“It will be like a deep mourning.” The words were spoken by François Mitterrand when, on March 24th 1993, following parliamentary elections that swept a conservative government to power in France in what was a catastrophe for the Left, he held the last cabinet meeting with ministers of his outgoing socialist government. Mitterrand was to spend the remaining two years of his presidency in political tandem with a right-wing government.
For about 20 minutes and without recourse to notes, Mitterrand addressed the 41 ministers and secretaries of state in the presence of his prime minister, Pierre Bérégovoy, whose suicide in the north-central town of Nevers little more than a month later, on May 1st, would appear as if a funereal echo of Mitterrand’s parting words.
“They won’t succeed in placing me in the rat-trap,” declared Mitterrand, speaking with a certain panache, like a warlord, whereas in fact, defeated, his policies had led to the rout of his political family. He made the choice of staying in power, in political ‘cohabitation’ with the Right, just as he had between 1986 and 1988, following the conservative victory in the 1986 parliamentary elections. He had chosen, in other words, to survive alone amid the collective debacle, under the cover of the presidential institutions.
Aiming to disarm his critics, he cleverly presented himself as a sort of Resistant, one who, by staying put, would avoid the worst from happening, and by doing so kept the future in his hands, even though he was by then into his 12th year as president. His reign, spanning two seven-year terms of office from 1981 to 1995 was the longest in the history of the French republic.
“I have a duty to serve,” explained Mitterrand. “A duty of State, of course, but also that of signifying that the forces rallied together over these past 12 years are not annihilated, and that they will again, in the future, have a role to play.” His radical speech, raising the political stakes of his situation, followed upon his opening observation that “millions of citizens feel abandoned […] because we did not know how to preserve, or retrieve, a sufficiently firm doctrine.”
Whereas his presidency had finished by accompanying the transition of the Left into an entity within the order of things, its injustices and conservatisms, rather than into reality, Mitterrand told his outgoing ministers: “Don’t forget that to impose simply equitable laws, revolutions are often needed.” Denouncing the “forces of money” and evoking “the defence” of social rights, he underlined that “those who possess always want to possess more”. Yet he was addressing a departing government which included French tycoon Bernard Tapie as urban affairs minister and which was led by a prime minister who, via his entourage when he was finance minister, was tainted by the first insider trading scandal, the Pechiney affair.
“You must fight,” Mitterrand repeated, like a testamentary message, before evoking death. “Tell yourselves that, whatever the situation, one is never really alone. Never, except before death,” he told the cabinet. “Yes, before death one is alone.” A silence followed, either spontaneous or calculated. Whatever, everyone present knew that Mitterrand was battling with cancer, and had been for a long time. First detected in 1981, it was kept hidden from the public, like a state secret, until September 1992. The silence in the room was broken only by the clock facing the president when it sounded the 12 chimes of midday.
“Anything rather than strangulation in the silence of shadows,” said Mitterrand, picking up again. He then went on to speak of his fears for the socially explosive urban suburbs - the banlieues, characterized by vast public housing estates, high youth unemployment and concentrations of populations of immigrant origins - before talking of a “deep mourning”.
“And be reassured that, on a certain number of issues, I will never compromise,” he said. “And, if needed, I will ask the French people to decide. I wish you all good luck. For all of us. I hope we won’t see the banlieues go up in flames. That we will never see the CRS [riot police] shoot at rebelling youngsters from the ‘cités’ [suburban housing-estate neighbourhoods]. I hope not. On Monday an enormous weight will fall on your shoulders. It will be like a deep mourning.”
The expression “deep mourning” throws back to a custom in former times when, according to the French dictionary, Le Littré, the bereaved wore “the costume of mourning in all its rigour”. To raise this Mitterrand-ist ghost is to underline what, in terms of his socialist posterity, is definitively lost: this capacity to raise a horizon that floats above tactical professional politics, one that is ideological or strategic and which is a counterpoint to the different arrangements, compromises and capitulations. One which saves hope, albeit a hope that requires rebuilding in exchange for a part of his legacy.
A political adventurer, capable of the best while in opposition and of the worst while in power, Mitterrand shuffled positions as much as he swapped entourages. With a multiple temporality, Mitterrand played on several stages, taking care in his wording not to upset the people of the Left - while his concrete political policies were capable of abandoning them. In a sort of permanent double act, he never broke off from speaking with his followers, in order that they would not be lost en route, even if he took a solitary path behind the cover of what were sometimes unspeakable secrets. He did this with quite some nerve - if not cynicism – as illustrated by his declaration in 1993 that “The socialists must stop believing that a personal success is more important than the defeat of their party”. It was a collective rebuke from a man who considered his own freedom to be unaccountable to anyone.
When I was at French daily Le Monde, I wrote about the catalogue of scandals that marked his double term of office, the amorality of which is his doing above all. I summed up the nature of this in the title of an essay on the subject I published in 1992: La Part d’ombre, (which can be loosely translated as ‘The Dark Side’). It was a play on words in French that referred to the title of a 1969 book of extracts of Mitterrand’s discussions with French political affairs journalist Alain Duhamel, and which was entitled Ma part de verité (‘My Side Of The Truth’). But my indictment of Mitterrand was not unequivocal, making clear from the outset that between the shadow and the light, the one suggesting the other, the two parts were complementary, and inseparable when grasping the complexity of an adventurer in the world of power.
