Francois Mitterrand

Francois Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand was born on October 26, 1916, in Jarnac, a small town in the Charente department of southwestern France known for its cognac trade ^[1]. His father, Joseph Mitterrand, worked as a railway official before taking over a family vinegar business, and the household was provincial, Catholic, and conservative. Francois was one of eight children, and the rhythms of Mass, family meals, and rural quiet shaped his earliest years ^[2].

At age nine he was sent to a Catholic boarding school, the College Saint-Paul in Angouleme, where he proved a capable if solitary student. In 1934 he moved to Paris to study law and political science, enrolling at the Faculty of Law and the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques ^[1]. His student years placed him on the political right: he attended some rallies linked to nationalist leagues and wrote for conservative publications, associations that critics would revisit for the rest of his career ^[3].

Mitterrand completed his degrees in the late 1930s just as Europe slid toward war. Mobilized as a sergeant in the colonial infantry, he was wounded near Verdun in June 1940 during the German invasion and taken prisoner ^[2]. He spent eighteen months in prisoner of war camps in Germany, escaping on his third attempt in December 1941 and making his way back to France. The experience of captivity, he later said, did more to form his political outlook than any book.

The most contested chapter of any Francois Mitterrand biography concerns the years 1942 to 1944. After returning to unoccupied France, he took a job in the Vichy administration working on services for prisoners of war, and in 1943 he received the Francisque, a decoration awarded by the collaborationist regime of Marshal Petain ^[3]. For decades he minimized this period, and its full contours only became widely known after historian Pierre Pean published a detailed account in 1994, while Mitterrand was still president ^[3].

Yet by 1943 Mitterrand was also active in the Resistance. He built a clandestine network of former prisoners of war, adopted the code name Morland, and traveled secretly to London and Algiers, where he met Charles de Gaulle in December 1943 ^[2]. The encounter went badly. De Gaulle wanted Resistance prisoner networks placed under his own nominee, and Mitterrand refused, beginning a rivalry that would structure French politics for a generation.

At the Liberation of Paris in August 1944, Mitterrand, still in his twenties, briefly held responsibility for prisoner and deportee affairs in the provisional government ^[1]. In October 1944 he married Danielle Gouze, a nineteen year old from a family of committed secular republicans who had sheltered Resistance members. The marriage linked him to a political culture very different from the Catholic conservatism of his childhood.

Mitterrand entered parliament in November 1946 as a deputy for the Nievre, a rural department in Burgundy that would remain his electoral base for thirty five years ^[1]. Under the unstable Fourth Republic he became one of the youngest and busiest ministers in France, holding eleven ministerial posts between 1947 and 1957, including Interior and Justice ^[2]. He belonged to a small centrist grouping, the UDSR, which made him a useful coalition partner, and he earned a reputation as a skilled, ambitious, and somewhat unreadable operator.

His record in these years drew lasting criticism. As Interior Minister in 1954 and Justice Minister from 1956 to 1957, he served in governments that prosecuted the war in Algeria, and as Justice Minister he declined to commute a number of death sentences against Algerian militants ^[4]. He also weathered the Observatory affair of 1959, a murky episode in which he reported an assassination attempt against himself that opponents alleged he had staged, a charge never proven but politically damaging ^[3].

The return of de Gaulle in 1958 pushed Mitterrand into opposition, and he made resistance to the new Fifth Republic his cause. His 1964 book Le Coup d'Etat permanent attacked de Gaulle's presidency as personal rule dressed in constitutional clothing ^[2]. In 1965 he ran against de Gaulle for the presidency as the single candidate of the left and forced the general into a runoff, taking about 45 percent of the second round vote, a result that transformed him into the left's most plausible national leader ^[1].

After the upheavals of May 1968 and a failed bid for leadership that year, Mitterrand executed the political project that defines Francois Mitterrand achievements for many historians: the reconstruction of the non-communist left. At the Epinay congress of June 1971 he took control of the newly refounded Socialist Party despite having only just joined it ^[2]. In 1972 he signed the Common Programme with the Communist Party, betting that an alliance would let the Socialists absorb communist voters rather than the reverse. The gamble worked over the following decade.

He lost the 1974 presidential election to Valery Giscard d'Estaing by barely more than one percentage point, then spent seven years consolidating the party and his own authority within it ^[1]. On May 10, 1981, at age 64 and on his third attempt, he defeated Giscard with about 52 percent of the vote, becoming the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic ^[1]. Crowds filled the Place de la Bastille that night, and Mitterrand marked his inauguration by laying roses at the Pantheon on the tombs of Jean Moulin, Victor Schoelcher, and Jean Jaures.

