Twilight of a president - France's Francois Mitterrand - On The Scene

National Review, Oct 10, 1994 by Brian Crozier

Pascal used to tell non-believers to "kneel every night and pray that you win believe in God." Francois Mitterrand used to kneel every night and pray that he would believe in socialism. One morning he woke up and found that he did.

This apocryphal anecdote says it an. The French president, ailing from cancer of the prostate, emerging from his second operation and on chemotherapy, is at the center of a bubbling controversy to which he is the major contributor. His second term expires next May. Will he survive until then? He thinks he will. How high, or low, will his reputation stand? That is a more complex question, which has dominated the French media since the long (four hours!) talk he had on September 3 with Franz-Olivier Giesbat, editor of Le Figaro.

This was his answer to a hostile book by Jean Montaldo which has topped the best-seller list for some months. A lawsuit was out of the question, so the president - who has always loved controversy and revels in intrigue, mounted a massive counter-offensive. He gave many hours of (presumably precious) presidential time, in his ornate office in the Elysee Palace, to a writer named Pierre Pean, handing him many damning wartime letters. The outcome, Une jeunesse francaise (Youth of a Frenchman), is packed with embarrassing disclosures.

With a past like his, known to many but hushed up in deference to the head of state, Mitterrand had chosen to make an extended, though not entirely honest, confession. He followed up the Figaro interview with a ninety-minute Q&A on national television on September 12. For a shocked mass audience, a very murky past poured out.

In that distant youth of his, Mitterrand was a member of the right-wing monarchists, whose newspaper, Action Francaise, he sold at street corners. He briefly joined the extreme right-wing Croix de Feu Fiery Crosses). Some say he even dallied with the hooded Cagoulards, a kind of French Ku Klux Klan, but Pean denies this; the Fiery Crosses will have to suffice. Captured by the Germans during their whirlwind conquest of the northern half of France, Mitterrand escape and rallied to the collaborationist Vichy government of Marshal Petain.

Naturally, this Petainist phase has attracted barbed questions from his interviewers. Was he anti-Semitic? for example. On this delicate theme Mitterrand allowed himself a touch of obfuscation. No, he had never been anti-Semitic. So, what about Vichy's anti-Jewish laws? He was too junior to know about them. Why, then, did he have a long friendship with Rend Bousquet, Vichy's police chief, who deported thousands of French Jews to Nazi Germany's death camps?

Mitterrand was ready for that one. He pointed out that he had not met Bousquet till 1949. From then on, until 1978, they had met a dozen times; he had not seen Bousquet again after 1986. He pointed out that Bousquet had been cleared of human-rights charges, first in 1949 and again in 1991. (The French historian Serge Klarsfeld told Le Figaro that in his opinion Mitterrand had used his authority to prevent a further trial, a charge that Mitterrand denies.) The Bousquet story came to a violent end when he was assassinated on June 8, 1993.

In early 1943, to his credit, Francois Mitterrand contacted the Resistance. He was flown secretly across the Channel to meet the British, crossed back again (one man in a boat), and became a Resister. After the war, he was in and out of the fast-changing governments of the Fourth Republic (11 times a minister). He very nearly committed political suicide in 1959, when he faked an attack on himself. Gunmen shot up his Peugeot, and Mitterrand leaped over a fence, ostensibly to escape. He escaped in reality when a charge of contempt for the law was dropped. He was never a Gaullist and bided his time until the Gaullist Fifth Republic (whose constitution he had bitterly attacked) brought him his chance of supreme power.

During his long period in the wilderness (roughly from 1958 to 1986), Mitterrand appeared to drift ever further leftward: cultivating good relations with the Moscow-line French Communist Party and with Moscow itself. By 1975, having been narrowly defeated by Valery Giscard d'Estaing for the presidency, he forged an impressive Union of the Left - an alliance between the renovated Socialist Party he now led and the PCF.

In 1981, shortly after he won the presidency, I had a lengthy talk with his long-time confidant and newly appointed advisor on the secret services, Dr. Francois de Grossouvre, at the Elysee. "One thing you have to understand about Francois Mitterrand," he said, "is that he has a visceral hatred of the Communists."

This seemed odd, in the light of his having brought the Communist Party into his first government. De Grossouvre was right, though. By the time the Communist ministers walked out of Mitterrand's government in 1984, their formerly formidable party had been politically marginalized, to the benefit of the Socialists.

Last April, de Grossouvre was found dead, apparently by suicide. Earlier the body of former Prime Minister Pierre Beregovoy had also been found, and a well-known businessman, RogerPatrice Pelat, had reportedly died in hospital of a heart attack. Pelat was involved in a complicated corruption scandal which had splashed over the two other dead men. Now it is whispered that all three were murdered. Mitterrand's interviewers spared him questions on this sordid affair.