Mitterrand on Mitterrand

By Sandra Burton

His own words are the best guide to an elusive man

Do not imagine that my life is filled with politics. It is not the first in my order of priorities. Politics is the servant of science and the humble interpreter of philosophy. It does not have the creative virtue of art. Estranged from the knowledge of nature and the workaday life of man, politics is like a cut flower, quickly withered. I have worked, dreamed, loafed, learned to love things and beings. Nothing speaks to me better of spirit and matter than the light of summer at 6 o 'clock in the evening as seen through a stand of oaks.

He has been called mysterious, elusive and unknowable--as convoluted as the great Charente River, which flows through his native town. He has been compared with exceptionally diverse figures: Niccolo Machiavelli, whose name is synonymous with conniving politics; Lorenzo the Magnificent, Renaissance Florence's benevolent, art-loving ruler; Chateaubriand, 19th century France's aristocratic writer-statesman; Alexander Kerensky, who first led Russia to a democratic revolution that quickly succumbed to the Communists. In the bestiary of epithets used to characterize French politicians, he has emerged as the "chameleon." His recondite politics is inevitably labeled Florentine in the press. His most recent biographer, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, described him as "ambivalent." Wrote Giesbert: "He is misanthropic and sociable, naive and calculating, sincere and deceitful." In fact, Franc,ois Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand is as much an enigma to the French, who elected him President of the Republic, as he is to the rest of the world.

The mystery of this fiercely private and almost neurotically shy man has endured in spite of his exposure to 37 years of public life. It has been reinforced by his bizarre shifts from right to left and, especially, his zigzag relationship with the Communist Party. Most of all, the mystery has been fostered by the distance Mitterrand has placed between himself and all but his family and a few intimate friends. In the end the best analyst of the character--and the methods--of Mitterrand may be Mitterrand himself. His observations, perceptive, witty and often elegant, run through his eleven books.

In his autobiography, My Own Truth, published in 1969, Mitterrand describes the improbable background that produced France's pre-eminent leftist. He was born in 1916 in Jarnac, a small southwestern town in the Cognac region. His upbringing was seemingly strictly conventional--piously Roman Catholic and petit bourgeois. His father Joseph was a railway stationmaster who inherited a prosperous vinegar business. Mitterrand explains, "To be a Catholic in a small town in the provinces automatically classified you as politically on the right." Yet, strangely, Mitterrand pere thought differently and had his problems. Writes Mitterrand: "When a man went to Mass but refused to associate himself with the arrogance and the injustices of the right, he was nowhere. Such was my father's case."

When the eight Mitterrand children sat down to dinner, their father forbade traditional bourgeois table talk, "speaking ill of others" and "talking money." Says Mitterrand: "My father knew he was living at the end of an era, and he was irritated at the outdated rites that accompanied its demise. He looked to the future as one watches a child grow up. But since he found peace in the beauty of a sky or the affection of a dog, it didn't matter."

Mitterrand grew up alienated like his father from many of the classic middle-class values. His mother Yvonne's influence was equally compelling. A voracious reader, she instilled in her son a lifelong passion for books. Her favorite works are instructive: Honore de Balzac's great panoramic novels of French society, Alphonse de Lamartine's romantic poetry and, above all, Maurice Barres' intensely patriotic fiction. Says Mitterrand: "I lived my childhood in another century and it cost me some effort to jump into our own."

When the young Franc,ois arrived in Paris to complete his higher education in 1934, he was by no means leaning left. At the Catholic school where he had completed his secondary education, he had heard no mention of Marx. Latin prosody was more in Mitterrand's line. "Vergil was my happiness," he recalls.

Studying law and political science at the Sorbonne, he made friends who were right-wing or faintly bohemian. "They were more madly in love with music and literature than with politics. Thanks to them I got to know [the composers] Erik Satie, Arthur Honegger and Igor Stravinsky, before I became acquainted with [the politicians] Gaston Doumergue and Edouard Daladier."

Socialism then held no attraction for him. "At the university I was intimidated by my socialist comrades. To tell the truth, I was embarrassed to hear the Marxist left speaking a French that was translated from the German. The isms burned my ears. One can only guess what I endure these days."

Still, the seemingly impassive 20-year-old university student was capable of being stirred by the election of a leftist coalition government under Leon Blum in 1936. "A great wind of joy among the people" had blown in with the victory of the Popular Front. "I remember election night in the streets of Paris. The rejoicing brought back to me the races I used to run until there was no breath left in me; I discovered that there were still causes worth living and dying for. I loved the fact that I had turned 20 just as the world was being rescued, though I knew nothing of its suffering. I did not make a political choice. I could not distinguish between the forces that were at work. I did not have the key. But without understanding the reasons, I believed I could see on which side lay right and justice."

This stage of Mitterrand's political evolution concluded with his detachment from the world view of his family, his parochial corner of France and the dogmas of the Catholic Church. "Since the church was not on the side of suffering or of hope, I told myself I had to go on without it. Thus did I leave the path of my father so that I might better find him again."

In 1940 Sergeant Mitterrand was shot in the chest, then captured by the Germans near Verdun. He felt his imprisonment in a Nazi P.O.W. camp was his "first real encounter with other men." He recalls: "At noon the Germans distributed tureens of rutabaga soup and loaves of bread. At first, it was the survival of the fittest--government by the knife. The first men to get hold of the soup or the bread served themselves, passing on no more than a few drops of dirty water to the others." After three months, however, camp leaders emerged to "cut the black bread into equal slices, under the wide-eyed scrutiny of free voters. It was a rare and instructive sight; I was witness to the birth of the social contract."

