Un temps de chien

Edwy Plenel, (Paris: Stock, (1994), 187pp., 95 fr.

As Francois Mitterrand's long tenancy of the French presidency moves toward its close, negative verdicts on his career multiply. Intense coverage of the scandals disfiguring his second term was connected with the suicide in May 1993 of his last Socialist prime minister, Pierre Beregovoy. Mitterrand attempted to reject accusations both against himself and his party en bloc by charging at Beregovoy's funeral that he had been driven to suicide, exclaiming "all the explanations in the world do not justify throwing to the dogs a man's honor and, in the end, his life, as his accusers doubly renounced the basic laws of our Republic, those which protect the dignity and the liberty of each among us."

Two investigative journalists felt themselves directly attacked. Edwy Plenel of Le Monde, (a left-wing paper which has shown decreasing enthusiasm for Mitterrand in recent years) and a more right-wing writer, Jean Montaldo, who might be termed the French Jack Anderson, both rapidly produced new attacks whose titles picked up the word "dog." Shortly before, Montaldo had published another and longer book entitled Mitterand and the For, Thieves.

The president has not responded to these assaults, but during late 1993 and early 1994 he gave an unusual series of private interviews to journalists who wanted to question him about other controversies--his service with Marshal Petain's Vichy regime, and his continuing association with and tolerance for members of the extreme right. The resulting books drew much more attention--and sold better--than Plenel and Montaldo's books, in part at least because the president was finally admitting details of his earlier career which he had long denied or sought to retouch.

The biggest success has been Pierre Pean's Une jeunesse francaise, which describes Mitterrand's right-wing politics and connections in his student years, his army service and time as a POW in Germany, and minutely examines the controversial twenty-two months he spent as an official of the Vichy government before going underground into the Resistance. A storm of public comment obliged Mitterrand to give a long explanatory interview to the editor of the conservative daily Le Figaro, following up with a television interview.

The interest in Une jeunesse francaise stems from current fascination with a period long repressed in French recollection and history--the four years of Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain's French State, which turned its back on the compromised democracy of the Third Republic and sought collaboration with Hitler's New European Order. Mitterrand had never denied that after escaping from a German POW camp in late 1941 he took a government job in Vichy--but he had earlier elided this period with his formal entry into resistance activity in late 1943--as if he had become a resister shortly after his return to France.

In admitting that he was a right-wing activist in his student days and initially a strong believer in Petain's quasi-fascist regime, the Socialist president shocked many younger voters with continuing affinities to the left who knew little about his biography, although for the older generation it was no secret that he had begun on the right. He had, however, touched up some of the details of his biography to make his transition from Vichy official to resistance fighter seem more rapid and less complex than in fact it was.

The controversy on Mitterrand's early beliefs and activities has two themes, both beginning with the Occupation and Resistance. The first concerns the sincerity of a man who has moved from right to left and back to rather less left. If Mitterrand now admits beliefs and actions he had blurred during most of his political career, when was he sincere? When he became a resistant after being a Petain enthusiast? In the 1970s when as first secretary of the Socialist Party he denounced capitalism and talked of the exploitation of man by man? (Mitterrand's predecessor as head of the old Socialist Party, Guy Mollet, sneered, "Mitterrand has not become a Socialist, he has only learned to speak socialist, which is not the same thing.") Was Mitterrand sincere at any point in his career, or only a skillful opportunist?

The second and parallel theme is Mitterrand's life-long hostility to Charles de Gaulle. Becoming involved in the Resistance in early 1943, and rapidly assuming a leadership role, Mitterrand looked to General Henri Giraud, an important figure in Algeria in early 1943 (backed by the United States as leader of the Free French). Giraud himself professed loyalty to Petain until September 1943. His personality allowed those in France who wanted to fight and still keep faith in Petain to maintain some coherence. Pean's book is very good on this difficult and confusing period.

In December 1943, young Mitterrand arrived in Algiers, via London. It was his bad luck to arrive there as a Giraud partisan just at the point (as Pean points out) when de Gaulle had definitively out-maneuvered Giraud as head of the Free French. When Mitterrand was introduced to de Gaulle, their relationship began badly, turned worse at the Liberation, and remained bad in the years after de Gaulle's return to power in 1958, which Mitterrand opposed. That opposition marked his conversion to the left.

Mitterrand has always incurred the hatred the Gaullist right, far more than that of the Vichyite right. La main droite de Dieu speaks of "a recurrent theme [which] runs through his two seven-year terms, one of national reconciliation borrowed from the extreme right, which permits a discreet drawing of the veil over old wounds, and treats the fighters on opposite sides as equally complicit in a story now over and done with."

Strong Gaullists like current Interior Minister Charles Pasqua see in Mitterrand's justification of his youth using the theme of national reconciliation a continuation of his long war against de Gaulle. Breaking on June 18, 1940 with a government legally established and recognized by all major states, de Gaulle had to treat Vichy as illegitimate from the beginning--or else he was a rebel.

