Vichy Francois

...This was when the Germans occupied the Vichy zone...

...They let General Leclerc, the famous Free French tank commander, spearhead the drive, and Leclerc found himself in the western and southern suburbs by August 10...

...What was intolerable to those who for years had bought Mitterrand's own rationale—Vichy was a cover for Resistance work—was the feeling of having been had...

...In the late forties, when he was a dashing,handsome, and successful politician of the center-right, the youngest minister in the musical-chair governments of the Fourth Republic (he headed a small party that always was needed to form working majorities), he helped collaborationist friends who had been in the Cagoule to get reduced terms during the epuration, or purge...

...In particular, he remained on good terms with the notorious Rene Bousquet...

...But the substance of all these revelations was known...

...Surely...

...The average Frenchman of a certain age is torn between lining up whoever was on the opposing side during the war—which is the largest of the many dividing lines between themselves that the French always live with—and shooting them, or sitting down to a fine lunch and admitting that at bottom they are all Frenchmen...

...He always claimed to have no personal interest in money...

...By then, moreover, the no-longer-unspoken secret within the party was that the second Mitterrand term had been a disaster, that it represented a Mephistophelian pact...

...The scandale Mitterrand that hit the followThe American Spectator February 1995 43 ing week is all bound up and confused in these events of August 1944...

...Mitterrand now claims he did not know about the antiSemitic legislation of the government he served in the 1940s...

...The left was trying to do what Mitterrand himself was doing, and what, in a certain sense, much of France has always done, which is to have it both ways...

...The only thing you could plausibly say "it did not know" was that Mitterrand continued to maintain personal relationships with fascists and killers, of whom Bousquet was the most notorious...

...Mitterrand evidently was one of them...

...The Francisque was the Vichy Legion of Honor, but it had to be solicited...

...Mitterrand, after being taken prisoner, along with two-anda-half million others, in the debacle of May-June 1940, escaped from a stalag and made his way to Vichy...

...He even made astounding confessions in interviews...

...Mitterrand, steeped as he is in that history and its rhetoric, knows this...

...For fifty years Mitterrand has been one of the key figures in French political life...

...Nan suggests strongly that he vacillated until the end of 1943, and that the Gaullists themselves, whose networks Mitterrand approached (he went, at great risk, to Algiers and London), viewed him as a "useful Petainiste," that is to say, the sort they ought to work with for national reconciliation after the war...

...In a famous campaign speech when Giscard d'Estaing was still president, he said: "From Thiers to MacMahon [conservative nineteenth-century leaders] to Giscard d'Estaing and Peyrefitte [contemporary conservatives], by way of Vichy, there is a straight line...

...Failures in Yugoslavia and Rwanda grew out of choices by Mitterrand that belied his own rhetoric...

...Fewer than five thousand were awarded...

...t need hardly be added that Jews belong disproportionately to the Socialist party to understand that all this repressed Vichy stuff came down on the demoralized left like—how else can you describe it?—a ton of manure...

...In Algeria—not a colony but a fully integrated part of France, except the franchise was restricted to Europeans—sentiment was pro-Vichy but opportunistic...

...I t happened the week they were celebrating the Liberation of Paris...

...His focus is on how Mitterrand lived the fascist years...

...People had to wonder whether they were blind—or stupid, which in France is the worst sin of all...

...The Paris Resistance, so the legend goes, forced the supreme commander's hand by rising up...

...They knew about the women (although the second family was known only to a few intimates and journalists), the Freemasons (a French obsession), his loyal friends and his lifelong enemies, and somehow they had missed something essential...

...The French, always in a commemorative mood, re-enacted the arrival of the Leclerc Division, through the Porte d'Orleans on the southern periphery and down what is now the avenue Leclerc, past the place DenfertRochereau, which commemorates the (only) point that resisted the Prussian onslaught in the war of 1870, and down the boulevard Saint-Michel, the main drag of the Latin Quarter, to the river—the eternal Seine—to culminate at the Hotel de Ville...

...Provincial, bourgeois, Catholic, what else could I be...

...Who is to say that in this immensely complex, shrewd man, this man of perverse loyalties as well as the most breathtaking selfishness, the French did not see a true reflection of themselves...

...Eisenhower was inclined to bypass the capital, drive toward Flanders, and attack the Rhine...

...But Petain, and many others, stayed put...

...There had been rumors throughout the eighties that Mitterrand was helping the National Front, the neo-fascist party...

...Already in 1965, when Mitterrand challenged de Gaulle from the left, Algerie Francaise irredentists sent him, via Bousquet, a suitcase full of cash...

...Mitterrand observers have often remarked that he is less a man of ideas than of loyalties, "Italian" in his sense thatall politics boils down to patronage...

