product of the elitist hautes écoles. He endeavoured to “demystify” the presidency by wearing a city plain suit instead of formal dress, and was wont to use the back door of the Élysée—notably on nocturnal trysts. But when it came to his pet subject, the economy, his arrogance knew (and continues to know) no bounds. I remember well an occasion, at a weekend in his country house, when his voice rose to a high pitch of indignation discussing his opposite number, Margaret Thatcher: “Why, cette Thatcher, cette dame—she even lectures to me, moi: on economics!”
He himself tended to talk down to the electorate much as a professor from the grandes écoles would have lectured his students. Vain and authoritarian, to some anglo-saxons he evoked Louis XIV. He interfered constantly with the daily running of affairs of the government, not only its composition. Giscard was in theory superbly equipped to deal with the economic problems he found; economics was, after all, his forte. But, because of the bad hand passed him by the oil price riggers of Arabia post-1973, in fact nothing went right. Giscard’s economic “Stabilisation Plan” failed; unemployment, negligible in the 1960s, soared to 1 million in 1975.81
In foreign affairs, he managed to infuriate the Americans by welcoming Ayatollah Khomeini in October 1978, and then went on, in the best Gaullist tradition, to refuse to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—and to sign an arms deal with Nicaragua. In Africa, he supported the hyper-corrupt leader of Zaire, Mobutu; while even more extraordinary was his patronage of Bokassa, handing him ff4 million for his Napoleonic-style coronation as emperor. Under him French troops had a disastrous involvement in Rwanda, finally withdrawing in disorder and failure in 1994.
At home, various architectural projets were launched during Giscard’s presidency—but none was to bear his name. Perhaps his chief epitaph was the extension of women’s rights, including the right to abortion. Giscard ended his term under a cloud of scandal concerning diamonds given him by the undesirable Bokassa. Never one to admit defeat, however, he went on to lend his expertise in economics—at high price—to the international lecture circuit, then to re-emerge in old age as father of the controversial EU “constitution.”
WITH THE END OF GISCARD’S TERM of office, in 1981, there also came to a close the Gaullist Fifth Republic. In the national elections of May-June of that year, François Mitterrand and his coalition of Socialists and Communists, the recently formed Union pour la Démocratie Française (UDF), boosted by the scandals that had beset the last days of Giscard, swept the board in a truly historic victory. They won with 51.75 per cent of the votes to Giscard’s 48.25 per cent. Under Mitterrand, the first Socialist president to be elected by universal suffrage, France would reach the very brink of the twenty-first century; his two-term span of fourteen years would exceed that of any twentieth-century French president including de Gaulle, and would also last longer than Napoleon’s term as emperor, while the changes it brought would compare to those occurring under the long-serving great sovereigns of the past, like Louis XIV. These were French leaders to whom this remarkable politician would be compared, in different ways.
The 1981 results were greeted with delirium across France. It was Mitterrand’s third attempt on the presidency. He was already sixty-four. Pompidou’s triumph in 1969 had seen the left in a disastrous predicament; but Mitterrand had come close to winning in 1974. This time, with consummate political skill, he had woven together a new Front Populaire of the two Socialist Parties and the Communists under its new secretary-general, Georges Marchais. The once mighty French Communist Party (PCF) had seen its share of the vote steadily decline, in tandem with the popularity of its icon, the Soviet Union. It had remained disastrously loyal—through Stalinism, Hungary, Prague, the revelations of Solzhenitsyn, and now Afghanistan and the menace to Poland’s Solidarity. The PCF’s continuing decline was swiftly to allay fears of the Communist tail wagging the Socialist dog. As an enticement, the party was offered four ministers in Mitterrand’s first government, but these would dwindle away along with its national support.
Mitterrand’s personal achievement in welding together his winning alliance was remarkable not least because he had done so using the mechanics of the Gaullist Fifth Republic. His victory represented the culmination of an extraordinary political odyssey. He was a man full of fascinating contradictions. Born in Jarnac but with roots in the Morvan, a poor rural area in the massif central, and a church-going Catholic, as a dreamy young student in 1934 Mitterrand had joined Colonel de la Rocque’s semi-fascist Croix de Feu. In 1939 he was called up, only to be wounded and taken prisoner in the debacle of 1940—significantly, close to the First World War battlefield of Verdun. That, the grimly symbolic name, was a factor that would never cease to preoccupy and haunt him.82 The war also brought an abrupt and sad end to a passionate first love affair. In prisoner-of-war camp, Mitterrand gained a reputation as an intellectual, giving a lecture on Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Somehow, in December 1941, he managed to escape, making his way back to Unoccupied France. There he joined the Vichy government, concerned notably with the plight of prisoners of war. Though he viewed the complexities of Vichy as “bedlam,” Mitterrand’s admiration for Pétain, primarily as the “Hero of Verdun,” was—and remained—eternal; he was photographed with Pétain and received Vichy’s Francisque medal—facts that were savagely held against him at the close of his life. He always steadfastly maintained: “I have nothing to be ashamed of.”
In June 1942 (like many other Vichyites), he joined the Resistance, still in his mid-twenties. By December the following year he had become important enough (despite his youth) to merit an audience with de Gaulle—and to order the assassination of a leading collaborator with the Gestapo. Explaining the transition years later, Mitterrand declared, baldly: “I became a résistant without any agonising.” Mitterrand seems to have had a good record in the Resistance; he was high on the Gestapo list, and more than once narrowly escaped arrest. It was here that he met and married Danielle. At the same time, among the varied and controversial friends he collected over the years was the dubious René Bousquet, and the writer Marguerite Duras, who herself had a curious relationship with a Gestapo chief.
