Fran?ois Mitterrand, Machiavellian Monarch
GURFINKIEL, MICHEL
Fran?ois Mitterrand, Machiavellian Monarch By Michel Gurfinkiel Anyone could see that Barbara Hendricks was not the best choice to sing Le temps des cerises at the Place de la Bastille in tribute...
...And he tirelessly promoted grand architectural projects, from the Orsay Museum and the renovation of the Louvre to the Great Arch in the business district of La D?fense and the Bastille Opera...
...That gave him moral standing for the second stage: a complete retreat from dogmatic Socialism, to be replaced by yuppyism...
...Mitterrand did this in various ways, by playing one conservative leader against another (notably, after 1993, Edouard Balladur against Chirac) and Eurofederalists against Euroskeptics...
...And he had other strategies...
...The political diary of Jacques Attali, his closest adviser, hastily published under the title Verbatim, provides ample evidence that he did not understand at first what was going on and then desperately sought to support the collapsing Soviet Empire in order to check the emergence of a greater Germany...
...He would not be a cabinet minister again...
...With considerable foresight and guts, Mitterrand called for a united left, including the Communists, rather than a left-of-center coalition of Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, and other anti-Gaullists...
...But the rally at the Place de la Bastille-in front of the Bastille Opera House, one of Mitterrand's regal adornments of postmodern Paris-was a leftist gathering, and the French left is studiously secular...
...Mitterrand had established his credentials as a true Socialist, in the grand tradition of Jean Jaur?s and L?on Blum...
...The choice was poor not for political reasons, but because the singer was bound to perform in her usual operatic style...
...In the Middle East, Mitterrand first supported Israel in order to rally the crucial Jewish vote, then tilted toward the Arabs and the PLO when the Jewish vote became less monolithic, and maybe also because the French Muslim vote was growing...
...Welfare was expanded, working hours were shortened, banks and major industries were nationalized, public expenditures rose...
...The funeral took place at Jarnac, Mitterrand's birthplace on the Atlantic coast of France, on Thursday morning...
...Fran?ois Mitterrand, Machiavellian Monarch By Michel Gurfinkiel Anyone could see that Barbara Hendricks was not the best choice to sing Le temps des cerises at the Place de la Bastille in tribute to the late president of France, Fran?ois Mitterrand...
...But Mitterrand stood firm...
...Indeed, he had been reelected handsomely in 1988 against a then-naive Jacques Chirac...
...Bousquet, a senior official in the Vichy police who in 1942 supervised the arrest and deportation to Nazi death camps of thousands of Jews in Paris...
...So Mitterrand the not-so-secret right-winger was transformed into Mitterrand the born-again left-wing liberal...
...He wrote books, first on Red China, then on de Gaulle's "dictatorship," then on himself...
...The U.S...
...Mitterrand had requested a simple funeral...
...As it turned out, the Bastille rally was only one of many memorial observances and not the crowning ceremony as might have been expected...
...When he went into politics after the war, still quite a young man, Mitterrand won support from the arch-conservative Republican Party for Freedom (PRL...
...And in his very last public speech, on May 8, 1995, for the 50th anniversary of the Allies' victory in World War II, he insisted on paying homage to the bravery of the German fighters...
...So no hymns, only sad, romantic songs, as thousands of people gathered in the rain, many of them holding a single crimson rose, the emblem of the Socialist party...
...In 1981, he ran for the third time and won, by one percentage point...
...But just how Socialist a president had Mitterrand been...
...Twice he was a candidate for the Union of the Left and lost, the first time in 1965 to de Gaulle, the second time in 1974 to Val?ry Giscard d'Estaing...
...Mitterrand had gone on to reign for 14 years, longer than any other president of the Fifth Republic including Charles de Gaulle...
...Yet Mitterrand-who plainly had political genius-became the leader of the left...
...But much larger numbers of ex-Communists and ex-radicals were simply vanishing into thin air, withdrawing from politics...
...government was still taking undercover action against politicians with Communist leanings...
...Mitterrand reversed that policy, then urged the left to do whatever was necessary to stimulate xenophobia throughout the country-for instance, demand more rights and benefits for Third World immigrants, including full voting rights in local elections before naturalization...
...He saw to it that electoral laws were tailored to benefit the Socialists and their allies...
...It is possible that the social unrest France experienced last fall was an attempted popular rebellion against the king's peace...
...The second presidential term, from 1988 to 1995, was ridden with scandals involving ministers and personal friends...
...There is a photograph of him attending an anti-immigration-that is, anti-Semitic-rally in the Latin Quarter...