...He was an admirable character...

...And they had instinctively shouted, as had Mitterrand, when the first shots were fired in the Kabylie on All Souls Day 1954, "Algeria is France...

...Racisme, the young people's crusade against bigotry that seized the French imagination in the mid-1980s...

...Purple, maybe, but amazing: there was an entire American army corps just a few kilometers north of where de Gaulle was speaking and—the reason I am relating this—everybody believed him...

...This suggested that something was at work that went deeper than a morbid fascination with an aging president dying ofprostate cancer whom the French know to be anything but a saint...

...They would liberate one of Europe's major capitals, send a message...

...But little by little, the honesty becomes colder, the facts come out more clearly, the French feel a little better...

...A well-respected journalist and historian who became interested in the young Mitterrand while researching the Cagoule, an ultra-right-wing movement of the thirties, Nan is scrupulous and restrained...

...Which is exactly how Jean Daniel put it in a lead editorial in his weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, the conscience and weathervane of the French left and the Paris intelligentsia...

...That was Bousquet," Mitterrand replied...

...Somewhere they knew that they had accepted Main, and then they had rejected and rebelled against the cruel German occupation, and then they had accepted de Gaulle as a savior...

...The shock was not so much in the broad fact of Mitterrand's participation in the Vichy regime that ran France under the German shadow from the summer of 1940 until the summer of 1944...

...To the young men and women at whose head Mitterrand rebuilt the Socialist vieille maison in the 1970s—leading it to victory in the name of "breaking with capitalism," of "justice," of "solidarity with the peoples of the world resisting imperialism," in opposition to the "dictatorial regime" of de Gaulle and his successors—the Vichy era was one of 44 The American Spectator February 1995 the most important defining moments of French history...

...Committed to a German victory...

...Yet his popularity ratings are holding at over 50 percent...

...Decades later, Nazi-hunters went after him again...

...His countrymen had always known old Tonton ("Uncle") was a crafty fellow, who could earn his other moniker le Florentin (as in Machiavelli) when he wanted...

...This is his style...

...Somehow, this odd situation seems to be connected to revelations about Mitterrand, the man, since last summer, as if the French wanted to assure themselves that they hadn't been dupes for fourteen years, that they wanted what they got—national shortcomings, personal failures, and all...

...In effect, Mitterrand "made" the National Front, ordering money and crucial air time to be made available to the worst demagogues to appear on the French scene since the days when there were people at Vichy, a few doors down from Mitterrand, demanding that the government be more anti-Semitic...

...Arriving there in the evening of August 25, de Gaulle, flanked by his officers and the Communist-dominated Paris Resistance organization, made one of the greatest off-the-cuff speeches of his rhetorically fabulous career: "Paris, martyred and beaten, but not defeated...

...We give a hand to Le Pen, the mainstream right loses votes to him...

...The Germans are taking over the European movement...

...Some versions of the story, perhaps wistful, have Attali puking into the Seine...

...It is profoundly illogical, and because the French prize logic they find it emotionally unbearable...

...On the day of his first inauguration, Mitterrand went to the Pantheon in great pomp and laid a red rose on Moulin's tomb...

...The Socialist Party, which he brought to power, is a shambles ideologically and politically...

...He was tried in Lyon and sentenced to life in prison...

...Who was that brilliant fellow...

...Bousquet is, or was, one of France's bona fide criminals against humanity, one of the key players in the Final Solution, who sent thousands to the death camps with no special German prodding...

...The reason the Barbie trial took place only in the 1980s, and the Bousquet trial might have taken place only in the 1990s, was that a lot of people did not want them to take place...

...In 1988, he hung on, without purpose and without glory, unless it was, as some muckrakers suspect, quite deliberately to protect friends who were on the take...

...Pean found no evidence that Mitterrand had been a party member, though he had been close to active members...

...Paris in August 1944 must have been sort of like this, except that the population was living on about 1,500 calories per day and the Germans were nervous and trigger-happy...

...And they loved him for this...

...If Petain had fled to Algiers at this point, he would have been, and would still be, a hero, and de Gaulle would not have been the leader of Free France...

...In reality, there were serious negotiations between the Free French (the Gaullists) and Eisenhower's HQ, and Ike decided that the larger strategic purpose, as defined by the Conetable, Charles de Gaulle, was sound...

...the younger man asked later...

...The second died of shame, a suicide, for taking money from the first...

...They wanted a man with a history as ambiguous and tortured as their nation's, a man of supreme cynicism who could say, when queried recently about an illegitimate child kept for years with her mother in official residences, "So what...

...Some 10,000 people, mainly Resistance fighters, Free French troops, and civilians, lost their lives...