To us anglo-saxons Mitterrand’s “reinvention” of himself during the war may seem hard to accept. How could one be anti-Nazi and pro-Vichy? Join the Resistance, and yet continue to be a diehard supporter of Pétain? But then, as we have seen, not all Frenchmen supported either Pétain or de Gaulle; the Resistance was a river that had many tributaries. The wartime enigma of Mitterrand is the essential conundrum of a whole generation of Frenchmen born in the First World War, adult in the Second World War and assuming power and responsibility in the post-1945 world. It is one that enfolds the whole story of wartime France, and is what makes Mitterrand so fascinating a personality, so central to this, or any, history of France.
Out of the war, and his experience with the internecine squabbles of the Resistance and its unpatriotic attachment to Moscow, Mitterrand emerged distrustful of the PCF, and a staunch anti-Communist. He admired American achievements but—with de Gaulle—mistrusted anglo-saxon“hegemonism.” In 1971, he visited Allende’s Chile and was so open in his admiration of Latin America’s first elected Marxist president in his defiance of “ Yanqui imperialism” that there were those who thought that Mitterrand in power would emulate the compañero Presidente. They misjudged their man. Though no longer an active Catholic, he would make an annual pilgrimage to his favourite shrine at Vézelay.
When the Algerian War exploded on France in November, as Minister of the Interior under Mendès-France his display of sturdy nationalism “The only possible declaration is war . . . for Algeria is France”1 was to blow back on Mitterrand in later years. As the Algerian War grew increasingly unpopular with the French electorate, subsequently he endeavoured to make himself appear as a left-wing hero against Algérie Française. But if he had one unwavering, fixed star during the post-war years it was Europeanism, frequently stating his conviction—based on his own wartime experiences—that “only European integration could replace European wars.”
In October 1959 Mitterrand’s access to power was seriously impeded by an extraordinary episode that smacked more of an Alain Delon gangster film than respectable political life. In the “Observatory Affair,” as it came to be known, Mitterrand claimed to have been narrowly missed in a machine-gunning attempt on his life. At the same time there were threats against his family. Out of the “affair” Mitterrand gained much publicity, and sympathetic support; until one of those involved, a shady figure called Pesquet, came forward to claim that the whole affair had been faked with his aid. An indictment against Mitterrand was eventually dropped, but the slur remained—indicating a shadowy side to his character.
During his long, prolonged, twenty-three years out of power in the Gaullist era, Mitterrand showed exceptional patience. An unshamed intellectual (something which, in France, was never marked against a politician), he developed a remarkable command of the language, with a cutting sense of humour. Yet he never came over as an inspiring leader. At only 5 feet 7 inches, not much taller than Napoleon, he was seen to compare poorly with a towering de Gaulle, the stately Pompidou and the cultivated patrician loftiness of a Giscard—not to mention Ronald Reagan’s lofty height, or the towering Helmut Kohl. When I met Mitterrand, in the “wilderness year” of 1973, at his house in Paris’ chic Rue de Bièvre, he struck me as being not noticeably Socialist, more a product of the affluent bourgeoisie, and not obviously electable; in fact I wrote him off as one of yesterday’s men. (On this last assessment I was proved totally wrong, eight years later.)
Nevertheless, as with so much of Mitterrand, his affinity with true Socialism was, to put it mildly, enigmatic. When he finally succeeded Mendès-France as leader in the 1970s, he made it immediately plain that he would sup with the Devil and make an electoral alliance with the Communists. The high-principled Mendès had always refused this, recalling how, in the 1930s, the then powerful Communist Party (PCF) had boasted that within the Front Populaire they would “pluck the Socialist chicken.” Contemptuous of the ability of the PC leaders, Mitterrand would soon firmly put the boot on the other foot. Scathingly, de Gaulle remarked of Mitterrand at the time of the 1965 elections that he “only had one thing going for him: ambition.” But it was this ambition that—endeavouring to appear as a man of the “real left”—would make Mitterrand and the alliance he cobbled together with the Communists electable in 1981. It became clear that he regarded the Socialist Party not as a vessel of holy doctrine, but rather as a weapon for securing a shift in political power that would bring the left to government. (Could similarities be drawn here with Tony Blair and Britain’s “New Labour”?) For all these reasons he was, not unfairly, nicknamed “the Florentine,” “the Medici” or “Machiavelli.” Les évènements of May 1968, revealing as they did serious chinks in the Gaullist armour, gave Mitterrand his first opening, but it would take him another thirteen years to attain power; even then he did not look an obvious winner.
