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Overview
In this first major political biography since his death, Ronald Tiersky looks at the contradiction that was Mitterrand and the legacy he left to France and the world. This promises to be the standard book on this great world leader for years to come.
"[Tiersky's] crisp, energetic narration gives both a sense of the biographer's fascination with his subject and an appreciation for the sheer breadth of Mitterrand's experience. " - Publishers Weekly
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312129088 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 07/21/2000 |
| Edition description: | REV |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.06(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Introduction:
France's Most
Controversial
Politician
He thought the success of his undertakings the more likely in that his actions had for setting a society in which he felt himself—by family origins, early experiences, the diversity of his gifts and culture, his disappointments, his mistakes and about-faces, the variety of his acquired roots [in various parts of the country], and even by the intensity of his successive sincerities—eminently representative. [François Mitterrand] seemed the most French of all the French of his time. —Jean Lacouture, Mitterrand: Une Histoire de Français
Some people must die in order to be missed and this was the case with François Mitterrand. Doubtlessly because, given how long he lasted, he became identified with France. He liked to say that he had become part of the landscape. He was right. When he died, France mourned for herself; fifty years of French history were sliding away. Alternately or simultaneously a pétainist and a résistant, a socialist and a liberal, a Catholic and a secular, a centralizer and a provincial, authoritarian and tolerant, François Mitterrand was able to embody the complexity of France. —Franz-Olivier Giesbert, François Mitterrand: Une Vie
Fortunately—orunfortunately—I had experienced far more of the world than most ... This did not mean increased wisdom on my part, but it certainly meant a broad knowledge of the complexities of a life in one's time and of the numerous and often dangerous opportunities, to be taken or avoided. —Gore Vidal, Palimpsest: A Memoir
FRANCE'S REPRESENTATIVE MAN
François Mitterrand WAS, to reinvent a stereotype, a "very French"president. Paradoxically, he was also France's most controversial politician. Hewas, therefore, simultaneously France's most representative, and most controversialpolitical man. The French people understood this intuitively; foreignersfound France once again fascinating because of this French president'ssomewhat inexplicable allure.
Mitterrand was quite unlike Charles de Gaulle. General de Gaulle,despite his own extravagant personality, was an unquestioned national hero, apure and intransigent embodiment of French courage, determination, and honor.De Gaulle was, in other words, anything but a representative Frenchman.François Mitterrand, on the other hand, was a remarkable president who stayedthe course, whose presidency was, history will show, creative and in placesillustrious, despite its scandals and Mitterrand's own imperiousness andshortcomings of character.
Thus Mitterrand should be thought of not as a pale imitation of de Gaulle.He commands interest in his own right and, if I am persuasive, will appear as aricher, more complex study of France and the French than de Gaulle. This boldassertion naturally does not mean that Mitterrand's career was a more inspiringstory of leadership or morality. It was not. But Mitterrand's vicissitudes andtransformations create deeper insights into France and the French—he as hewas, the French as they are.
This difference between Mitterrand and de Gaulle as one focus of mybook is tied specifically to de Gaulle's idea of himself and of the French. Toconnect de Gaulle and the French is not to begin with objective realities. It is tostart with de Gaulle's "certain idea of France," his "exalted" conception ofFrance, France as "the Madonna in the frescoes," what the French should be,although they almost never are, in order that France might "be herself." DeGaulle, in the memorable drama he created in words and deeds, was the heroicleader whose only goal was service to France, and thus to the French State. Toconnect François Mitterrand and France is, by contrast, to begin with objectivecharacter and social structure, with the man growing up out of the boy, and withFrench history since the 1930s in all its light and shadows.
De Gaulle's type of pure Frenchness meant that he was in a certain sensenot much else. De Gaulle was France was de Gaulle. This made for strength—deGaulle didn't have a single doubt that he embodied France—but it also cuthim off from other experience. He could not afford to be either too interested inthe rest of the world or, above all, influenced by it.