...When the Americans arrived in late 1942 (my old dad was there), they had no clear sense of who were "our" French...

...The financial corruption that the Socialists had introduced into political life, partly out of that peculiar mix of romanticism and moral idiocy that characterizes the left ("Under capitalism, that is how you play the game"), was not yet widely known...

...Evolving Roger Kaplan is the editor of Freedom Review, published by Freedom House...

...The Resistance, which had, in fact, risen prematurely a few weeks earlier, rose again, and Paris was the scene of some fairly serious fighting until the German general Von Choltitz surrendered, instead of following Hitler's orders to blow the place up and retreat...

...You can take your time...

...It was sweet to be in France in 1988, and had he retired then, Mitterrand would have gone down in history as a great man...

...Moreover, as President of the Republic, he had aided and abetted the National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen, actively helping these Jew- and America-hating Saddamophiles go from 1 to 15 (20 in some regions) percent in the polls—not the opinion polls, mind you, the votes of French citizens...

...He said he did not hear anything...

...he has said...

...To the west the battle of Normandy was raging, about sixty full-strength divisions on either side, but the Americans were better equipped...

...Nor did he deny having been on the right in his youth, even, as the French say, on the right of the right...

...In this concern for living well courtesy of other people's money, Attali was much like Mitterrand's friends and retainers, particularly what came to be called the "rose elite," and the boss himself...

...philosophically (or at least politically), the man who represents the French left remained on friendly terms with some of the worst numbers in the Vichy regime of Marshal Pertain...

...Nan investigated persistent rumors that Mitterrand had been a member of the Action Francaise, the monarchist organization led by Charles Maurras, whose milder editorials included lines like "Knock off the Jew" (meaning Leon Blum, the leader of the 1936 Popular Front and one of the saints of the French left...

...Algeria was set to the torch, and prisoners were treated, as several French officers and civil servants protested at the time—one of them was Michel Rocard, Mitterrand's rival in the Socialist Party and erstwhile prime minister—the way the French themselves had been by the Gestapo a decade or so before...

...The Gaullists ended on top...

...Mitterrand always said this was when he made his choice for the Resistance...

...But Mitterrand remains a man of power for its own sake...

...Bousquet had received a suspended sentence for treason, due to friends in high places and the acknowledgment of "services rendered" to the Resistance (in late 1944...

...War was raging around the world...

...The American Spectator February 1995 45...

...he 42 The American Spectator February 1995 said, referring to his friendship with a notorious wartime Nazi collaborator...

...Attali admired the other guest, though without having been introduced...

...The week after Mitterrand led the French in a celebration of the Liberation of Paris by de Gaulle, he was the focus of a national debate: Had he been for Petain, then—back when it was not commemoration but real life...

...Not because they knew it was true, but because they wished it were...

...W ith France soon to elect a new president after fourteen years of Francois Mitterrand, there is a paradoxical sense that the French are satisfied with this man who is leaving behind him a field of ruins...

...What had come back, once again—it happens periodically—was the ghost of Vichy...

...He had presided over a wave of reforms that belonged to the traditional program of the left (increased social benefits, increased worker rights, openings to women, anti-racism, substantial nationalizations, aid to long-term unemployed) during the Mauroy government, and a wave of "liberal" reforms (a more open attitude toward private enterprise than even the French right had ever proposed) during the Fabius government...

...They dealt with him in the French style, by writing anguished essays...

...In the fifties and sixties, wartime memories were still acute, and there were quite a few people who knew who Mitterrand had been, or rather what he had done...

...He obviously struck a deep chord...

...The French fascination with Vichy comes largely from this...

...This was perfect for people like Mitterrand, eager to downplay their own vacillation...

...The French chose Mitterrand, as they say, en connaissance de cause, with direct personal knowledge...

...They thought he was such a clever guy...

...But Mitterrand took Attali to lunch at a restaurant near the river one day...

...Mitterrand had shown that the left in power did not mean Apocalypse, which in itself was a real step forward...

...He was under indictment for crimes against humanity when someone described as "unbalanced" (and never heard from again) killed him in 1993...

...The Gaullists were advancing from Equatorial Africa, eventually to link up with the British in Libya and Tunisia, and the Americans in Algeria...

...They re-enacted all this, period costumes, old tanks and jeeps, and all...

...Barbie eventually was extradited from Bolivia, where he had sought refuge after the war...

...The journalists who went after him on his attachments to the extreme right and on the money scandals—were armed with facts, documents, and witnesses, some of them suggested by Mitterrand himself...

...Vichy comes back at the French again and again, and they react by saying, "Indeed, let us have it out once and for all," and then when they see what that entails, they shove it back into the closet...

...T he Vichy period was brief—summer 1940 to summer 1944...

