François Mitterrand

President of France (1981-1995)

• Born: October 26, 1916
• Birthplace: Jarnac, France
• Died: January 8, 1996
• Place of death: Paris, France

Mitterrand was elected president of France in 1981 and again in 1988 with the backing of a coalition of the Left, which he had played a strong role in forging. He was also a minister of several governments in the Fourth Republic and a Resistance leader in World War II.

Early Life

François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand (mee-tah-rahnd) spent his early life in Jarnac, a town of five thousand people not far from Cognac in southwest France. He was the fifth of eight children in a close-knit family. His mother, Yvonne, was devoutly Roman Catholic. His father, Joseph, was the stationmaster of the town of Angoulěme. Joseph inherited his wife’s father’s vinegar-making business and became president of the Union of Vinegar-Makers of France.

At age nine, Mitterrand was sent to a boarding school run by priests of the Diocese of Angoulěme. There he was a loner and often sick. A devout Catholic, he sometimes thought about becoming a priest. He enjoyed reading philosophy and the French classics. At the Facultés de Droit et des Lettres in Paris in 1934, he enjoyed lengthy student discussions about literature. In 1938, at age twenty-one, he published in a small student journal an attack on the French and British governments for appeasing Adolf Hitler.

In September, 1938, newly graduated, Mitterrand was called up for compulsory military service. He was a sergeant in September, 1939, when France declared war on Germany and spent that winter manning a section of the Maginot line. Wounded in May, 1940, he was taken prisoner by the German army. His third attempt at escape succeeded in December, 1941. He worked for a period in a Vichy department servicing French prisoners of war and received a Vichy decoration that was later controversial. When the Germans occupied all of France in November, 1942, Mitterrand began the full-time Resistance work for which he later received several decorations.

In 1943, Mitterrand resisted Free French efforts to pressure him to merge his network with a similar one headed by General Charles de Gaulle’s nephew. A meeting with de Gaulle in Algiers ended in hostility. Mitterrand became a lifelong virulent critic of de Gaulle. In March, 1944, when the three main Resistance organizations to help escaped prisoners of war were merged, Mitterrand became the leader of the unified group. Nominated by de Gaulle to be temporary secretary-general in charge of prisoners of war and deportees, from August 19, 1944, he was briefly part of an ad hoc government for France.

Mitterrand then became editorial director of a publishing house and resumed his legal studies. He wrote articles for the journal of the Federation of Ex-Prisoners of War, wrote a pamphlet, and joined with left-wing Resistance leaders to stop a communist takeover of the Resistance. Although he was more in the Center than the Left, from then on he made common cause with the Left. In 1944, he married Danielle Gouze. They had two sons. A third child died soon after he was born in 1945.

Life’s Work

From 1945 to 1957, Mitterrand was in and out as a minister in eleven of the many governments of the Fourth Republic. In November, 1946, he became deputy for Nièvre in central France. His first position as a minister was in 1946. He was information minister in 1948 at the start of television transmissions, but most of his several ministerial posts dealt with colonial affairs, in which he tried to hold on to the empire by giving more internal autonomy to the colonies. Intermittently, he was out of the government.

Mitterrand became a friend of Pierre Mendès-France when they both collaborated with the new weekly journal, L’Express. When Mendès-France was premier (1954-1955), Mitterrand became minister of the interior. As such, he favored keeping Algeria for France, while proposing some reforms. In February, 1956, under Socialist premier Guy Mollet, Mitterrand was minister of justice. He left the government in June, 1957, and did not hold office again until he was elected president in 1981. In 1957, he was called to the bar.

In September, 1958, the public voted to abolish the Fourth Republic. When Mitterrand lost his seat in the Gaullist 1958 election landslide, he was president of his party and one of the recognized leaders of the Left. From March, 1959, until 1981 Mitterrand held the position of elected mayor of Château-Chinon and other local offices. In April, 1959, he was elected a member of the senate. His career seemed back on track until autumn, 1959, when events made it seem as if he had contrived a fake attempt to assassinate him, to discredit Algerian hard-liners. The facts never were made clear.

