Francois Mitterand
From Philosopedia
Mitterrand, François Maurice Marie [President] (26 October 1916 - 8 January 1996)
Mitterrand, a president of France from 1981 to 1995, was born in Jarnac, Charente, France, in a conservative and Catholic family.
He became a prisoner of war during the Second World War, escaped, then became active in the French Resistance. In the 1950s, he held several cabinet posts, joined the weak Socialist party, then became its secretary in 1971. In 1981, Mitterrand became the first Socialist president of the French Fifth Republic.
Jean Lacouture’s Mitterand (1998) not only describes his eloquence, his brilliance at strategy, his being a master of timing, a leader of men, a charmer of women, but also tells how in his later life he could be arrogant, cynical, cruel, vindictive, a schemer who liked to divide and rule.
The courageous leader of the French Resistance, after his dubious beginning as a Vichyite, was author of a number of books, including Le coup d’état permanent (1964), Un socialisme du possible (1970), and Politique II (1981).
It was not until 1995 that he divulged some secrets about his past: that he had worked for the collaborationist Vichy regime before joining the Resistance during World War II; in 1940, while serving in the Vichy army of Marshall Philippe Pétain, he wrote First Agreement, a novel about Elsa and Philippe, a couple madly in love and living together, which was a shocking notion at that time; and that until 1986 he had remained friends with René Bousquet, the Vichy official charged in 1989 with crimes against humanity for his role in deporting Jews from France to Nazi death camps. Later, he joined the Resistance.
Alan Riding, of The New York Times, has suggested that because Mitterrand had stunned his wide circle of Jewish friends with such disclosures, he chose to collaborate on a work with Elie Wiesel, Memoir in Two Voices (1996). To Wiesel he explained that he had been unaware of Vichy’s anti-Semitic policies and that he had thought Bousquet was only a respectable businessman. Wiesel does not state in the book whether he found these explanations valid ones.
Progressive freethinkers were shocked when, in 1994, Mitterrand as the President of France said of Rwanda, “In such countries, genocide is not too important.”
In 1994, when the world press announced his prostate cancer (he kept it a secret for fifteen years!), Mitterrand, a declared atheist, met with a devoutly Catholic French philosopher to discuss death. The philosopher, Jean Guillot, 93, told reporters that Mitterrand confided that the doctors had given him no more than six months to live, that his major goal was to live until at least 7 May 1995 in order to complete his second seven-year term. In a television interview, asked what he would say when he arrived “who knows where,” Mitterrand replied drily, “Eternity is a long time.” (In fact, he did live out his term of office.)
Mitterrand ended his own life by halting the drug treatment against the cancer that killed him. Roland Dumas, a close friend and a former Foreign Minister, said over television, “A few days before his death, he told me, ‘Now I have my philosophy.’ ” He had asked his physician, Jean-Pierre Tarot, what would happen if he stopped taking all drugs except painkillers, and the physician told him he would be dead in three days. The day Mitterrand stopped the treatments, he died.
In flowing African robes, Arab Headdresses, and sober mourning clothes, numbers of notables assembled for a requiem Mass in Notre Dame Cathedral while his family 250 miles away in Jarnac conducted a small funeral. In Paris, Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger said that Mitterrand was “more agnostic than anything else,” adding, “May François Mitterrand find in the company of saints the help, forgiveness, and courage finally to open his eyes to the invisible,” a comment that angered many and surprised some of the sixty world leaders and thirteen hundred other dignitaries who had gathered. Maurice Duruflé’s “Requiem” was played.
Meanwhile, in Jarnac, in a small Romanesque Church of St. Peter, the entering procession started with the former President’s widow, Danielle, their two sons, and his longtime mistress, Anne Pingeot, and their daughter, Mazarine Pingeot. Mrs. Mitterrand had invited both women to the interment next to his parents’ graves in the church graveyard. “A sceptical free-thinker, he had a religious feel for nature,” reported The Economist in an obituary. “His stature rests . . . on a grasp of the limitations of politics, on being a catalyst, on knowing when to do nothing. He was an exceptional leader in a time when France was ceasing to be an exception.” Among others, journalist Adam Gopnik has commented upon how Mitterrand orchestrated his own afterlife. For example, Paris-Match published a photo of Mitterrand on his deathbed, one that looked as if he himself might have photographed his final minute. He had chosen to die not on a hospital or state bed but a medium-sized married couple’s bed with white bedspread, looking as if it had just been smoothed out by the femme de ménage. Dressed for a Sunday promenade, in a dark-gray suit and shoes, “he looked the way the French like their leaders to look - dignified and serene without trying too hard for that effect.” Gopnik, after saying that by American standards Mitterrand was a relatively weak leader, observed that “the French love authoritarian leaders and pine for them when they’re gone.”
They were amused upon finding that their President had kept an entire separate second family, “like a character in the fifties French comedy. Anne Pingeot, Mazarine’s (their “illegitimate” daughter) mother, who is a scholar of nineteenth-century sculpture, was not really his mistress; she was a second wife. He spent the weeks with Danielle at the Élysée, and the weekends with Anne and Mazarine at the château of Souzy-la-Briche, another propriété de la nation that the French President had at his disposal.” Gopnik continues: “One day, he would be found with Danielle on the Rue de Bièvre, in the Fifth Arrondissement, and the next, chez Anne on the Rue Jacob, in the Sixth. He had two country residences, too: one at Latche, in the Landes, for Danielle, their two sons, and the Labradors; one in Gordes, in Provence, for Anne, Mazarine, and the cats. He spent Christmas with Anne and Mazarine and New Year’s Day with Danielle and his sons. These arrangements were widely known yet never made public. (He had other liaisons. He loved women, particularly their feet. He asked his conquests to take their shoes off in front of him, so that he could caress their insteps.)”
After Mitterrand’s death, Dr. Claude Gubler wrote The Great Secret (1996), in which he revealed that Mitterrand had sworn his doctors to silence when they had found prostate cancer that had spread to most of the rest of his body by November 1981. Many condemned Dr. Gubler for betraying a confidence, although others were surprised that Mitterrand had been able to dupe them about such a basic issue as his health for more than a decade.
However, according to Gopnik, “In Mitterrand, the French got what they want: not so much an authoritarian figure as a romantic one, and romantic in both the strict and the popular senses. . . . For most of the past two hundred years, it has been the passionate unspoken conviction of the French people that History, in Mitterrand’s sense—the high, romantic, sometimes even tragic sense - was happening here. Not happening here in just the modest, decent sense in which history always happens everywhere but in the grand, Hegelian sense: the spirit of the time kept its court in Paris.”
{CE}