Both to justify himself and give new spirit to a defeated France largely liberated by foreigners, de Gaulle created a myth which, in the words of the historian Henry Rousso:

did not so much glorify the Resistance (and

certainly not the resistants) as it celebrated a

people in resistance, a people symbolized

exclusively by `tine Man of June 18th,' without

intermediaries such as political parties, movements,

or clandestine leaders. This image was to be

superimposed on the far more complex and

inconsistent realities of the Occupation.(n1)

The communists adopted a parallel myth, claiming almost the entire credit for the Resistance as the "party of the 75,000 fusille's." (The total of French men and women shot by the Nazis is reckoned at 29,600.) Resistance members like Mitterrand who had been first pro-Petain, then proGiraud, were caught between the two prevailing myths: liking neither de Gaulle nor the communists, they could not defend the original legitimacy of Vichy; the regime had ended by totally delegitimizing itself. But they have continued to question the validity of the Gaullist myth.

For long the dominant version of French history in the 1940s, that myth has undergone much examination and criticism in recent years, and many people can at least vaguely apprehend that Vichy was more complicated than de Gaulle's version had it, and understand Mitterrand's youthful positions without approving them. More shocking to more people than admissions about his youth was the president's refusal to condemn the major protagonists of the Vichy period. Much disapproving comment had ensued when it was learned that he had annually sent a presidential wreath on Armistice Day to Petain's grave on the prison island where the old soldier had died--so much so that in 1994 he desisted.

Other self-justifying interviews Mitterrand decided to give in 1993-1994 helped produce La main droite de Dieu (The Right Hand of God). The title is a pun on one of Mitterrand's nicknames, given him by a television program in which he was caricatured as a pompous green frog who called himself "God," but the word "right" refers to a whole series of right-wing actions: Mitterrand's amnesty of the generals in Algeria who rebelled against de Gaulle in 1961, the aid he quietly extended to extreme rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen (the better to split the right); the wreaths he had placed on Petain's tomb; and continuing right-wing associations throughout his career, especially his friendship with the former secretary-general of the Vichy police, Rene Bosquet.

Arrested after the Liberation, Bosquet was tried and acquitted in 1949, going on to a considerable career as a banker and director of the powerful and mildly left southern newspaper La Depeche du Midi. Charges based on offenses to human rights were leveled against him again in 1989, as the organizer of the now-notorious Velodrome d'Hiver roundup in 1942, in which Vichy's police arrested thousands of foreign Jews and handed them over to the Nazis. Few returned. Mitterrand admitted to his interviewers that he maintained friendly relations with Bosquet, arguing that he had been acquitted in 1949. He dropped the contact only in 1986 when it turned out (Mitterrand dixit) "that his responsibility was perhaps greater than was said at the time," notably in the Vel d'Hiv affair. Mitterrand however, tried after that to keep Bosquet from coming to trial. In the event, Bosquet was murdered in 1993 before the trial could take place--by an apparent lunatic.

The Montaldo and Plenel books appearing in 1994 concern Mitterrand's relation to the already much discussed Socialist corruption. When entering into power in 1981 the Socialists argued (and even believed) that the conservative parties in office for twenty-three years were corrupt, while they themselves were not only clean but incorruptible. The scandals of the past few years demonstrated the contrary, as Socialist politicians and officials were hauled into court. But the books by Montaldo and Plenel aim at the chief executive, who can only be hauled into the court of public opinion.

Plenel mixes his tale with so many high-falutin literary references that one wonders whether anyone ever taught him the journalist's trade of telling a straight story; Montaldo is a bulldog who goes straight for the bone and crunches on it, but his books are written in such a breathlessly accusatory style that it is hard to keep up with all the characters and charges, or to assess them. Both authors take up a number of scandals, but their central figure is Roger-Patrice Pelat, an old friend of Mitterrand's whom he first met in POW camp, and who served with him in the Resistance and then went into business. The principal informant against Pelat for both writers was Francois de Grossouvre, a longtime friend of Mitterrand's, though no Socialist, who served him in a number of confidential capacities before becoming disenchanted. De Grossouvre committed suicide in his office in the presidential office complex in April 1994.

In 1982 Pelat sold his company, Vibrachoc, to the recently nationalized Compagnie Generale d'Electricite'. According to Montaldo, pressure was exerted from on high to force the sale of a company which in any case was worth far less than the 110 million francs paid for it. Pelat is also alleged to have benefited from a hotel built in North Korea by a French company, where he served as middleman thanks to his close relation to Mitterrand. Montaldo charges that over the years Pelat paid large sums to Mitterrand, first in the form of a dummy retainer as his lawyer (until 1981) with Mitterrand's younger son replacing him thereafter, and then to help President Mitterrand buy property for his mistress of many years and their illegitimate daughter.

The best authenticated scandal concerning Pelat occurred in 1988, when the nationalized French aluminum company Pechiney purchased Triangle-American Can. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission noted that large blocks of American Can stock had been purchased just before the announcement of the company's sale at over five times its previous stock quotation. SEC investigations rapidly ascertained that Pelat, along with several associates, had made profits of several million francs from insider trading. The precise informant has not been identified, but Alain Boublil, then director of the cabinet of finance and Economy Minister Pierre Beregovoy, were implicated, along with Max Theret, a prominent businessman who had been one of the financial backers of the Socialist Party. Pelat died of a heart attack in early 1989, shortly after being indicted.