...He was king of France, and he applied his whole will and energy to remaining on the throne...
...Oddly, though, the more the French, either on the right or on the left, learned about the real Mitterrand, the less they cared, as if they enjoyed being ruled by an ancien r?gime monarch...
...Then when a conservative parliament was elected in 1986, he both presided over conservative cabinet meetings and helped the Socialist parliamentary minority and the trade unions to undermine government policies...
...It was not as simple as all that...
...And so firm was his commitment to coalition with the Communists that they had to support him in return, whatever they thought of him privately...
...The former president passed away on the morning of Monday, January 8. President Chirac delivered an emotional eulogy on television that night...
...When the possibility of building new quarters for the National Library was raised, he unabashedly ordered a gigantic, impractical, and unimaginative complex of glass boxes near the Seine, against almost every librarian's advice...
...This may have been a disaster in terms of government but not in terms of politics...
...A personal assistant, Fran?ois de Grossouvre, also committed suicide at his Elys?e office...
...Mitterrand had expected somehow to reunite the Socialists, the Communists, and the far left in a Socialist-dominated grand party of the left...
...Fran?ois Mitterrand was born in 1916 to conservative Catholic parents...
...On the one hand, he knew the Americans knew that de Gaulle had reached his own unwritten accommodation with the French Communists and their Soviet overlords (Leave me in power and I will take France out of NATO...
...While staying true to his older friends, he made new ones-academics, artists, Third World militants...
...The pomp and symbols of traditional France had eclipsed the comrades' mourning-an ironic reflection of the way Mitterrand had lived his life...
...During his last two years as president, he brought up controversial aspects of his life in conversations with journalists and writers, including his role at Vichy, his connection with Bousquet, and the royal polygamy in which he had indulged...
...But the second time, the margin shrank to a mere percentage point...
...There was only one problem...
...He was sent to a Catholic private school...
...Ironically, Mitterrand was not quite aware of one very real achievement: the consolidation, through his long reign, of a new French ruling class, drawn from the meritocratic senior civil service and the big staterun or publicly funded corporations...
...Almost 15 years earlier, on May 10, 1981, when Mitterrand was first elected president, the same people, or perhaps their parents, had gathered at the same spot to celebrate with music and dancing...
...In his turn, Mitterrand placed people of leftist background in positions of power...
...All in all, the observances were more right-wing than left-wing in tone...
...There were troops, and flags, and honors...
...Mitterrand quickly realized this...
...Thus a consensus emerged about the excellence and usefulness of the new nobility...
...In addition to allowing Attali to keep a political diary and to publish it, he hired a distinguished academic, Georgette Elgey, to be his official historian and gave her an office at the Elys?e and free access to him...
...And the opposition was left-wing...
...Then de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic, with its strong presidency...
...As for Mitterrand's finest hour-his stand at the West German Bundestag in favor of NATO policies and American missile deployment in Western Europe in 1983-it had much to do with his need to persuade the Reagan administration to tolerate Communists in his cabinet for a while...
...He assiduously worked at developing contacts in all Socialist, progressive, and radical circles...
...Moreover, he had succeeded by then in revitalizing the Socialist party under his exclusive leadership...
...In other cases, like Kuwait and Bosnia, he spent French blood and treasure to advance intricate schemes aimed ultimately at enhancing his own stature as global elder statesman...
...Hendricks could no more pull that off than Pavarotti could sing "Tambourine Man" in Bob Dylan's style...
...Communists were still riding high...
...The Communist party was indeed declining, and some middle-aged former radicals or Trotskyites were willing to join the new Socialist establishment...
...He cultivated as many Jews as he could and made a point of displaying a sympathetic attitude toward Israel...
...For if Mitterrand relished the exercise of power, he cared even more about his place in history...
...The people assembled at La Bastille knew the answer: They were orphans, not just because their leader was gone, but because their dreams were gone as well...
...Presidential elections under the Fifth Republic inevitably would produce a polarization of political forces, and someday the Union of the Left was bound to win...
...The Communists deserted...
...The president's closest friend, Roger-Patrice Pelat, died suddenly, right after being prosecuted for his role in the Triangle insider-trading scandal...
...For one thing, he could exploit ambiguities in the constitution...
...Le temps des cerises-"Cherry Season," a lovely, nostalgic, 19th-century song that somehow became an unofficial anthem of the French left-is the antithesis of opera...
...It was soon revealed that Mitterrand not only had a mistress and an illegitimate daughter (something the French can live with) but actually lodged them in a handsome government apartment, at state expense, a few minutes from the presidential palace...
