Mitterrand: The Master of Reinvention

Mitterrand: A Study in Ambiguity
by Philip Short
Bodley Head, 2013, 704 pages, $69.99

In his dying days, Francois Mitterrand wryly noted to a novelist friend that his life had followed a simple logic: “I work in shades of grey … There are black threads and white threads, I weave them together and with that I make grey.” In the variegated and murky world of twentieth-century French politics, a capacity for reinvention and rebranding went a long way.

Philip Short’s Mitterrand is the first substantial English-language treatment of Mitterrand, who was the French President between 1981 and 1995 and the longest-serving French leader since Napoleon III. Such a book is overdue by any measure. In France, more than 500 books have been written either directly or indirectly about Mitterrand—a figure for a president rivalled only by books about Charles de Gaulle. Short, a BBC correspondent in Paris during much of Mitterrand’s reign, does justice to the significance of his subject in a sprawling, lively read.

Billed as a “study in ambiguity”, Short’s book might equally be seen as a meditation on the virtues of inscrutability for a successful political life. Labelled the “sphinx” by his political contemporaries, Mitterrand is a difficult subject for biographers because he defies easy categorisation. His career was built around and upon some improbable and obvious tensions. After a period as a prisoner of war, he became an official in the wartime Vichy government, then became involved in the French resistance. As Justice Minister in the 1950s he turned a blind eye to the extra-legal torture of French officials in North Africa yet famously opposed the return of de Gaulle as an affront to the rule of law and an effective coup d’état. Despite his conservative, bourgeois, Catholic background, it was ultimately Mitterrand’s capacity to assuage communists that made him a successful unifier of the French Left.

Short chronicles Mitterrand’s almost pathological desire to compartmentalise his life and keep secrets. He didn’t tell his family when he flunked out of officer training school. For almost the entirety of his fourteen-year presidency, the French public were entirely unaware that he returned each night to his second family in a government apartment on the banks of the Seine. Friends were organised into separate circles, some knew some things, others knew only a little, but only Mitterrand himself knew exactly what each person knew.

This aversion to self-revelation included, rather bizarrely, a distaste for any exposure of his body. Mitterrand famously hated to walk barefoot, even on beaches. Not long after he married, his new wife hazarded to ask him about how his day had fared, only to be met with the icy riposte: “I did not marry you under the regime of the Inquisition.”

His preference for secrecy also predisposed him to outright deception. Diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1982, Mitterrand and his doctor conspired to issue fake updates about his good health. The police were conscripted to harass journalists so as to prevent publication about Mitterrand’s private life. At one point this reached high farce: in the late 1950s, to garner public sympathy, Mitterrand staged a fake assassination attempt on his life.

That the focus of Short’s book is on Mitterrand’s capacity for survival and self-advancement reflects the fact that his central achievements were electoral rather than social. The France that Mitterrand left in 1995 looked broadly similar to both the France Mitterrand took over in 1981 and the France of today.

This is not to discount Mitterrand. France’s reputation as a progressive, left-wing country belies the fact that it prefers conservative leaders. In the ten presidential elections held since the proclamation of the Fifth Republic in 1958, just three have been won by candidates of the Left (two by Mitterrand and one by François Hollande).

The French Left has always been a bit different from its European fellow travellers: socialist, not social democratic; loosely rather than formally associated with trade unions. Before Mitterrand was elected president in 1981, the Left had not won a national election since the short-lived triumph of Léon Blum’s Popular Front in 1936. Its governing program was written in conjunction with the communists in the early 1970s in order to unify the Left and largely ignored how low growth, oil shocks and high inflation had circumscribed what governments could hope to do. For most socialists, the election of Mitterrand promised to be a grand soir—an opportunity for a critical rupture with the ordinary modalities of capitalism. Banks and other key industries were nationalised in rapid succession, retirement ages were lowered and tax rates for the wealthy spiralled.

But by 1983, these efforts had largely failed to produce the promised prosperity. France faced a balance-of-payments crisis, rising unemployment and escalating inflation. Unemployment headed beyond 8 per cent in the first year of Mitterrand’s reign and has never been meaningfully below it since. The French “u-turn” (dealt with only cursorily in Short’s volume) was swift and sharp: nationalised enterprises were privatised, spending was slashed and taxes were lowered.

To govern for another twelve and a half years following the collapse of his legislative program was a testament to Mitterrand’s political acumen. The socialists’ defeat in the following legislative elections and the indignity of having to work with his opponents was no bar to his survival. His finely-tuned antennae for shifts in public sentiment, coupled with his capacity to exploit the tensions among his opponents, smoothed his run to a resounding re-election in 1988.

Domestically, the best that can be said of Mitterrand is that he ended the silent civil war that had bedevilled French politics, reconciling the Left to something resembling Northern European social democracy. Abroad, Mitterrand’s impact was perhaps more significant. Nowhere was this more so than in his thirst for European integration. As he was fond of saying: “France is our home, Europe is our destiny.” Like Helmut Kohl, he saw European integration as an almost missionary enterprise that would ensure Europe never again tore itself apart in bloody conflict.

His post-1983 conversion to free-market liberalism was decisive in the passage of the Single European Act and the growth of the European single market. In the late 1980s, monetary union became Mitterrand’s way of preventing a unified Germany from returning to its pre-war ways (something that pre-occupied both him and Margaret Thatcher). Moreover, Mitterrand imposed a rapid timetable for unification so as to prevent any wavering.

Much as Zhou Enlai is alleged to have once said it was still too soon to understand the full consequences of the French Revolution, Short suggests that the jury is still out on the impact of Mitterrand’s efforts to propel European integration. He may be right. But Short’s account of the negotiation of the Maastricht treaty in 1992 (which set out Europe’s path to monetary integration) suggests that the euro was a project conceived in faith as much as in reason. Seen from today, the storied failure of many countries (including Germany) to adjust their budgets to the rigours of a common currency makes the Maastricht treaty look horribly hasty.

Outside of his European forays, Mitterrand’s foreign policy was as much one of omission as commission. His instincts were to avoid conflict but to preserve French prestige. Despite his scepticism about the first Gulf War (“How am I going to explain to the French peasants that I have imperilled the lives of their children to restore to power a billionaire?” he asked James Baker, the US Secretary of State), French involvement was justified to avoid giving the impression that France lacked relevance. But intervention in either the Balkans or Rwanda was resisted because it might embroil France in a conflict where its interests were vague and its friends were even vaguer.

Few politicians of the last fifty years can boast as successful a record of reinvention and revival as Mitterrand. To navigate the labyrinthine rivalries and petty animosities of the French political class was no small achievement. But his ability to survive was a function of his innate capacity to reflect rather than shape an era. That is the real legacy of Mitterrand.