WITH ALL THE ZEAL OF NEWLY EMPOWERED SOCIALISM, Mitterrand’s first government (including those four Communist ministers—much to the alarm of the French bourgeoisie, and Washington) set forth at a tremendous clip. Capital punishment was abolished, the most radical drive on decentralisation since the revolution was initiated, and widespread nationalisation of banks and major companies, as well as punitive taxes on wealth, were introduced. The most ambitious reform of terms of employment, the “Auroux Laws,” were promulgated—including a thirty-nine-hour week (though a further reduction to thirty-five hours was aimed at) and “workplace councils.” Economic planning came to the fore. On every aspect of the cultural scene, sweeping new measures were promoted under live-wire minister Jack Lang. Though, in opposition, Mitterrand had fought long and hard against the constitution of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, once in office he did nothing to amend it; rather he used the powers it provided to further his own purposes, showing himself resolutely set against all serious constitutional change. Thus imbued with the most wide-ranging authority of any western democracy, as one historian put it, “France became an enormous laboratory in which every aspect of national life came under the microscope.”2
The Socialist honeymoon of this leader who didn’t truly believe in Socialism lasted no more than a year and a half. Facts of life of the economy brought his dreams crashing. A massive balance of payments crisis, and a run on the franc, forced three consecutive, and panicky, devaluations of the currency between 1981 and 1983 (and two again in 1986–87). In March 1983 Mitterrand was forced to perform a radical U-turn, the most dramatic in all France’s post-war economic history, adopting a policy of economic rigueur—or austerity. It indicated that he had singularly failed to deliver his mandate of two years previously, and now he was abandoning most of the political programme. No lesser politician than Mitterrand could have got away with it, and yet continued to claim that he was “working for Socialism.” The Auroux Laws were seen to have caused France to lose out on the global upturn of the 1980s; by 1986 unemployment had soared to 2.5 million, or 12.5 per cent. An estimated 5 million Frenchmen awoke to find themselves “socially excluded,” as the gap between rich and poor was not narrowed but actually widened. Was this Socialism? The U-turn put a marker down on Mitterrand’s greatest policy failure; though, by adopting unsocialist Keynesian principles, he managed to check, and reverse, inflation. Meanwhile, in 1984, he was forced to accept another reversal—on his programme of educational reform. There were steel industry closures, accompanied by massive demonstrations, and banking debacles. Even mighty Renault was shut down—and under a Socialist regime—while nationalisation schemes were shelved, accompanied by massive sackings of heads of public sector enterprises.
Between 1975 and 1989, the number of French industrial workers declined markedly; growth in terms of GDP fell from 3.3 per cent in the years 1976–80 to only 1 per cent by 1996. (Nevertheless, despite these economic travails, during Mitterrand’s first term France still managed to overtake Britain’s industrial performance under Thatcher.) The dramatic flight of agricultural workers from the land—falling from 20 per cent of France’s working population in 1962 to 10 per cent in 1975, and only 5 per cent by 1990—marked a decimation among the small farmers of traditional society. At the same time, an advanced nuclear power programme took over the majority of French electricity generation, and the trade in arms thrived—notably the Mirages and Exocet missiles that helped Argentina in the Falklands War against Britain.
In January 1984 Mitterrand told France categorically: “The French are beginning to understand: it is the firm that creates wealth, it is the firm that creates employment.” Later that year Laurent Fabius replaced Mauroy as prime minister, on a platform ofmoderniser et rassembler. There were no Communists in Fabius’ ministry. The growing weakness of the PCF might have encouraged Mitterrand; on the other hand, that January, too, a new threat to the supremacy of the Socialists had arisen with the launch of the Green Party—followed soon thereafter by Le Pen and his National Front. In July 1985 there was an event involving the Greens that was to bring censure down on the Mitterrand government both at home and abroad. A small boat manned by Greens called Rainbow Warrior appeared in the South Pacific, intent to sabotage French nuclear tests. It was blown up while in harbour in New Zealand by a mysterious frogman—killing a member of the crew. Eventually the deed was pinned down to the long hand of the French Intelligence Services, over-extending themselves as they so often had during the Algerian War. Nominal sentences were handed out, but swiftly commuted.
Aside from this “little local difficulty,” Mitterrand’s handling of foreign affairs was generally far more adroit and successful than his performance on the domestic scene. Though just as nationalist-minded as de Gaulle, he was much more supple. Little of his approach bore much connection with traditional French Socialist policy. In the Middle East he switched traditional support for the Arabs to display greater friendliness towards Israel. Turning a blind eye to the bombing of Iraq’s nuclear installation in 1981, he paid the first visit of any French president to Tel Aviv the following year; although, in his private cosmogony, the slaughter of Verdun may have ranked closer than the Holocaust—at least in the eyes of one of his biographers, Ronald Tiersky.
He was much more of an “Atlanticist” than de Gaulle had ever been, showing greater affinity towards NATO. With America he had a love-hate relationship, once declaring “I like the Americans, but not their policy . . . My relations with the American ambassadors in Paris always had a touch of trouble.” (True: Reagan’s ruggedly right-wing, but francophone Ambassador in Paris, Evan Galbraith, was pointedly not awarded the statutory Légion d’Honneur on his departure, having instead to await its bestowal from Chirac.) Mitterrand got on surprisingly well with Reagan personally, though he fell into dispute over four major issues: the sale of arms to Nicaragua was one, the US invasion of Grenada a second. He refused to support US measures against the Soviet Union, following the suppression of Poland’s Solidarity,83 and was equally resistant to US pressure to stymie the building of the gas pipeline from Siberia to western Europe.84 At the same time Mitterrand staunchly backed US deployment in West Germany of intermediate-range missiles (passionately opposed by the left in Britain), and pressed the Germans to accede, too.
To the rising generation, Marxism was coming to be regarded now as a positive evil; it was held to be responsible for the Terror under Stalin as 1789 had led to Robespierre in 1793. To some extent Mitterrand shared de Gaulle’s expressed philosophy: “Communism will pass, but Russia is eternal.” Yet even the reforming, benign Gorbachev was viewed with far greater suspicion by Mitterrand—and France as a whole—than by the British or Americans.