On the other hand the equally French François Mitterrand was Frenchin a different way. He was by temperament and by education a cosmopolitanas well as a Frenchman. His character and the results of rubbing up againstthe world hither and yon, inveterately on the road as opposed to de Gaulle'ssingle-minded francocentric worldview, made him an unusually intriguingforeign leader to Americans and other non-French peoples. Thus, reading hisbiography can be richly rewarding because his own worldliness facilitatestranslation of French mentalities and genuine comprehension across cultures.De Gaulle felt chez lui only in the presidential Élysée palace in Paris and inhis rural residence in the village of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. Mitterrandwas at his ease not only in Paris and various homes in the French provinces,but also in Venice, Jerusalem, Egypt, Prague, and several countries in Northand sub-Saharan Africa. De Gaulle's political vocation was all-consuming,with the exception of family. Mitterrand, by contrast, led a versatile lifecombining politics and a full menu of unconventional, sometimes bohemianinterests. He reveled in the diversity of his interests and savoir-faire, indeedin the diversity of life itself. Mitterrand was in many respects a dilettante, aspecialist in several things, a great talent in one or perhaps two. De Gaulle, bycontrast, had few outside interests; they would have detracted from hisambitions and goals. When de Gaulle died at home in 1970, he slumped overa game of solitaire, his wife in the next room. When Mitterrand died in 1996in a small government apartment alone with his doctor, his "two wives" andhis out-of-wedlock daughter were all, despite years of "awkwardness," stillutterly devoted. To each his own.
Mitterrand's savoir-faire did not, however, extend very much to theUnited States, a country that he referred to, formally and semiresentfully, as"les États-Unis d'Amérique," "the United States of America." Like so manyFrenchmen (including de Gaulle), François Mitterrand had a love-haterelationship with America. In 1980, in his last book before becomingpresident, Mitterrand defined his attitude toward the United States andAmericans: "I like the Americans, but not their policy. During the FourthRepublic [1946-58] I was exasperated by the climate of submission to theirleast desires. I didn't admit their right to set themselves up as the policemanof the world.... My relations with the American ambassadors in Paris alwayshad a touch of trouble.... [Right now] I don't even know the currentambassador, who has been in France for two years."
If he thought of America and its people as interesting, this humanisticfeeling didn't hide from himself or others the fact that he knew rather little aboutthe one or the other, as opposed to his genuine knowledge of several othersocieties. He felt very foreign, very French, in the United States, which surfacedsometimes in conversation. Once with me he tried out a not terribly successfulcomparison of the Far West in American history with the role of Siberia vis-à-visRussia. There is a superficial parallel, having been made by many people,but not much more. I think the comparison helped him justify his very Frenchargument that the United States and the Soviet Union were ultimately, in relationto France and to Europe, geopolitically two dominating superpowers. Mitterrandnever denied America's democratic political and cultural life and all thedifferences between it and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, in private he oftenreferred to the United States, half-joking but half-serious, as "the most powerfulempire in the world." This is typical de Gaulle-like thinking that boggles theminds of most Americans, yet is a viewpoint widespread around the world. Itwould take us astray to argue the issue out here.
No matter how many times Mitterrand visited the United States heremained basically a tourist, which contrasted with his feeling of familiarity—andpaternalism and post-colonialism—in many other foreign lands. In thefollowing passage François Mitterrand describes how he was bowled over byNew York:
The first time I saw New York, it was heaven, it was dazzling! We flew [the Atlantic] overnight and [on arrival] the rising sun hadn't yet dissipated the early morning fogs. Manhattan, gray and golden in its geometric relief, had a round sweetness. I thought of Botticelli.... Arriving by plane I've always had the same impression of entering into the future through a window. When I'm asked what cities I prefer, I put New York at a level with Venice, Ghent, Florence, Jerusalem....
Despite this bedazzlement, the roots and branches of American society were,and remained, hard to grasp. Europeans of his generation, educated in nineteenthcentury ideas of class and class conflict, naturally found it hard to understand asociety that, whatever its genuine social class divisions, did not derive fromfeudalism. In Old Deerfield, Massachusetts, a well-preserved colonial NewEngland village where I once took him on a tour, he looked at the large whitehouses, half-mansions, and observed that these "obviously had belonged to theearly American grand bourgeois class." The early American grande bourgeoisie?The appropriateness (or not) of this concept sparked discussion of thepossible meanings of "bourgeois" society, American, European, and other.Mitterrand said, "Ah yes, I take the point." But he really seemed a semiblindman touching the great American elephant. It was one of the few times in allour various conversations—which after all mainly concerned France andEurope—when I saw puzzlement plain on his face. Whatever else I felt at themoment I was impressed that this man could recognize, without loss of face,what he didn't know.
* * *
There is of course a fundamental painful point in reckoning with FrançoisMitterrand's record and the winding road of France's most controversialpolitician. Mitterrand's various incarnations and apparent shifts of characterhave always been seen as a lack of courage or honor. Some foreigners even thinkof Mitterrand's career as "very French" in this regard, certainly a wrong way touse the idea of Mitterrand as France's representative man. Even if these problemsare intertwined in foreigners' perceptions of France they are different problems.One leader, whether Mitterrand or de Gaulle, does not define a nation. Moreover,where questions of honor or judgment are posed, as they were repeatedly inMitterrand's career, the answers we can give today, with some hindsight, revealan unexpected portrait of a French president and, in certain ways, of the Frenchpast as well.