...Foreign policy, too, was largely conceived as an instrument for influencing domestic politics...
...Michel Gufinkiel is editor in chief of the French conservative weekly Valeurs Actuelles...
...He dressed more casually...
...In his early twenties, as a student, he flirted with the royalists and other far-right agitators...
...The Bastille rally was on Wednesday night...
...He had made it...
...In fact, Hendricks herself was conscious of the problem and would have preferred to sing Schubert's Ave Maria...
...More intriguing was the close relationship Mitterrand developed with Ren...
...He also knew that de Gaulle despised him...
...In less than two years, France was bankrupt...
...Under the weak, Italian-style Fourth Republic, which lasted just 11 years, from 1947 to 1958, he led a small left-of-center party and was 11 times a cabinet minister, no mean achievement...
...During World War II, Mitterrand managed to escape from a prisoner of war camp in Germany, only to become a junior official in Vichy France and to be granted the francisque, Vichy's badge of honor...
...At about the same time, President Chirac was attending a requiem mass at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris...
...This was still the Cold War...
...It was an enormous gamble...
...These Machiavellian tactics were essential to Mitterrand's reelection in 1988, when he campaigned as the last bulwark against the Fascist threat...
...There had always been far right undercurrents in France, as elsewhere, but conservative governments had prevented the extremists from staging large rallies or gaining full access to state-run radio and TV...
...On the other hand, numbers were numbers...
...Sometime debunker of de Gaulle's "dictatorship," he adopted a positively Gaullist insistence on presidential prerogative, including the so-called reserved sphere (foreign affairs, national defense), nowhere mentioned in the written constitution...
...His first prime minister, Pierre Mauroy, resigned...
...Barriers were duly erected to separate the family and their numerous Parisian guests from the local populace...
...another photograph shows him with Marshal P?tain...
...Anybody but Mitterrand would have bowed to fate and made a point of stepping down "on the left," as a brave reformer and an inspiration to future generations...
...Later, as president, he discreetly ordered flowers to be laid on P?tain's grave...
...He then hosted a state dinner for foreign heads of state and government at the Elys?e palace...
...The best response to erosion on the left was to split the right...
...He had no choice but to join the opposition...
...No contemporary political leader, at least in the West, has been so obsessed with style over substance, glory over achievement...
...Given the bipolar nature of Fifth Republic politics and the narrow margin between right and left, that made a conservative comeback a sure thing...
...The process had begun in earnest under de Gaulle...
...His handling of the major foreign issue of his presidency, the great Eastern European and Soviet upheavals of 1989-91, was pathetic...
...He created elaborate rituals and symbols, like a yearly trek in the hills of central France at Pentecost, an ostentatious passion for old trees, and pageantry at the Panth?on, Paris's republican shrine to secular heroes...
...A very fashionable young man, Laurent Fabius, became prime minister and made sure that France would ride the wave of neocapitalist prosperity generated by the Reagan Revolution...
...Mitterrand realized that the new regime would last and de Gaulle would remain in power for many years...
...He soon discovered, however, that things were not so easy...
...What remains to be seen is how good for the country this one-party-system-in-disguise can be...
...Half of it was Communist-and that half terrified the other, which was Social Democratic...
...Anticommunism still prevailed...
...The last Socialist prime minister, Pierre B?r?govoy, committed suicide over allegations of embezzlement...
...Above all, he helped the far right emerge as a strong, organized political force...
...Mitterrand had other ideas...
...In the end, even Mitterrand's staunchest supporters had to acknowledge that there was something outr...
...His first move was to appoint a Socialist-led cabinet including Communist ministers and to implement nearly every reform he had subscribed to as a candidate of the left, however impractical or downright silly...
...The views of conservative president Jacques Chirac and conservative prime minister Alain Jupp?, on the one hand, and the new Socialist leader Lionel Jospin, on the other-all graduates of the National School of Administration, France's training ground for top bureaucrats-are in fact quite close on most political and economic issues...
...It has to be sung simply, without vocal lush-ness, the way Yves Montand once sang it on television...
...and over-cynical about him...
...He joined the resistance by 1943, but again, the right-wing resistance under General Henri Giraud rather than the mainstream Gaullist resistance...
...Moreover, in what amounted to a complete disavowal of the secular mood at La Bastille, there was a mass at the Catholic parish church...
...In 1965, as a leftist candidate for president challenging de Gaulle, Mitterrand managed to secure support from the far right...
Vol. 1 • January 1996 • No. 19