If Mitterrand, however, had any overriding conviction, any grand projet in foreign affairs, and enduring over both his terms of office, it was the goal of an indissolubly integrated Europe. To him the symbol that would never leave him was Verdun, and all that it meant to more than one generation of Frenchmen. It was on this battlefield that for most solemn moments of the renewed Franco-German entente Mitterrand would come to stand silently hand in hand with (and dwarfed by) Chancellor Helmut Kohl. For him Germany was the all-important keystone to the future of Europe—as it had been for de Gaulle, though to a lesser extent. He recalled how “the good German” of the inter-war era, Gustav Stresemann, had recognised that “fear of seeing Germany rise again paralyses the will of French politicians and prevents them from thinking objectively.” As early as 1982–83 he had seen the importance of the single market and single currency—not least to help stabilise France’s own volatile currency. In getting the West Germans to bind themselves to these projects, Mitterrand was particularly aware of “time’s winged chariot,” appreciating that Helmut Kohl might well be the last German chancellor with whom it would be possible to build Europe. Such intimate and delicate negotiations fell conveniently within the “reserved domain” which de Gaulle’s constitution had handed his Socialist successor—and he was progressively aware of his own mortality.
IN 1986, following defeat in the legislative elections and the decline in popularity resulting from the accumulated failure of his domestic policies, Mitterrand was forced to accept Jacques Chirac, his conservative opponent, as his prime minister. It was a first experiment, unique to the Fifth Republic so far, of cohabitation. And it worked—even though the two fell out over privatisation (Mitterrand found it impossible to realise his electoral pledge of “ni privatisation ni nationalisation”). In the spring of 1988, Mitterrand was reelected for a second seven-year term, with a reduced but still comfortable majority. Considering the record, it seemed a remarkable achievement. He was now able to replace Chirac with a party faithful, Michel Rocard, and concentrate on his continental design in foreign policy. In the meantime, major international events were taking place. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, followed inevitably by the reunification of East and West Germany. Mitterrand— affected by all the residual misgivings of a twentieth-century Frenchman—was hesitant, though not so vocally as Margaret Thatcher.
Close as Mitterrand’s love-affair with Kohl was, remarkably it seems not to have soured his relationship with “the Iron Lady,” Margaret Thatcher, however far she was from sharing his passion for Kohl and the Germans. Far apart as their political philosophies may have been, there always remained a curious sympathy between the two. Not only in remarks to me personally, but also from observations by British diplomats in attendance, it was clear that she had a soft spot for him, and— on a personal level—was not altogether immune to his legendary charm for the opposite sex. Briefly, after the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in November 1989, they shared the same visceral unhappiness about German reunification, the classic French view being represented by François Mauriac’s famous witticism that he loved Germany so much that he was always “delighted there were two of them.” Nevertheless Mitterrand went on to press through the historical Maastricht Treaty, binding France irrevocably to an integrated Europe—and to a reunited, powerful Germany. (Not everyone noted that the crucial vote occurred on the 200th anniversary of the defeat of the Prussian Army by French revolutionaries.)
In 1990, the first Gulf War broke out. A divided French government joined the coalition, though it caused the resignation of the Foreign Secretary, Jean-Pierre Chevènement. The French contingent, though much trumpeted on the media, in fact played but a minor role in the campaign—revealing, uncomfortably, how far France had fallen back in terms of military technology over the thirty years of her isolation from NATO. Similar weaknesses were compounded when Yugoslavia exploded into horrendous civil war. A large proportion in France instinctively supported the Serbs, but militarily she was impotent to exert much of an influence. The same debility arose in the old-style ex-colonial intervention in Africa at the time of the Rwanda massacres.
Prior to the 1974 elections, which brought the first prospect of a Socialist/Communist-dominated administration, there were ugly rumbles in the army, which was unwilling to trust national security to a government with pro-Soviet sympathies. But in fact, when Mitterrand finally came to power in 1981, neither did the army “move,” nor was there even a notable number of officer resignations. In the event, the French armed forces got on well with Mitterrand’s Minister of Defence, Charles Hernu, and Mitterrand accepted unequivocally the nuclear strike force, vigorously attacked by the left when out of power.85
In 1986, Mitterrand had resolutely refused Reagan’s request to use French over-fly rights for the punitive bombing of Libya, much to US aggravation. This did not, however, do much to palliate French relations with the Arab world. As immigration from North Africa surged, so race relations deteriorated—fanned by the leader of the National Front, Le Pen. In 1994, the Algerian War once again crossed the Mediterranean to plague France, when a plane was hijacked by the GIA Islamic fundamentalists. A preview of the events of 9/11, the objective was to fly it into the Eiffel Tower; fortunately it was thwarted by France’s newly created anti-terrorist unit—which had been much aided by exchange of information with the British, in their experience of dealing with IRA bombers.