"How many are the acts of one man in which we recognize the samecharacter!" Ralph Waldo Emerson's exaltation of individual character gives usa starting point from which to measure Mitterrand. A similar thought isexpressed by the Frenchman Henri Michaux, poet, traveler, historian, andrésistant: In Un Barbare en Asie he writes that "Every individual is born with agiven character, a principle which doesn't need to be demonstrated, generallyfar from being transcendental and around which he assembles his ideas...."
Nevertheless, character is a complex thing all the same. To decipher alife means seeking the essence of character; but also highlighting our mostmeaningful experiences, those encounters that affect and develop us, "hurledinto the world" as each of us begins life.
* * *
"De Gaulle is not the only one in French history," François Mitterrand once toldan interviewer objectively and disarmingly. If François Mitterrand was not a"great" leader (although I think he could have been in those moments of greatcrisis that elicit a great leader), he was a truly remarkable political talent, a leaderof strategic vision who had immense influence in French and European politics.He achieved a great deal: Despite his failures, important as they were, heachieved much more than was conceded by his critics at the time. Therefore, tounderline the contrasts between de Gaulle and Mitterrand, as I am doing in thisintroduction, does not eliminate Mitterrand. In fact the "merely" remarkableMitterrand becomes all the more interesting because of what he did achieve inless dramatic times, without the crisis circumstances that allowed the larger-than-lifeCharles de Gaulle to play the role of France's savior and redeemer.
In sum, whatever the man's character flaws and whatever the questionsthat must be asked about his long march through French history since the 1930s,François Mitterrand was uncontestably the most impressive political man of hisgeneration. And de Gaulle aside, he was unquestionably the leading Frenchpolitician and statesman of the second half of the twentieth century.
Why there was so much ambivalence about whether Mitterrand was asubstantial leader, both in France and abroad, is yet another interestingquestion we must ponder.
Part of the issue is that François Mitterrand, from his earliest entry intopolitics, was always a man for controversy. He was always drawn to the greatissues of his time, tempted first by the challenges to his ambition, later by thesubstance of the matter. Polemic was one of Mitterrand's most natural andsharpest weapons. Irony, sometimes witty and sometimes devastating, was hischaracteristic mode of conversation. Overall his desire to fight the big politicalbattles resembled de Gaulle's invocation of Hamlet in the War Memoirs: "Tobe great is to embrace a great quarrel." To engage himself in the "greatquarrels" was a kind of courage that played to his strengths and served hisown ambition well. But along the way his courage sometimes veered over intorecklessness that got him not only into hot debates but also into the personalscandal which almost ended his career. The so-called Observatory affair of1959, the subject of chapter 2, is a little-known episode even to the French oftoday. It is crucial because his role in the affair at first seemed to confirm thathe was a basically fraudulent, corrupt politician. However, I believe that thisextravagant moment in his career should be read with empathy as well as moralrigor. It was almost certainly a matter of illegal behavior on his part, but it wasalso a test of character. It became a crisis of identity out of which Mitterrand,the sort of game-playing Fourth Republic politician whom de Gaulledisparaged as a "politichien" (a play on words he loved because it combinedpolitician and dog), emerged matured rather than destroyed. The Observatoryaffair was a crucible that forced Mitterrand's character development. Ittransformed a brilliant, hugely talented but morally unanchored FourthRepublic wonder boy into de Gaulle's successor as the dominant leader inFrench public life.
And if the French themselves had difficulty re-evaluating Mitterrand,if they continued to suspect him, this was partly because they were reluctantto re-evaluate themselves objectively in light of the successive revelations oftheir World War II, colonialist, and cold war past. Mitterrand was, so to speak,them. There was much they preferred to deny about themselves and it wasconvenient to displace the blame onto someone like him, all the more temptingin that they could then imagine themselves, as has so often been observed, ashaving been always de Gaulle—like permanent patriots and résistants. Inreality, the various stages and stops along François Mitterrand's path had beenthe low points and high moments in their own political history. No otherpolitician summarized so much of the French experience as it really had been,for better and for worse.
It was clear and thus fairly uncomplicated to assert in France, that deGaulle was a hero. Not even the French Communists chose to deny it at the time.De Gaulle soared proudly, even arrogantly, above the disgraces of Frenchhistory. But to ask today's French if François Mitterrand was un grand présidentis like asking them if they are still a great people. It is a vexing question, andnot only because of globalization, because France has become only a medium-sizedpower and economy. Mitterrand's reputation at home was and continuesto be a matter of the French coming to terms with their collective self-image. Ina sense it is the soul-searing business of settling accounts with their own historyas it really was.