His first government moved fast. Parliament abolished the death penalty in September 1981, a reform carried by Justice Minister Robert Badinter with Mitterrand's full backing ^[5]. The government nationalized major banks and industrial groups, added a fifth week of paid vacation, lowered the retirement age to 60, decentralized power to the regions, and legalized private radio stations ^[2]. By 1983, however, inflation and pressure on the franc forced a sharp turn to budgetary rigor, the tournant de la rigueur, which anchored France in the European Monetary System and marked the left's acceptance of market constraints ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Francois Mitterrand in institutional terms finds an unusual answer: a fierce critic of presidential power who, once in office, used every lever of it for fourteen years. When the right won the 1986 legislative elections, he chose to remain in office and appointed his rival Jacques Chirac as prime minister, inaugurating the first cohabitation, a power sharing arrangement the constitution had never tested ^[1]. He handled it with enough skill to defeat Chirac decisively in the 1988 presidential election, winning a second seven year term with about 54 percent of the vote ^[2].

In foreign policy Mitterrand was a committed European. He formed a close working partnership with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, symbolized by their joined hands at Verdun in 1984, and together they drove the Single European Act and then the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which created the European Union and set the path to the euro ^[4]. He supported German reunification after initial hesitation, backed the American led coalition in the 1991 Gulf War, and maintained France's independent nuclear deterrent ^[2].

His presidency also left a physical mark on Paris through the Grands Travaux, a program of monumental architecture that produced the glass pyramid of the Louvre by I. M. Pei, the Grande Arche at La Defense, the Opera Bastille, and the new Bibliotheque nationale de France that now carries his name ^[5]. The later years were harder. A second cohabitation began in 1993 after a crushing Socialist defeat, scandals touched his entourage, and revelations about his Vichy past and his use of an illegal wiretapping unit at the Elysee clouded the final stretch ^[3].

Mitterrand married Danielle Gouze in 1944, and the couple had three sons, one of whom died in infancy ^[2]. Danielle Mitterrand built an independent public life as a human rights campaigner, founding the France Libertes foundation in 1986 and often taking positions to the left of her husband's government. The marriage endured despite long separations of habit and affection.

For more than two decades Mitterrand also maintained a second, hidden family. His relationship with Anne Pingeot, a museum curator, produced a daughter, Mazarine, born in 1974, whose existence was shielded from the public with state resources until Paris Match published photographs in 1994 ^[6]. French opinion, by and large, reacted with a shrug, and both families stood together at his funeral, an image that fixed itself in the national memory.

Away from politics he was a reader and a walker. He collected books obsessively, wrote several volumes of essays and memoirs, kept company with writers, and made an annual climb of the rock of Solutre in Burgundy that became a media ritual ^[2]. Colleagues described a man of silences and long calculation, nicknamed the Sphinx and, more mockingly, the Florentine, for a style of power that owed something to Machiavelli.

Mitterrand was diagnosed with prostate cancer in late 1981, only months into his first term, a fact concealed from the public through years of misleading health bulletins even though he had promised medical transparency ^[6]. The disease advanced slowly, then aggressively during his second term. By 1994 he was visibly diminished, undergoing operations while still receiving foreign leaders and managing a cohabitation government.

He left office in May 1995, handing power to Jacques Chirac, and retired to a small circle of friends, doctors, and books. His last months were spent between Paris, his country house at Latche in the Landes, and a final journey to Egypt. He died in Paris on January 8, 1996, at age 79, eight months after leaving the Elysee ^[1]. His former doctor's book Le Grand Secret, published days later and quickly banned, revealed the extent of the medical concealment and set off a national argument about privacy and the presidency ^[6].

France gave him two ceremonies on the same day: a formal requiem at Notre-Dame de Paris attended by dozens of heads of state, and a private funeral in Jarnac, the town of his birth, where he was buried in the family plot ^[2].

The essential Francois Mitterrand facts describe records unlikely to be broken soon: fourteen years as president, the longest in the Fifth Republic, two full terms, two cohabitations, and the first alternation of power from right to left under the 1958 constitution ^[1]. By proving that the left could govern within Gaullist institutions, he arguably completed those institutions, ending the regime quarrel that had divided France since 1958.

His substantive legacy runs through modern Europe. The Maastricht Treaty, the single currency project, and the Franco-German engine of integration all carry his imprint alongside Kohl's ^[4]. At home, the abolition of the death penalty, decentralization, media liberalization, and the fifth week of paid vacation survived every subsequent government, while the 1983 austerity turn set the template for the European social democratic compromise with market discipline ^[5].

The debates have not closed. Historians still weigh the Vichy functionary against the Resistance organizer, the abolitionist Justice Minister of 1981 against the minister who signed off on executions in the 1950s, and the European visionary against the secretive tactician who wiretapped journalists ^[3]. That double character is why biographers keep returning to him. Museums, a Paris quay, the national library, and countless streets bear his name, and every French Socialist leader since has governed, or failed to govern, in his shadow.