IF THERE WAS ONE ASPECT common to both Mitterrand’s terms of office in which failure said something about the state of France and Mitterrand’s own weaknesses, it has to be the advancement of women. All through the Fifth Republic it had proved singularly difficult to find electable women deputies. When asked about creating a minister for women’s affairs, de Gaulle had retorted in a scathing display of old-fashioned male chauvinism: “A ministry? Why not an undersecretaryship of state for knitting?”3 Even in the latter part of the twentieth century, French husbands could exert a power of veto over their wives working. Only 10 per cent of those admitted to the scientific grandes écoles were women; it was not till 1980 that the first woman was allowed to become anImmortelle and admitted to the Académie (Marguerite Yourcenar); the first woman stockbroker was not appointed till 1985. There was deep shock when, in 1971, 343 women (including Simone de Beauvoir, Françoise Sagan and Catherine Deneuve) signed a manifesto demanding free and legal abortions, and confessing that they had all had abortions at one time or another. In politics, in the seventies there had only been 33 women deputies out of a total of 586, whereas by 1993 the picture revealed no more than 35 out of 577—the lowest proportion of any European country except for Greece. Equally, during the Mitterrand years the maximum number of women ministers never exceeded eight, of which four were only juniors. If this seems extraordinary for a Socialist regime, supposedly more attuned to the call of feminism than the traditional right, it is even more extraordinary for a society where—from the time of Louis XIV and before—women have traditionally wielded so powerful an indirect influence on public affairs.
Under pressure to make amends, in May 1991 Mitterrand appointed France’s first woman prime minister, Edith Cresson, in replacement of Rocard. He immediately came under ferocious criticism, it being widely accepted that Cresson had been one of his (numerous) mistresses. Cresson proved an almost unqualified disaster, her principal claim to fame being her, purportedly knowledgeable, assertion that the majority of English males were homosexual. A hint of the political forces aligned against her within the government may be found in an egregious remark made by the macho Corsican, a future Minister of the Interior, Charles Pasqua: “She cannot succeed and her failure will discredit women for a long time.” In the event, Cresson lasted less than one unhappy year, to be replaced by Pierre Bérégovoy in April 1992. (He committed suicide, under taint of corruption, the following year.)
BY TRADITION, les intellos (intellectuals) constitute a more respected part of French life than they do in Anglo-Saxon countries. Watched over and nurtured by the Académie, they are a source of pride, rather than of mistrust or disdain, as often seems the norm north of the Channel. Thus it was of particular concern that, with the departure of de Gaulle and the towering figure of André Malraux (d. 1976), a kind of caesura was inscribed. Many of the towering grandees departed, and were replaced by few. Sartre died in 1980, aged only seventy-five; his consort, Simone de Beauvoir, in 1986; Raymond Aron in 1983; the philosopher Michel Foucault (of AIDS, aged only fifty-eight) in 1984; Roland Barthes, the literary critic, in 1980 (aged only sixty-five); Fernand Braudel, the great historian of the Mediterranean, in 1985. Who has followed them? Where are the intellostoday? Commenting with some acerbity, a contemporary British historian, Robert Gildea, picks out the popular Bernard-Henri Lévy as a prototype of the new intello, with his romantic coiffure and Yves Saint-Laurent silk shirts, marrying the glamorous film star Arielle Dombasle before the cameras in 1993, no longer describing himself as a philosopher but as a writer, and quintessentially a media personality, lovingly exposed to every medium. 4
In the “postmodern” environment, Gildea goes on to find Adidas to be rated of “equal value to Apollinaire.”
The heart of the problem is, of course, the behemoth of television and its progressive dumbing down, which has stricken France in the last half of the twentieth century just as it has Britain and America, though it was longer in putting down its roots in France. In 1964, the average person saw 57 minutes of television a day; already by 1970 this had risen to 115 minutes. As one result, newspapers and magazines suffered; the circulation of Paris-Match, for instance, plummeted from 1,800,000 in 1958 to 800,000 over the same period. By 1988 Le Monde—France’s leading serious newspaper—had a circulation of no more than 387,000, and it was estimated that one-half of the “reading public” never read anything but television magazines. On the brighter side, however, Malraux could reckon that “More people would see a Racine play one night on television than had seen it in the theatre across all the intervening centuries.” 5
As the century ended, there were still nearly 200 million francophones across the globe, and every government in Paris would spend millions of francs energetically protecting France’s traditional mission civilatrice— indeed, far more energetically than either Britain or the USA attempts to project its culture. As always, the gloriously beautiful French language continued to be officially watched over and nurtured. For long the spokesman at the barricades would be the marvellously mellifluous sécretaire perpetuelle de l’Académie Française, Maurice Druon, who contributed an entertaining, but instructive, regular column in Le Figaro on “le Bon Français.” Nevertheless, by the close of the glum twentieth century, it was beginning to look like a losing battle as such abominations asle mixed grill, le aftershave, le self-made-man, le zapping and le drugstore became accepted into the language, despite all the efforts of the beaux sabreurs of the Académie.
The situation was equally discouraging in the world of film. Even in the ten years 1979–89 the share of the market for French-made films fell from 50 to 34 per cent, displaced by Hollywood, and the French government sought the assistance of the European Commission to get cultural products exempted from free trade agreements in 1993. Similarly with pop music—between 1973 and 1988 numbers of those who attended a pop concert doubled. Nearly all the most popular, as well as the most innovative, music has been Anglo-American—projected into France by radio and MTV. France, however, could boast her own Johnny Halliday as well as the traditional strength of the French chanson, with its roots going back to the medieval jongleurs.