...Until some Jewish organizations finally got wise to him and raised the issue, he put flowers on Main's grave ("The hero of Verdun") every year...

...Mitterrand blamed the press...

...Until then they had confined themselves to the northeast and the coastline, plus Paris...

...You can see the plaques on walls all over the city...

...They admired the fact that when tens of thousands of people descended into the street to protest the desecration of the Jewish cemetery at Carpentras in 1989, Mitterrand was in the lead...

...This sentiment was found most poignantly and cruelly inside the ranks of the Socialist Party, which vaulted into power headed by a moral, moralizing, and even moralistic Mitterrand, a man of grand phrases ("Socialism is Justice") in the Victor Hugo style, who admonished his compatriots to "change life," who actively supported youth movements such as S.O.S...

...However, as Daniel Cordier, Moulin's deputy and biographer, pointed out, it might be one thing to entertain a national myth, bordering on a lie, about the Occupation and the Resistance...

...Yet people around him—including his best friend Roger-Patrice Peat, and his last prime minister Pierre Beregovoy—got into thick money scandals...

...It was a useful cover," Mitterrand shrugged...

...T he left will recover from Mitterrand...

...precipitating one of the cruelest colonial wars...

...And for reconciliation's sake, the Gaullists wanted to emphasize the myth of a France united in resistance, even within the Vichy regime...

...The French will too, I guess...

...Mitterrand never denied that he worked in the Vichy office responsible for POWs...

...He no longer does...

...it was quite another "to go from the tomb of Jean Moulin to dinner with Rene Bousquet...

...Rather, it was in the details: the sincerity with which he had engaged himself, the enduring loyalties that he formed while there...

...Like most of his compatriots, he assumed that the war was over and that Petain represented the country's best bet...

...Tut-tut, they said, that is only politics...

...What is the point," he asked, "of reviving these old wounds...

...Mitterrand in 1988 had done all that he could do for French socialism and for France...

...People had assumed his rhetoric about "cosmopolitan money" and "money that knows no country" was merely Socialist cant...

...Francois Mitterrand was a fascist in his youth...

...Thus the question really is this: What did the left think it was doing...

...Bousquet...

...T he scandal that hit Paris last August was provoked by Pierre Pean's Une Jeunesse Francaise, a meticulously researched book on Mitterrand's career in the 1930s and '40s...

...One of his most faithful, and favorite, young men was Jacques Attali, an Algerian-Jewish jack-of-all-trades who was fired from the Eastern Europe reconstruction bank for spending more money on himself than on eastern Europe...

...But the journalists Gilles Perez, Emmanuel Faux, and Thomas Legrand found that giving a hand to Le Pen had been more than just some political shenanigans in some closely contested districts...

...Note by way of comparison that 200,000 Poles died in the Warsaw uprising the same month...

...But the point here is that the left has no case for pretending "it did not know...

...There were 3,200 German troops killed and 13,000 taken prisoner...

...In other words, when confronted with evidence, over his long career, he allowed it, shifting the argument by coming up with still another rationalization...

...While he was anything but clear about his past, Mitterrand never fundamentally denied it...

...They appreciated his role in the Algerian War, when, as justice minister in the government of Guy Monet (himself a Socialist), Mitterrand tried to stop the independence movement through a war of terror and torture...

...Another thing the left had conveniently forgotten when it decided to make a deal with Mitterrand in return for coming back to power was the extent to which he had fought Third World liberation, despite all the later rhetoric when he became the leader of the Socialist-Communist Union of the Left...

...Bousquet was the antithesis of another civil servant, Jean Moulin, who as de Gaulle's delegate became head of the interior Resistance, was betrayed, and was tortured to death in a Gestapo jail by Klaus Barbie...

...He was not unrepresentative of the attitude of the French civil service, unfortunately, who viewed obedience—even zealous obedience—to the state as taking precedence over the values of the Republic...

...What Daniel expressed was not only exasperation with the fifty-year game of "love me, love me not" that Mitterrand has played with the French people, and the French left, but the feeling that the French had never sufficiently expiated the sins of the fascist Vichy regime...

...That was already known...

...Show their sensitivity...

...Unemployment, one of the central themes of Mitterrand's long campaign against the conservatives, is much worse than when he won the presidency...

...He received the Francisque," was a recurring complaint...

...It was a balmy week in this best of months when you are spared the Parisians and you can stroll around and admire the city, its pavements and rooftops, and not be overcome by jostling crowds and noise and, as I say, the Parisians themselves...

...Paris is risen and liberated by its own children, aided by the arms of Free France, Fighting France, Eternal France—the only France...

...The first died of a heart attack before he could be tried for a mammoth scam involving nationalized companies and therefore public funds...

...That is the background...