Thus when it became known in 1993 that Beregovoy, then prime minister, had benefited in 1987 (when out of office) from a million franc interest-free loan from Pelat to help him buy an apartment in the fashionable sixteenth arrondissement, the story was not only damaging in itself, it reopened other stories about Pelat and connected the presidency with a whole series of financial scandals and still more scandalous charges, most of which involved dubious financing of the Socialist Party. There is little doubt that this whole complex helped to create the overwhelming vote against the Socialists in March 1993.

John Laughland's book, subtitled "France under Mitterrand," is less an examination of Mitterrand's France than a philippic against the whole French system of government:

For the last two hundred years or so, people

have been saying that the British constitution

is archaic and that it ought to be reformed

along European, usually French lines. Usually

such views go hand in hand with a desire for

more administrative government, and a dislike

for the apparent anarchy of parliamentarism

and democracy. Now that Britain faces the

prospect of being governed by a French or a

Franco-German style European government, it

is time to crawl inside the political system of

France to see whether the grass is really so

much greener on the other side of the

Channel.

Most of Laughland's investigation is a denunciation of Mitterrand's administration root and branch, but without kind words for the president's rivals or probable successors either. The tide of criticism of Mitterrand's conduct of his office has risen so high that Laughland has an embarrassment of riches in choosing devastating quotes, from whatever sector of French political life. When he can bring himself to say something approving about Mitterrand, he is unwilling to let it stand. Thus he notes that Mitterrand "effectively reduced the once-powerful French Communist Party to political irrelevance," but complains that Mitterrand's tactics depended neither on consistency nor logic, because Mitterrand shaped his tactics in the late 1970s to steal the communist vote away from the Communist Party. "In other words, for Mitterrand, the real problem about communism was not that it is totalitarian, but that it represented an electoral threat to him. Only the propagation of similar illusions would enable him to overcome that threat."

In his haste to score a point Laughland here misses a real criticism; the "similar illusions" concerned not "totalitarianism," on which increasing numbers of communist voters nourished doubts, but an unrealistic economic program conceived in the boom years, which Mitterrand refused to drop--and which caused immense trouble when he was elected in 1981 and attempted to put part of it into action.

Since Laughland's main purpose is to emphasize that Britain not only has nothing to learn from France but in closer association in the European Union has much to fear from French and European administrative and political practices, he devotes much space to politics--not without extensive citations from the various books on scandals, however. There is some good stuff on the bureaucratization of French politics and elitism in the role of the top civil servants, the enarques.

Laughland attacks Mitterrand for remaining in power in "cohabitation" as "an ultimate perversion of the constitution." This is an arguable position, although others have seen it as proof that the constitution can survive a change of legislative power without kicking out the executive. An American is perhaps less shocked by the idea of this cohabitation of opposing parties in the executive and legislative than is an Englishman--especially one determined to be shocked.

Laughland attacks Mitterrand's weakening of the already declining prestige of the prime minister, but again overreaches, charging that Mitterrand "has changed prime ministers as a man might change his shirt. He has had seven prime ministers in twelve years...more than his three predecessors over twenty-three years, [who] had only two each." Aside from the minor fact that de Gaulle had three, this judgment glides over the fact that two of these changes resulted from election defeats. Mitterrand did fire Michel Rocard abruptly, after three years, for being a success, and Edith Cresson after less than one, for being a failure, and judgments are in order--but not necessarily Laughland's.

A number of inaccuracies, mostly minor in themselves, suggest that Laughland is less familiar with his material than he should be. Numerous dates are a few years off. In a criticism of the Constitutional Council, which corresponds roughly to the American Supreme Court, he says that its current president, Robert Badinter, is an old ally of the president (correct) and a professional politician (inaccurate; he was a famous criminal lawyer), having served as minister of the interior (inaccurate) and of justice (correct). "The idea that the council should have a `President' who leads from the front is itself strange, that the post should be occupied by a man who is an old friend of the President of the Republic, even stranger." In other words, what is not British is not right.

Of the clutch of books discussed here, four are intensely polemical. Laughland has delivered a sermon for the congregation of British Eurosceptics. While Une jeunesse francaise and La main droite de Dieu are far from non-judgmental, they are sufficiently balanced to aid in the verdicts on Francois Mitterrand and his presidency which are yet to come. Much in the charges of corruption in other books is thus far unproven, though quite enough remains to leave a strong smell hanging over the political landscape. A period which began with great excitement (and fear) in 1981 ends fourteen years later with a whimper. One of the better things in Laughland's book is the epigraph, from one of Dryden's last poems, "Tis time the old age was out, and time to begin a new."

(1) Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in Franec Since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 18. All other translations by the author.

Julius W. Friend is adjunct professor of history at George Washington University.

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