When André Malraux left the scene in 1969, he had much to be proud of. Apart from the monumental cleaning of Paris and the restoration of the Marais, he had compiled a general inventory of all the artistic riches of France, restored the Chagall ceiling of the Paris Opéra, and achieved the (highly controversial) safe loan of the Mona Lisa to New York and the Vénus de Milo to Tokyo. There was hardly any corner of the French cultural scene that did not bear his mark; above all, he liked to claim his mission had been to “make accessible to the greatest number of French people the greatest works of humanity, beginning with those of France.” On entering the Élysée, Mitterrand, the committed intello, dedicated much of his considerable energies to furthering the goals of Malraux, appointing a workaholic called Jack Lang to take over the role of plenipotentiary Minister of Culture, and doubling the state budget. For his massive grands projets of building he came to be nicknamed “Mitterramses.” Like his great predecessors, from Louis XIV to the two Napoleons, he showed a “somewhat exhibitionistic desire to live on in stone.” (It may be interesting to note that de Gaulle was the one president who did not build monuments.) Declaring to his cabinet that “there can be no great policy for France without a great architect,” Mitterrand expounded the notion (deriding the unfinished projects of his predecessor, Giscard) that periods of impoverished architecture also correspond with bouts of political debility.
He took the greatest personal interest, even down to choosing the colour of the seats of the new Bastille People’s Opéra. “I am attracted by pure geometrical forms,” he admitted—the result being the Pei pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre; controversial at the time but perhaps the most successful of his grands projets. The Bastille Opéra was much less successful: tiles regularly fell off its lamentable exterior, as the scenery collapsed inside, and its bad record of strikes provoked wits to compare it unfavourably with theTitanic—“at least the ship’s orchestra played on!” Three directors gave notice in as many years. Equally disastrous was the hideous modern brutalism of the Arab Institute and new Finance Ministry at Bercy, across the Seine, and—above all—the unappealing new Bibliothèque Nationale, which, for years, simply did not work. In 1994, Mitterrand had the option of closing down the dread and already decaying Centre Pompidou, but decided instead to shore it up—at a cost of something like ff1 billion. Rather better, in almost every sense, was the brilliant conversion of the Gare d’Orsay into the new Musée d’Orsay. Nor were the provinces left out, with the creation of a new School of Dance at Marseilles.
Working with a huge budget that would turn his British opposite number green with envy, Jack Lang, described as a “cultural revolutionary,” spent fortunes on subsidies for “heritage films.” France turned out masterpieces like Pagnol’s Jean de Florette andManon des Sources. Zola’s Germinalwas the most expensive film ever made in France; nevertheless, it was eclipsed at the box office by Jurassic Park, and Lang was roundly criticised for “vulgarising and fossilising literature.” Lang sent free videotapes to schools, but was attacked for foisting “official, state-sponsored culture on a mass audience whose own popular tastes are ignored.” For all the vast expenditure, the “heritage film” project proved a failure. The tide of le défi américain was not stemmed.
Turning to broadcasting, become a jungle of free enterprise since de Gaulle’s authoritarian ORTF state monopoly had been demolished, Lang and Mitterrand imposed regulatory conditions with strict rules that applied to ownership as well as content. The new technology of cable and satellite was exorbitantly expensive—and did not work. A new highbrow European cultural channel, which became a joint Franco-German venture called ARTE, was a success, and this was followed—in 1994—by a new educational channel, La Cinquième. It too ran into enormous problems—but at least it was a serious effort to counter “dumbing down,” while the British media were heading Gadarene-like in the opposite direction. At the same time, legislation hung on nobly to French privacy laws, protecting public and political figures from media investigation—again in contrast to England. It would take the advent of Chirac to lower the barriers, and the tone of French television.
Busy everywhere, Lang created “Zeniths,” popular music halls capable of seating 7000 people, in most major cities. (Wealthy Lyons, curiously, found it could not afford one.) But the vast majority of the French stayed away; in what was an unprecedented “cultural revolution,” by 1988 the improvement in public participation was at most an anticipated 3 per cent. Lang’s interventions sometimes seemed inconsistent; he would denounce anglo-saxon music, ostentatiously refusing to open the festival of American film at Deauville in 1981; yet Sylvester Stallone would receive a decoration for services to art, and in 1993 the inauguration of Euro Disney at the very gates of Paris would seem to have opened the floodgates to American culture at its lowest denominator.
In his public patronage of the arts, Lang’s tentacles reached out to writers, too. I well remember leading, in the 1980s, a British delegation of writers and publishers to Fontevraux, burial ground of the Anglo-French Plantagenets, to discuss literature—and specifically what could be done about improving exchanges between the two languages. Exhilarating promises of rich bourses for translators came from the French side; nothing materialised. Out of all the expenditure of the Mitterrand-Lang “Cultural Revolution,” which lasted until Lang’s departure in 1993, no novel was produced in France to compare with Michel Tournier’s classic, Le Roi des Aulnes, published back in 1970; and did that even sell more than the one million copies that William Boyd achieved in translations from the English? The field of history/biography threw up a few outstanding authors, such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Montaillou, 1975), and Georges Duby, the medievalist (who sadly died in 1996). As memories of the Occupation receded, there was a spate of introvertive studies of Vichy (viz. Eric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy: Vu Passé qui ne passe pas, of 1994), and numerous inquests into the mysterious death of Jean Moulin—but few to compare with the American R. O. Paxton. There were some outstanding biographies, such as Jean Lacouture’s massive (and heavy-going) works on de Gaulle and Mitterrand. But how few, how pathetically few, compared with the outpouring of history and biography of distinction in the English language over the same period. But then history, over the ages, has seldom been a French forte.
