A Moderate Premier

Franc,ois Mitterrand needed a moderate Premier who could reassure a nation still caught uneasily between jubilation and the jitters over the novelty of a Socialist in the Elysee Palace. But he could not accept another bloodless technocrat of the kind that he had criticized in the Giscard regime. He needed a political figure with a popular touch. No one fit that description better than Pierre Mauroy, 52. The big (6 ft. 2 in.) burly mayor of the northern industrial center of Lille, Mauroy (pronounced Mawr-wah) is an archetypal man of the north, pragmatic, hardworking and direct. He was born in the town of Cartignies, the grandson of a woodcutter and the son of a teacher. His family moved in 1936 to the steelworkers' village of Haussy, where the weekly Socialist street demonstration was the major public event. "At eight years old," he recalled in his book, Heirs to the Future, "I already knew the Internationale. "After World War II, Mauroy became a teacher and began working at Socialist Party headquarters in Paris. He eventually moved to Lille and became mayor in 1973. Mauroy's meeting with Mitterrand in 1965 was a union between a dogged tactician and a strategic visionary that helped transform the party. In the early 1970s, Mitterrand visualized a broad alliance with the Communist Party; Mauroy hammered out the details. When the alliance collapsed, Mauroy brought the idealistic Mitterrand back to the pragmatic center. The new Premier is expected to pursue what is possible, unblinded by what he once called "the illusion of revolution." Mauroy, said Le Monde, is "an authentic socialist. . . a man who incarnates at once a legitimacy, an attitude and a region."

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