PARIS (dpa) – More than five years after his death from cancer, former French president Francois Mitterrand remains a Sphinx to his countrymen, monumental and impossible to decipher.
This month, the French have had another opportunity to come to terms with the man they in turn adored and reviled and who embodied their history in the second half of the 20th century more than any other public figure.
The 20th anniversary of Mitterrand’s first presidential victory – on May 10, 1981 – was being marked with a number of media events, including the showing on national television of more than five hours of interviews conducted by the journalist Jean-Pierre Elkabbach in 1993 and 1994.
In many ways, the story of the ambitious provincial who became the longest-serving elected president in French history was a mix of triumph and tragedy.
Many of the people who danced in the streets when Mitterrand came to power in 1981 shouted “Good riddance!” 14 years later, when he left the Elysee Palace, a dying old man accused of a variety of sins, including anti-Semitism.
Over the course of his two seven-year terms, the French economy suffered its worst post-war crisis, Mitterrand’s Socialist Party had been badly weakened and two close associates – including his former prime minister – committed suicide.
His second term was also characterised by a series of explosive revelations, such as the existence of an illegitimate daughter and of the prostate cancer that would eventually kill him, which he had concealed from the French public – and his wife – for more than ten years.
In addition, his ties to Vichy France were aired, debated and damned, forcing the French to reflect on their own often ambiguous relations to the regime that sent thousands of Jews to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps.
Mitterrand gave away so little of himself that the author of a controversial book on the late president, “Jeune homme, vous ne savez pas de quoi vous parlez” (Young Man, You Don’t Know What You’re Talking About), published in March, was forced to interpret his gestures and facial expressions to arrive at some kind of judgement.
And, in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, Elkabbach noted that what little truth Mitterrand revealed, he revealed by his silences.
“Viewers can discover by what is not said, behind the words, a part of the truth,” Elkabbach said.
“Mitterrand is, first of all, a hard knot of distrust,” he added. “He had ambiguity and ambivalence.”
It may be Mitterrand’s connection to Vichy that best reflects these qualities, for it was entirely likely that, like many others, he served both the collaborationist regime and the Resistance that fought it.
A minor official in the Vichy regime in his mid-twenties, Mitterrand eventually “became a true member of the Resistance, with all the risks involved”, Elkabbach said.
“Many people cannot forgive that he was not a hero of the Resistance immediately,” he added. “In this he resembled many of his compatriots.”
Pressed by Elkabbach to explain his relationship to the Vichy regime, Mitterrand lost his customary sang-froid and angrily replied, “No, I’ve done so 25 times. That’s enough.”
However, he then proceeded to give what Elkabbach calls “his version of reality”, and ended by declaring, “All inquisitors are generally cowards.”
Mitterrand also displayed anger when Elkabbach asked him if he would apologise in France’s name for Vichy’s actions against the Jews.
“No, never,” Mitterrand fairly shouted. “France has no apologies to make for Vichy. Vichy was never a legitimate part of French history.”
However, this did not prevent Mitterrand’s successor, Jacques Chirac, from publicly admitting the “inescapable guilt” of Vichy leaders a few months after taking office in 1995.
While Mitterrand revealed little about himself in his interviews, he occasionally provided clues.
In “Jeune homme,” Mitterrand says of the Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval: “He was rich and powerful because during his life he believed in nothing.”
And he told Elkkabach that a statesman’s “most important quality is indifference – the ability to maintain a distance from the brutality of events”.
In the end, however, Mitterrand could not keep events from brutally hounding him.