Ask any British publisher attending the Frankfurt Book Fair; they wring their hands at the lack of French titles worthy of translation. What a pathetic return for massive state sponsorship over the past five decades. France has some 3000 literary prizes to offer—but where is the literature? When did she last produce a truly great playwright, novelist, poet, painter or architect of world stature? “There is no Molière or Racine, no Corneille, not even a Le Nôtre,” complained the British Spectator’s resident intello, Paul Johnson. (On the other hand, a Frenchman might riposte, where in Britain are the Shakespeares and Jane Austens?)
Meanwhile, in the world of higher education, which should be producing future leaders of French culture, despite the post-1968 shake-up, a recent survey revealed that only three French institutions could rank among the world’s fifty “high-performance” universities. Do courses at the Sorbonne still teach the edict of the literary critic of “structuralism” and “post-structuralism,” Roland Barthes: that you don’t need to know anything about the life and times of Racine to be able to comprehend his work? On a brighter note, however, at lower levels British educationalists continue to look with some envy at the French secondary school system. The universality of the Napoleonic legacy still applies; there are none of the distortions of the British system of expensive independent schools at one end, and rotten comprehensives at the other. For one thing, there is no such thing as an Eton or a Winchester. In selection for higher education, it is elitism, the elitism of talent, that rules—regardless of social or financial status.86
At least it could be said that Jack Lang did try to arrest the decline in French culture. When Lang departed in 1993, about the best his successor could do in the constant war against the invasion of franglais was, rather pathetically, to introduce a law prohibiting the use of English words where good French equivalents existed, enforceable by hefty fines. (Hitler tried something similar with German in the 1930s, and made himself a laughingstock.) Two years later this was followed by a law to allot French songs 40 per cent of the time devoted to popular music on the air. Nevertheless, even the Académie in the most recent edition of its famous dictionary sold the pass to allow 6000 new words into the language, including le cover-girl, le bestseller and le blue jeans. Yet, in common parlance, there still remained such controversial horrors as “je fais un booking pour le week-end, avec un supermodel anglais (sans name-dropping) dans un twin-set—si je trouve mon babysitter, sans stress . . .” Meanwhile the teaching of French abroad dwindles. Given another half-century, will French have become a semi-fossilised language like Welsh or Gaelic, as intellos like Maurice Druon fear?
SOME TIME EARLY ON IN HIS FIRST TERM, probably even before the end of 1981, Mitterrand discovered that he had cancer of the prostate. It seems nothing short of miraculous that his doctors, plus his own extraordinary willpower, managed to keep him alive for another fifteen years. Equally remarkable was the fact that his illness was kept secret from the world until well on in his second term—something that would be inconceivable in an Anglo-Saxon democracy, or with the intrusive media of today. To Mitterrand it was simply “None of the public’s business.” The illness could also account for the urgency with which he pressed to conclude Maastricht and his indissoluble bond with Kohl’s Germany. Equally, as the cancer took hold—accompanied by a great deal of pain—so progressively things went wrong during the latter years of his second term.
Mitterrand’s physical decline grew apparent from 1992 onwards, at the same time as disastrous losses in the legislative elections of 1993 brought to office an opposition prime minister, Balladur, leaving Mitterrand bereft of significant political power. Then his past—Vichy— came back to plague him. As Montaigne once observed, “Fortune appears sometimes purposely to wait for the last year of our lives in order to show us that she can overthrow in one moment what she has taken long years to build.” First there were the trials, fifty years after the event, of men like Barbie, Touvier, Papon and Bousquet, indicted for terrible crimes during the Occupation, who had somehow slipped through the net of épuration. Barbie, the Gestapo “butcher of Lyons” and the only German, was brought to trial in 1987 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Touvier, eventually found guilty of crimes against humanity, was the first Frenchman to be thus condemned; he also received a life sentence. Papon, resurrected as police chief in Paris, was found additionally responsible for the deaths of some 200 Algerian demonstrators in 1961. Bousquet, organiser of the Vél d’Hiv round-up of Jews from wartime Paris, was later assassinated at his Paris flat in 1993, in mysterious circumstances.
Bousquet’s wartime connection and continued post-war friendship with Mitterrand was more than just an embarrassment. At the time of the Touvier trial Mitterrand declared, “You cannot live the whole time on memories and grudges.” Not all of France agreed with him, but he was nothing if not courageous in consistently sticking up for Pétain and laying wreaths on his grave. Then, in 1994, a bombshell hit France in the shape of a book, Une Jeunesse Française; François Mitterrand, 1934–1947, written by professor and journalist Pierre Péan, evidently with Mitterrand’s full collaboration. Was it the deathbed confession of an old, mortally ill man? All France was shocked to see, on their television screens, a sick and weak, aged President of the Republic, replying with a faltering voice to penetrating questions about what had become almost a taboo subject—Vichy. He did not lie, but nor did he tell the whole truth. What shocked, however, was not so much the facts revealed, many details of which were already in the public domain, but that the President should have kept quiet about them for so long. Emphatically he declared that he had “nothing to be ashamed of,” but it was somehow as if he were holding a mirror, unflattering and highly unpleasant, up to an entire generation of Frenchmen. The whole unhappy story of Vichy, occupation and collaboration, in all its complexity, was once more resurrected.
Would it ever be put to rest? Perhaps only with the death of Mitterrand—or that whole generation, born in the First World War and growing to maturity in the terrible 1940s.