It remains that this adventurer was a presumptuous one, who fell into the trap of the institutions that he pretended to dominate: an adversary of the Fifth Republic when the Right, notably the Gaullists, were in power, Mitterrand would become its fervent advocate, to the point of increasing more than ever before him the extent of presidential powers, of the irresponsibility of the office and the cronyism that surrounded it. In doing so, there was no going back, like an outbreak of gangrene that finishes by taking hold of the whole body. That is no doubt why, 20 years on, that among those now in power who lay claim to his legacy, there is nothing left of Mitterrand’s ploys, of his skilful ability to rescue a horizon of hope amid the debacle.
This generation has learnt from Mitterrand only the dark side
By comparison, his successors, as represented by François Hollande, save nothing and ransack everything. It is as if the necrosis was complete, stripping them of all intellectual substance and historical depth. The only thing left apparent is a dried-up power, exposed in all its repressive and authoritarian nudity. It is a power reduced to the police and the army, order and security. What is more, it is a fake power because it holds on only to an illusion of the solidity and stability of institutions created to protect the presidency from the people and to put the holder of office and their servants at a safe distance from the frustrations and anger of the population.
While his party has recurrently lost support in local, regional and European elections, François Hollande, the second socialist president of the Fifth Republic attempts to survive by playing with the Right and the far-right and their escalating focus on national identity and law and order. Having no hesitation in dividing the French people instead of protecting them from terrorism, and thus comforting the hate and fears which designate scapegoats, he dabbles in a triangular approach in the hope of re-election in 2017. These miserable calculations place in peril what is essential - that is, principles, values, and struggles, in short a history that is the long memory of resistance to established order.
Selling off a heritage for reasons of egoism, this president inevitably becomes dumb amid the rambling of his numerous written and rewritten speeches. He no longer knows how to address his own camp, he cannot remember their language, their symbols, even if only to keep up appearances. It is as if Mitterrand’s socialist heirs have retained only the most mediocre part of his adventure, that of calculations and tactics, as if all that remains are pitiful ploys. In sum, it is as if the Cesar- and Bonapartist-like presidential system has completed its work, reducing the march of the State to just the “I” or “Me” of a solitary power that is indifferent to the “We” that allowed it access to power.
François Hollande, just like his prime minister, Manuel Valls, or Socialist Party leader Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, owe their political existence to Mitterrand’s adventure, one that was borne by the rebellious winds of the 1960s and 1970s which were in opposition to the personal occupation of power, economic injustice and social conservatism. Now, 20 years after that adventure ended with the death of Mitterrand, they carry in them, with the mediocre impasse into which they have driven the socialist Left, the regrets of the missed opportunity after Mitterrand’s election in 1981 - a time when youth still had the right to hope. They embody the admission of failure of their generation, and which is also mine, even if I have no taste for the false and misleading perceived solidarity of age.
In politics, this generation has learnt and retained from Mitterrand only the dark side, with its manoeuvring and scheming. The anniversary of his death, amid the spectacle of the waywardness of the current presidency, which places us in a permanent state of emergency and under threat of the stripping of citizenship, led me back to what I wrote in 1992, in La Part d’ombre, in an attempt to shake up the generation of François Hollande and his associates.
“To think where it hurts could be to look ahead and contemplate our defeat, to look at ourselves in the way our children will see us tomorrow, when they will call us to account,” I warned then. “We, this confused generation which believed it was to offer itself a whole world from May 1968 and which had, as it aged, to settle for provinces and fiefdoms, places and situations, desires and ambitions. We, who will be held responsible for our inability to ward off dangers.”
“Responsible for having let happen, for having let war come to us, and hate to grow, to have let injustice prosper and complacency proliferate. Responsible for allowing ourselves to fall into the trap of this decade of blind amnesia in which we proclaim ourselves to be heartily modern, fascinated by the games of money and power, forgetting our youthful indignations; scurrying courtisans concerning the least scrupulous, hungry for recognition concerning the most canny, while, in the ordinary reality that we forsake, the immigrant became fearful and Vichy savoured its revenge, the jobless curl up in their solitary distress and France in its illusory grandeur. We were forgetful, and as such irresponsible. To the uncertainty of the coming century we have added the obscuration of what was before, and not long ago.”
“To turn the pen in the wound is also to inscribe the demands of the past into the angst of the present.”
Of course, I would have preferred to be wrong, such as it is that these lines written in 1992 were penned in the hope that a jolt would come about. Just as I would have preferred not to have to re-read, more than 30 years on, the pages of L’Effet Le Pen, a book I co-authored in 1984 with Alain Rollat, in which I predicted the endurance and the reinforcement of the grip of the far-right on public life in France, in the absence of a radically democratic alternative. But it remains that, from one sounding of the alarm to another, the programme has not changed.
The deep mourning of the Mitterrand-ist era is that of politics played out as a personal adventure, gangrened by the day-to-day survival of individual power, self-untied of a debt towards those who lifted them to the highest office of the State. To regain the demands of the past is, once again, to inscribe within our present the initial promise without which these ephemeral monarchs would never have been able to reign. It is to return to a march towards the horizon bound by common causes, an imaginary in which politics rediscovers the experienced ideal of liberty, equality and fraternity.
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- The French text of this opinion article is available here.