How could a man with a Vichy past have possibly become a widelyrespected contemporary statesman in the world's leading international councils?How could a Fourth Republic politician, an ambitious cabinet minister in eightdifferent governments in eleven years, possibly have metamorphized into animperious Fifth Republic president who changed the face of contemporaryFrench politics? It is not impossible.
* * *
François Mitterrand was president of France for two seven-year terms, 1981 to1988 and 1988 to 1995. His first term was a rocky but overall remarkableexample of what I call "Machiavellian republican" politics. These first longyears produced major achievements of political clarification and legitimacy, ofintellectual disillusion, and political-moral consensus in French political lifeand political culture. While not historic in the weightiest sense of the term, theywere deep alterations in French political life at the level of history.
Three changes stand out, watersheds in French thinking about socialism,legitimacy, and Europe. In Mitterrand's first term the long French intellectualromance with the idea of socialism was finally clarified, because Mitterrand'sgovernment finally tried it out in reality. Between 1981 and 1984 threegovernments, all led by prime minister Pierre Mauroy, carried out the mostambitious socialist program since the Clement Attlee government in Britainafter World War II. Out of its failures and half-successes, French Socialist andCommunist mentalities were unfrozen; they had to face up to reality. And a pointof no return was reached in France even before Mikhail Gorbachev arrived inpower in the Soviet Union in 1985. In the process of movement on the FrenchLeft, the once fearsome French Communist party was finally shrunk to a juniorpartner to the Socialists. The latter then were politically free to become amoderate left-wing governing party, as had the German Social Democratic partyand British Labour before them. Even if success brought new problems forMitterrand and the French Socialists, his strategy for modernizing the FrenchLeft had worked beautifully, a plan developed in the 1960s and even laid outpublicly at a meeting of the Socialist International in 1972. How FrançoisMitterrand's strategy trapped the French Communist party is a textbook lessonin Machiavellian modus operandi, in having good luck at the right moment, andin democratic goals.
In terms of increasing the legitimacy of French institutions, Mitterranddid not keep a promise to rehabilitate the historic French parliamentary regimeas opposed to the gaullist presidential republic. To the contrary, on election dayhe did not hesitate to don the mantle of the over-powerful gaullist presidency.The justification, he once said, was that on coming to office "I was obliged todo everything at once." He needed the gaullist presidency to keep control of arisky situation. Whether or not this claim holds we will want to investigate. Inany case, as if in return for the Left's acceptance of the gaullist regime, it, or atleast the Socialist party if not the Communists, was accepted by the Right as thelegitimate alternative government. This second historical development provokedby François Mitterrand was surely remarkable for a man who had joinedthe Socialist party only at the age of fifty-five!
The third and final change provoked by François Mitterrand was in thecharacter of France's commitment to European integration. Simply stated, hispresidency committed France beyond a point of no return. Mitterrand made theFrench Left into equally experienced managers with French conservatives ofFranco-German partnership, the motor force of European integration. In hisEuropean policy, Mitterrand showed that he could operate internationally at agaullien, that is, de Gaulle-like, level of policy and vision. He decisively updatedde Gaulle's own policy of the 1960s for a limited intergovernmental "Europe ofthe peoples."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from François Mitterrand by Ronald Tiersky. Copyright © 2000 by Ronald Tiersky. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Protean Politician, Contested Legacy * Part I: A Classic Provincial Youth, Contested WWII, Fourth Republic Man-About-Government, Socialist Rose * Mitterrand's Contested WWII: Between Petain and De Gaulle * An Almost Perfect Fourth Republic * 1958-1981: Long Time in the Opposition * Part II: The Presidency, 1981-1995: Socialism, Legitimacy, Europe * Bloomed and Faded Rose: Mitterrand's Socialist Experiment * "The French Revolution is Finally Over": Institutional Legitimacy and National Reconciliation * France & Europe: Security and Integration Beyond Yalta, France, and Germany, American Hegemony, Soviet Bluff and Russian Collapse * Mitterrand's Moralities: Man for All Seasons or All Reasons? * Conclusion: Mitterrand's LegaciesWhat People are Saying About This
Stanley Hoffman, Buttenweiser University Professor, Harvard University, Center for European Studies
This book is fascinating for two reasons. It is a well-documented study of a complex 'political man' with a formidable appetite for power, pleasure and life, whose career and achievements Tiersky traces with subtlety. It is also the record of a constant struggle between Tiersky's fascination with and sympathy for his subject, and his awareness of the darker sides of Mitterrand's 'Machiavellian Republicanism.' This struggle pulls the reader in, and Tirsky's scholarship and thoughtfulness allow each reader to make up his or her own mind.