IN MAY 1995, Mitterrand ceded the presidency to his rival, Jacques Chirac. Six months later, on 8 January 1996, in his seventy-ninth year, he finally lost the struggle against cancer. Like de Gaulle, laid to rest at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, Mitterrand was buried quietly and privately. Alongside his wife of sixty years, Danielle, in solemn mourning there also stood his long-term mistress and their teenage daughter, Mazarine. The existence of his “other family”—known but not talked about—had only been acknowledged two years previously; it was, in effect, the last mystery of this hugely enigmatic figure. Again, it seems extraordinary that it should have taken so long for the media to uncover—perhaps a testament in itself to France’s long-held belief that the private life of a public figure is his or her affair alone, and not a matter of public interest.
The funeral of Mitterrand, and with it the revelation of the existence of Mazarine and his “other” family, sparked off once more in the outside world reflections on that unique institution, the French mistress. Harking back to the Middle Ages, great ladies of France, wrote André Maurois, “had a lover when at the same time they had a husband; here were the beginnings of a long tradition.”6 In tandem with it came the mystique of the mistress, a long tradition semi-accepted at many levels of French life. The first definition contained in Larousse gives “person who commands, governs, exercises an authority.” Precisely. From earliest days, from Mme. de Maintenon to Pompadour, to Paul Reynaud’s Hélène de Portes in 1940, the maîtresse of the man-in-power in France has wielded all these powers—often banefully, and far in excess of simply being a lover. She is her man’s spy, his sounding box, his confidante, his confessor and his adviser; he trusts her. She fills a role quite distinct from that in any other country, Latin or Anglo-Saxon. Why? A lifelong expert in such matters, Taki of the Spectator, comments:
For starters . . . In France, people have always treated sexual conduct as being outside the scope of moral judgment, not so in puritanical Albion . . . Whether the mistress loves the Frenchman is immaterial. She needs him, and he in turn communicates his ideas to her. C’est tout! The Frenchman informs his mistress of his power, and discusses it with her . . . The mistress, in fact, is more associated with the thoughts of the man, than the cinq à sept quickies she is usually associated with by the popular press. Oh, yes, I almost forgot. Mistresses in France do not go public, no matter what price is dangled in front of them . . .
The French mistress is, as Mitterrand’s official, extra-curricular consort was, by definition totally discreet—and quite indispensable. Also, like the high walls that traditionally protect the Parisian bourgeois from prying eyes, privacy of the individual had long been a priority of French life.
HISTORICALLY, THE END OF THE MITTERRAND ERA really came, not with his leaving the Élysée, but with his death in 1996. With him also passed a half-century of French history, one of the most vexing and complex in all its past 2000 years. Mitterrand was to some extent the embodiment of that complexity and—at least from the viewpoint of an outsider—was more representative of France, certainly in its darker side, even than de Gaulle, whose eventful tenure of office he had exceeded. Like Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, he could say, with some justification, “I am you.” One of Mitterrand’s own favourite observations was “Il faut donner du temps au temps.” The same might be said of his own career; it is too early to judge. Because of his Machiavellian suppleness (some would call it deviousness), many of even his own Socialist supporters would not rank him with Jaurès or Blum; yet he was more successful than either. He brought the left into meaningful power in France, just as Blair with his “New Labour” did in Britain.
He failed to realise the Socialist egalitarian dreams for which he was elected in 1981; but he triumphantly managed to break the monolithic power of the Communist Party, which had dogged French politics since 1918. Despite failing to resolve France’s economic woes—5 million “have-nots” in 1995—he left a France stronger and more competitive in world markets than he had found her. Undoubtedly he displayed some serious errors of judgement, especially in his waning years, such as the appointment of Edith Cresson; but his outstanding achievement has to lie in the integration of Europe, with Kohl’s suddenly expanded Germany. Over his fourteen years in office, he came to personify the Presidency as much as any of his predecessors—perhaps even as fully as de Gaulle; certainly he became more a President of all the French than was the latter. (In a curious way, Mitterrand’s profile even came to resemble the famous death mask of Napoleon.) In the opinion of the biographer of both de Gaulle and Mitterrand, Jean Lacouture, it could be said he “seemed the most French of all the French of his time.”
On balance, can François Mitterrand be denied the rank of a great French statesman? Certainly few have evoked more public discussion.
THE REST IS NOT, AS THEY SAY, HISTORY, but current events. Mitterrand once declared how he saw that “the role of France is to retain its rank.” As his successor, Jacques Chirac, took her into the twenty-first century, the third millennium since her remarkable story began, many of France’s problems continued to be familiar, and seemingly endemic: unemployment and labour unrest, demands for higher wages for shorter working hours, too many students pursuing places in outdated universities, the social demands of an ever-ageing population, corruption tainting even the highest political circles, and serious differences with the anglo-saxons, for instance over war in Iraq. More than ever before the question is whether, in the new world order of American Empire—or what the French call hyperpuissance and a dramatically weightier Germany, France can reasonably maintain this rank—or at least preserve the precious identity that France and the French have so assiduously sought to promote, and preserve, over all past centuries. Are her resources up to her determination to remain a great culture, and a world power? When all is considered, perhaps Rudyard Kipling judged France aright back in 1913:
Broke to every known mischance, lifted over all
By the light sane joy of life, the buckler of the Gaul;
Furious in luxury, merciless in toil,
Terrible with strength that draws from her tireless soil;
Strictest judge of her own worth, gentlest of man’s mind,
First to follow Truth and last to leave old Truths behind—
France, beloved of every soul that loves its fellow-kind!7