In bad repute as a politician, Mitterrand began practicing law and wrote a short book, La Chine au défi, published in 1961. Throughout the de Gaulle administration he scathingly criticized de Gaulle’s policies. Under a new electoral process begun in 1962, Mitterrand once more became deputy for Nièvre. He wrote regularly for L’Express, contributed to Le Monde, and in 1964 published a book, Le Coup d’Etat permanent, criticizing the de Gaulle regime and its constitution. In 1965, when the Communist Party decided not to run a candidate against de Gaulle, Mitterrand ran. His first move was to form the Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left, grouping the Socialist Party, the Radical Party, and a paper organization that Mitterrand headed. In the final round in December, 1965, Mitterrand received 44.8 percent of the votes.

In the summer of 1966, Mitterrand created a shadow cabinet. In December, 1966, his organization signed an electoral pact with the Communist Party. By the end of the March, 1967, elections, the Left had 193 seats in the National Assembly. In February, 1968, the two wings of the Left agreed on a common policy platform. What put Mitterrand in political limbo was his televised announcement, during the height of the student-worker rebellions in May, 1968, proposing to form a ten-member caretaker government. His bid for power offended many people, and the Left lost one hundred seats in the June elections. In 1969, Mitterrand’s book Ma part de vérité, de rupture à l’unité was published. In it, he who had been such an anticommunist in the Fourth Republic openly embraced Marxist concepts. At the same time, he attacked the Soviet Union’s intervention in Czechoslovakia. In 1970, Mitterrand published a short book, Un Socialisme du possible . In the summer of 1971, he was elected first secretary of the Socialist Party. In 1972, the Socialist and Communist parties signed a formal agreement on what was termed a Common Programme. Mitterrand ran for president in 1974, receiving wide support. In 1973, he called for direct elections to the European parliament.

Mitterrand made a number of trips to various parts of the world. His meetings with political leaders in the United States and the Soviet Union in 1975 were described in detail in his book L’Abeille et architecte: Chronique (1978; The Wheat and the Chaff , 1982). He put his faith in Eurosocialism as an antidote to the excessive power of American capitalism. In 1977, the Union of the Left was ruptured. In his book Ici et maintenant (1980), Mitterrand charged that the rupture was the result of a change of policy by the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. The Right won comfortably in the 1978 elections.

Despite efforts to replace him, he retained his hold on the Socialist Party. In 1981, he ran again for president. This time he won, with “110 propositions for France,” including nationalization, a wealth tax, increase of public service jobs, abolition of the death penalty, increased rights for women, criticisms of both the Soviet Union and the United States, support for more aid to developing world countries, decentralization of French government and pluralization of television and radio, more rights and benefits for workers, and unified secular public education. He also hoped to scale down the nuclear program.

President Mitterrand appointed a very moderate government led by the Center-Right of his party, but he also included four Communists, in relatively minor posts. Pierre Mauroy, social-democratic mayor of Lille, became premier. While nationalizations of industry were put into effect, the minimum wage was raised, a wealth tax was added, and strong support was given to the arts, the government soon had to cope with rising inflation and unemployment. The first reactions were Keynesian policies of massive public spending and easier credit. Large street demonstrations against the government’s efforts to weaken the autonomy of Catholic schools forced it to back down. In mid-1982, Mitterrand announced a plan to devalue the franc, freeze wages and prices, and cut his budget. He lowered domestic interest rates. By 1984, his popularity had dropped sharply, but the economy was better by 1985. While having problems of his own in the South Pacific, Mitterrand was critical of the Latin American policy of the United States and provided weapons to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. In Paris, new projects were aimed at developing the workers’ East Side. Eventually a new concert hall was built at Parc des Vincennes, and a new opera house was built on the site of the old Bastille prison. Controversy arose over the design by Chinese-American I. M. Pei for a seventy-foot-high glass pyramid as the new entrance to the Louvre.

In 1986, when the Right won the elections for National Assembly, Mitterrand made Jacques Chirac premier. The French called it cohabitation and liked it. Few changes were made in foreign policy. Chirac aimed to privatize many of the sixty-five state-owned companies and began the process, but problems multipled. The extreme Right wanted more restrictions on immigrants. Students revolted when efforts were made to make admission to the state-run universities more difficult. French competitiveness in world markets was declining. Chirac bore the brunt of popular discontent. Mitterrand stayed above the fray and became more popular than ever.