After two aborted attempts to escape from the camp, Mitterrand finally succeeded in 1941. Returning to Occupied France, he organized a small group of former P.O.W.s who furnished forged papers to members of the Resistance. It was then that he first tangled with Charles de Gaulle. When Mitterrand flew to Algiers to meet with the Free French leader, De Gaulle asked him if he would agree to merge his small P.O.W. group with a larger unit under the command of one of the general's nephews. Mitterrand refused, and De Gaulle curtly dismissed him. It was the beginning of hostilities between the two men, which were to turn Mitterrand into one of De Gaulle's most ferocious critics and political opponents.

It was also the beginning of Mitterrand's cyclical flirtations and disillusionments with the Communists. "I began working with the Communists during the Resistance. The friendships I made during this period are as strong as ever. Among the other benefits that I owe them, they have taught me never to close an eye if I am to avoid being crushed by their fearsome machine."

While in the Resistance movement (his alias was "Morland"), Mitterrand spotted a picture of a girl in an apartment used for exchanging messages. Mitterrand asked a few questions about her and then said, "I will marry her." That year he wed Danielle Gouze after, legend has it, introducing her to his parents with a staccato biography: "Danielle, nonreligious, democrat, socialist." Now a human rights activist in the party, she wrote a letter last month to Maureen Reagan asking her to use her influence to change her father's position on El Salvador.

Mitterrand's 37-year march to power began after France's liberation in 1944. First he ran for Parliament under the aegis of several moderate or center-right parties. Then he held a succession of eight Cabinet posts in the Fourth Republic, including the key post of Minister of the Interior under Pierre Mendes-France.

Mitterrand began gravitating toward the socialist left as his quarrel with De Gaulle grew sharper and he needed broader support for his fight against the general's "dictatorship." It was then that Mitterrand decided to become a spokesman of the opposition.

Mitterrand's fight against De Gaulle's investiture as President of the Fifth Republic cost him his parliamentary seat. After winning it back in 1962, he embarked on a long-term strategy of strengthening the non-Communist left and then joining forces with the Communists. To his critics his maneuvering looked like sheer opportunism. To close associates it was a matter of pragmatism motivated by a respect for "republicanism."

Mitterrand's strong race against De Gaulle in the 1965 presidential elections, run with the support of both Socialists and Communists, was the beginning of his rise to power in the left. In 1971 he became head of the Socialist Party, and the following year masterminded the five-year Socialist-Communist Common Program. The reverses he experienced did not deter him, even when he ran for the second time for the presidency in 1974 and lost to Giscard by a mere 424,599 votes. As Mitterrand's closest comrade, the late Georges Dayan, observed, "Mitterrand's great strength is that he knows how to wait."

For Mitterrand the long wait before his ascension to power may have been easier than for politicians with fewer extracurricular interests. "Literature is always for me a privileged paradise," he says. A closet poet, he is lyrical when he speaks of the wonders of nature, and he reads incessantly. "He loves literature," says one of his advisers. "When things are not going badly he will talk about nothing but literature; he only talks politics when he is worried." His favorite writer is Chateaubriand. But he also reveres Balzac, Emile Zola, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Nobel-prizewinning French poet Saint-John Perse. He came to Marx late and has never read him in his entirety. Several years ago, at a summer cultural festival in Avignon, he remarked, "The day when there will be a socialist art, I will no longer be a socialist."

Not content with having produced his eleven books of nonfiction, he still hopes to complete a novel on Lorenzo the Magnificent, which he has been researching for more than a decade. In his book The Straw and the Grain, he wrote, "If I had the time, I would write the history of the rivers I have known." Journalist Paul Guimard calls him "a great writer." Literary Critic Bertrand Poirot-Delpech rates him with Leon Blum and De Gaulle as the most literary of French politicians: "Each phrase of Mitterrand, even spoken, bears the mark of someone who has never ceased to read the great writers, to scribble, to scratch out and, in short, to dream with words."

Though he does not enjoy the Paris cocktail-party circuit, Mitterrand likes to dine with such old Socialist comrades as Claude Estier, Louis Mermaz and Pierre Joxe. Other close friends include a businessman from his native region and the owner of a taxi fleet. He is seen from time to time in Left Bank restaurants with one or another of the attractive young women whose company he enjoys. But he is also a family man who spends most weekends with his wife, visiting friends or staying in his converted sheep barn in southwestern France.

Says his brother-in-law, Actor Roger Hanin: "He is preoccupied by two notions: love and death. Not one day goes by without his thinking about death. During the long walks he takes he evokes these two subjects. Without love, he seems to think, man would fall into the deepest neurosis."

Since he surprised most observers by deciding to run for the presidency for the third time last year, Mitterrand has had to devote more of his time to politics. This time, however, his campaign seemed to fit more gracefully into the reflective side of his life. "At his age he is much more philosophical about all this," remarked a campaign adviser.

A lot of coaching and a bit of cosmetic aid have vastly improved Mitterrand's style and appearance. His protruding front teeth have been filed down to make him look less formidable. Following the advice of his image-conscious advisers, he scrapped his proletarian corduroy and tweed sports jackets for more "presidential" gray and navy flannel suits. Prone to catching cold, Mitterrand has not given up his enveloping overcoat and his colorful scarves, but he has substituted camel's hair for loden cloth. Practice in front of a video recorder has helped him overcome a bad blinking problem, which distracted viewers from what he was saying. It has also helped him achieve the relaxed look that is in keeping with his campaign claim to be France's "homme tranquille. " It remains to be seen whether France's new President can maintain his imperturbability in the new era ahead.

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