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, Franqois Mitterrand. The choice was poor not for political reasons, but because the singer was bound to perform in her usual operatic style. Le temps des cerises — “Cherry Season,” a lovely, nostalgic, 19th-century song that somehow became an unoffcial anthem of the French left — is the antithesis of opera. It has to be sung simply, without vocal lushness, the way Yves Montand once sang it on television. Hendricks could no more pull that off than Pavarotti could sing “Tambourine Man” in Bob Dylan’s style.
In fact, Hendricks herself was conscious of the problem and would have preferred to sing Schubert’sAve Maria. 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. 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.
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. Mitterrand had gone on to reign for 14 years, longer than any other president of the Fifth Republic including Charles de Gaulle. Indeed, he had been reelected handsomely in 1988 against a then-naive Jacques Chirac. But just how Socialist a president had Mitterrand been? 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.
As it turned out, the Bastille rally was only one of many memorial observances and not the crowning ceremony as might have been expected. The former president passed away on the morning of Monday, January 8. President Chirac delivered an emotional eulogy on television that night. The Bastille rally was on Wednesday night. The funeral took place at Jarnac, Mitterrand’s birthplace on the Atlantic coast of France, on Thursday morning. Mitterrand had requested a simple funeral. It was not as simple as all that. There were troops, and flags, and honor. Barriers were duly erected to separate the family and their numerous Parisian guests from the local populace. Moreover, in what amounted to a complete disavowal of the secular mood at La Bastille, there was a mass at the Catholic parish church. At about the same time, President Chirac was attending a requiem mass at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. He then hosted a state dinner for foreign heads of state and government at the Elyse palace. All in all, the observances were more right- wing than left-wing in time. The pomp and symbols of traditional France had eclipsed the comrades’ mourning — an ironic reflection of the way Mitterrand had lived his life.
Franois Mitterrand was born in 1916 to conservative Catholic parents. He was sent to a Catholic private school. In his early twenties, as a student, he flirted with the royalists and other far-right agitato. There is a photograph of him attending an anti-immigration-that tion — that is, anti- Semitic — rally in the Latin Quarter. 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 thefrancisque, Vichy’s badge of honor; another photograph shows him with Marshal Petain. He joined the resistance by 1943, but again, the right-wing resistance under General Henri Giraud rather than the mainstream Gaullist resistance.
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). More intriguing was the close relationship Mitterrand developed with Renfi Bousquet, a senior offcial in the Vichy police who in 1942 supervised vised the arrest and deportation to Nazi death camps of thousands of Jews in Paris. In 1965, as a leftist candidate for president challenging de Gaulle, Mitterrand managed to secure support from the far right. Later, as president, he discreetly ordered flowers to be laid on Pettain’s grave. 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.
Yet Mitterrand — who plainly had political genius — became the leader of the left. 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. Then de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic, with its strong presidency. Mitterrand realized that the new regime would last and de Gaulle would remain in power for many years. He also knew that de Gaulle despised him. He would not be a cabinet minister again. He had no choice but to join the opposition.
And the opposition was left-wing. Half of it was Communist — and that half terrified the other, which was Social Democratic. 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. It was an enormous gamble. This was still the Cold War. Communists were still riding high. Anticommunism still prevailed. The U. S. government was still taking undercover action against politicians with Communist leanings. But Mitterrand stood firm. 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). On the other hand, numbers were numbers. 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.
So Mitterrand the not-so-secret right-winger was transformed into Mitterrand the born-again left-wing liberal. While staying true to his older friends, he made new ones — academics, artists, Third World militants. He dressed more casually. He cultivated as many Jews as he could and made a point of displaying a sympathetic attitude toward Israel. He wrote books, first on Red China, then on de Gaulle’s “dictatorship,” then on himself. He assiduously worked at developing contacts in all Socialist, progressive, and radical circles. 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. 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 Valery Giscard d’Estaing. But the second time, the margin shrank to a mere percentage point. Moreover, he had succeeded by then in revitalizing the Socialist party under his exclusive leadership. In 1981, he ran for the third time and won, by one percentage point.
He had made it. He was king of France, and he applied his whole will and energy to remaining on the throne. 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. Welfare was expanded, working hours were shortened, banks and major industries were nationalized, public expenditures rose. In less than two years, France was bankrupt. This may have been a disaster in terms of government but not in terms of politics. Mitterrand had established his credentials as a true Socialist, in the grand tradition of Jean Jaurs and Ldon Blum. That gave him moral standing for the second stage: a complete retreat from dogmatic Socialism, to be replaced by yuppyism. His first prime minister, Pierre Mauroy, resigned. The Communists deserted. A very fashionable young man, Laurent Fabius, became prime minister and made sure that France would ride the wave of neo-capatalist prosperity generated by the Reagan Revolution.
There was only one problem. Mitterrand had expected somehow to reunite the Socialists, the Communists, and the far left in a Socialist-dominated grand party of the left. He soon discovered, however, that things were not so easy. The Communist party was indeed declining, and some middle-aged former radicals or Trotskyires were willing to join the new Socialist establishment. But much larger numbers of ex-Communists and ex-radicals were simply vanishing into thin air, withdrawing from politics. Given the bipolar nature of Fifth Republic politics and the narrow margin between right and left, that made a conservative comeback a sure thing. 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. Mitterrand had other ideas.
For one thing, he could exploit ambiguities in the constitution. 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. He saw to it that electoral laws were tailored to benefit the Socialists and their allies. 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.
And he had other strategies. The best response to erosion on the left was to split the right. Mitterrand did this in various ways, by playing one conservative leader against another (notably, after 1993, Edouard Balladur against Chirac) and Eurofederalists against Euroskeptics. Above all, he helped the far right emerge as a strong, organized political force. 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. 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. These Machiavellian tactics were essential to Mitterrand’s reelection in 1988, when he campaigned as the last bulwark against the Fascist threat.
Foreign policy, too, was largely conceived as an instrument for influencing domestic politics. 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. 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. His handling of the major foreign issue of his presidency, the great Eastern European and Soviet upheavals of 1989-91, was pathetic. 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. 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.
For if Mitterrand relished the exercise of power, he cared even more about his place in history. No contemporary political leader, at least in the West, has been so obsessed with style over substance, glory over achievement. 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 Elysde and free access to him. 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 Panthon, Paris’s republican shrine to secular heroes. 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 Dfense and the Bastille Opera. 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.
In the end, even Mitterrand’s staunchest supporters had to acknowledge that there was something outre and over-cynical about him. The second presidential term, from 1988 to 1995, was ridden with scandals involving ministers and personal friends. The last Socialist prime minister, Pierre Brgovoy, committed suicide over allegations of embezzlement. A personal assistant, Francois de Grossouvre, also committed suicide at his Elyse offce. The president’s closest friend, Roger-Patrice Pelat, died suddenly, right after being prosecuted for his role in the Triangle insider-trading scandal.
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. 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 regime monarch. Mitterrand quickly realized this. 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.
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 state-runor publicly funded corporations. The process had begun in earnest under de Gaulle. In his turn, Mitterrand placed people of leftist background in positions of power.
Thus a consensus emerged about the excellence and usefulness of the new nobility. The views of conservative president Jacques Chirac and conservative prime minister Alain Jupp, on the one hand, and the new Socialist leader Lionel Jospin, (m 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. What remains to be seen is how good for the country this one-party-system-in-disguise can be. It is possible that the social unrest France experienced last fall was an attempted popular rebellion against the king’s peace.
Michel Gurfinkiel is editor of the French conservative weekly Valeurs Actuells.