In 1988, at the age of seventy-two, Mitterrand ran again for president, promising to privatize some industries and to move to the Center. He won. The new premier was Michel Rocard, who fellow socialists believed was an apologist for capitalism. He was Mitterrand’s main rival in the Socialist Party. Mitterrand had been hopeful about greater economic unification of Europe, expecting Paris to be the center. In 1988, the French economy was booming, but unemployment was still high.

In 1991 Mitterrand appointed the first woman to be prime minister of France, Edith Cresson. Two years later the conservative opposition regained control of the parliament. In addition to his political struggles, Mitterrand also battled cancer during the remainder of his term. He died in 1996, shortly after leaving office.

Significance

François Mitterrand developed the French Socialist Party into a large, broadly based, national party aimed at social justice and brought it to national power after years of Gaullist rule. This accomplishment entailed a short-term collaboration with the Communist Party that helped him in the latter’s decline. Then Mitterrand moved toward the center, while still embracing socialist principles. Unlike his three predecessors as president, Mitterrand was a veteran politician. In this capacity, he was tough and clever as well as ambitious and vain. As a private person, he was intellectual, almost mystic, a solitary dreamer. His inconsistencies made some people distrust him. By 1988, though, many French people saw him as a father figure.

A long-term critic of de Gaulle and of the constitution of the Fifth Republic, once president himself he made no move to diminish the constitutional power of the presidency. He was more of a friend of a unified Europe than the Gaullists had been. By 1988, his government seemed pro-American. He had always been a person of ambiguities, but then France itself is a country of ambiguities. Whereas de Gaulle was known in some circles as a monarch, some have called Mitterrand “the prince.”

He had been all his life an indefatigable traveler, going to China to meet Mao Zedong in 1961. A learned man, he had read deeply and written extensively, hoping to provide a testament for socialists everywhere in the world. He wrote many articles and books, which may turn out to be his most lasting testament.

Bibliography

Balassa, Bela. The First Year of Socialist Government in France. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1982. A pamphlet analyzing the Mitterrand government’s first-year achievements from an American point of view. Le Monde is cited as a major source.

Bell, David S. François Mitterrand: A Political Biography. Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2005. An accessible biography that focuses on Mitterrand’s politics and political leadership.

MacShane, Denis. François Mitterrand, a Political Odyssey. London: Quartet Books, 1982. This biography gives a readable, thorough account of Mitterrand’s career up to 1981 and includes the 110 Propositions as an appendix.

Mazey, Sonia, and Michael Newman, eds. Mitterrand’s France. London: Croom Helm, 1987. The two principal authors are lecturers at the Polytechnic of North London. The chapters analyze promises and accomplishments of the Mitterrand administration. Each chapter has a bibliography related to the policy discussed in the chapter. The “conclusion” credits Mitterrand’s government up to 1986 with some modest achievements but also with some serious failures. Appendixes give election results for 1981 and a chronology of major political events in France from 1981 to 1986.

Nay, Catherine. The Black and the Red: François Mitterrand and the Story of an Ambition. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. Written in a more novelistic style than many biographies, this book contains references that readers outside France might find puzzling. The book has notes with references but no bibliography.

Ross, George, et al., eds. The Mitterrand Experiment: Continuity and Change in Modern France. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. This book evaluates Mitterrand’s achievements before he was reelected in 1988.

Singer, Daniel. Is Socialism Doomed? The Meaning of Mitterrand. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. As the title indicates, this book evaluates Mitterrand’s policies. Analysts have frequently expressed the opinion that Mitterrand was originally more Right than Left. In the early postwar years, he was strongly anticommunist. To some, his embrace of the Left was political opportunism.

Tiersky, Ronald. François Mitterrand: The Last French President. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Tiersky chronicles the contradictions in Mitterrand’s life and career, portraying him as the embodiment of postwar France.

Williams, Stuart, ed. Socialism in France: From Jaurès to Mitterrand. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. This book puts Mitterrand’s socialism in perspective.