François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand (26 October 19168 January 1996) was President of France from 1981 to 1995. He was the first left-wing politician to assume the presidency under the Fifth Republic, successfully remaining in office longer than any other republican head of state in French history.
Due to family influences, Mitterrand started his political life on the Catholic nationalist right. He served under the Vichy regime during its earlier years. Subsequently, he joined the Resistance, moved to the left, and held ministerial office several times under the Fourth Republic. Mitterrand opposed Charles de Gaulle's establishment of the Fifth Republic. Although at times a politically isolated figure, he outmanoeuvred rivals to become the left's standard bearer in the 1965 and 1974 presidential elections, before being elected president in the 1981 presidential election. He was re-elected in 1988 and remained in office until 1995.
In his first term, Mitterrand initially followed a radical left-wing economic agenda, including nationalisation of key firms and the introduction of the 39-hour work week. He likewise pushed a progressive agenda with reforms such as the abolition of the death penalty, and the end of a government monopoly in radio and television broadcasting. However, faced with economic tensions, he soon abandoned his nationalization programme, in favour of austerity and market liberalization policies. In 1985, Miterrand was faced with a major controversy after ordering the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace vessel docked in Auckland. Later in 1991, he became the first French President to appoint a female prime minister, Édith Cresson. During his presidency, Mitterrand was twice forced by the loss of a parliamentary majority into "cohabitation governments" with conservative cabinets led, respectively, by Jacques Chirac (1986–1988), and Édouard Balladur (1993–1995).
Mitterrand’s foreign and defence policies built on those of his Gaullist predecessors, except in regard to their reluctance to support European integration, which he reversed. His partnership with German chancellor Helmut Kohl advanced European integration via the Maastricht Treaty, and he accepted German reunification.
Less than eight months after leaving office, he died from the prostate cancer he had successfully concealed for most of his presidency. Beyond making the French Left electable, Mitterrand presided over the rise of the Socialist Party to dominance of the left, and the decline of the once-dominant Communist Party.
Family François Marie Adrien Maurice Mitterrand was born on 26 October 1916 in Jarnac, Charente, the son of Joseph Mitterrand and Yvonne Lorrain. His family was devoutly CatholicTiersky, Ronald. François Mitterrand: A Very French President. 2003, Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 38–42. and conservative. His father worked as a stationmaster for the Compagnie Paris Orléans railway. He had three brothers, Robert, Jacques (retired General and head of the French state aircraft company Aerospatiale), and Philippe, and four sisters, Antoinette, Marie-Josèphe, Colette, and Geneviève.
Mitterrand's wife, Danielle Mitterrand (née Gouze, 1924–2011), came from a socialist background and worked for various left-wing causes. They married on 24 October 1944 and had three sons: Pascal (10 June – 17 September 1945), Jean-Christophe, born in 1946, and Gilbert, born on 4 February 1949. He also had two children as results of extra-marital affairs: an acknowledged daughter, Mazarine (born 1974), with his mistress Anne Pingeot, and an unacknowledged son, Hravn Forsne (born 1988), with Swedish journalist .
François Mitterrand's nephew Frédéric Mitterrand was a journalist, Minister of Culture and Communications under Nicolas Sarkozy (and a supporter of Jacques Chirac, former French President), and his wife's brother-in-law Roger Hanin was a well-known French actor.
Early life
François Mitterrand studied from 1925 to 1934 at the Collège Saint-Paul in Angoulême, where he became a member of the Jeunesse Étudiante Chrétienne, the student organisation of Action catholique. Arriving in Paris in the autumn of 1934, he then went to the École Libre des Sciences Politiques until 1937, where he obtained his diploma in July of that year. François Mitterrand took membership for about a year in the Volontaires nationaux (National Volunteers), an organisation related to François de la Rocque's far-right league, the Croix de Feu; the league had just participated in the 6 February 1934 riots which led to the fall of the second Cartel des Gauches (Left-Wing Coalition).Pierre Péan, Une jeunesse française (biography on Mitterrand), p.23–35
Contrary to some reports, Mitterrand never became a formal member of the French Social Party, which was the successor to the Croix de Feu and may be considered the first French right-wing mass party. However, he did write news articles in the L'Écho de Paris newspaper, which was close to the Social Party. He participated in the demonstrations against the "invasion métèque" in February 1935 and then in those against law teacher Gaston Jèze, who had been nominated as juridical counsellor of Ethiopia's Negus, in January 1936.
When Mitterrand's involvement in these conservative nationalist movements was revealed in the 1990s, he attributed his actions to the milieu of his youth. He furthermore had some personal and family relations with members of the Cagoule, a far-right terrorist group in the 1930s.Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy, p.365
Mitterrand then served his conscription from 1937 to 1939 in the 23rd régiment d'infanterie coloniale. In 1938, he became the best friend of , a Jewish socialist, whom he saved from anti-Semitic aggressions by the national-royalist movement Action française. His friendship with Dayan caused Mitterrand to begin to question some of his nationalist ideas. Finishing his law studies, he was sent in September 1939 to the Maginot line near Montmédy, with the rank of Sergeant-chief (infantry sergeant). He became engaged to Marie-Louise Terrasse (future actress and television presenter Catherine Langeais) in May 1940, when she was 16, but she broke it off in January 1942. Following an observation of Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II, François Mitterrand became an agnostic.
Second World War François Mitterrand's actions during World War II were the cause of much controversy in France during the 1980s and 1990s. Mitterand was called up for military service in 1938 and joined the 23rd Colonial Infantry Regiment (RIC) at Fort d'Ivry. During the Phoney War, he was deployed with the 23rd RIC to Alsace in September 1939 and then to the Ardennes, near Stenay, in December. Mitterrand was wounded by shrapnel during the Battle of France on 14 June 1940, at the Cote 304 near Verdun. He was hospitalised in Toul and then Bruyères, where he was captured by the Germans on 21 June.
Prisoner of war: 1940–1941 Mitterrand was initially held at Stalag IX A, southwest of Kassel, before being transferred to Stalag IX C, Kommando 1515, in Schaala , Thuringia. In March 1941, Mitterrand made his escape with fellow POW Father Xavier Leclerc while they were on work detail. Mitterrand and Leclerc trekked over 22 days, but were arrested at Egesheim, just from the Swiss border, and returned to Stalag IX A. Mitterrand was appointed one of ten chancellors of the ZUT, a temporary university in Ziegenhain, where he gave lectures on the ancien régime and Voltaire. He claims that his activity in the camp and the influence of the people he met there began to change his political ideas, moving him towards the left. On 28 November Mitterrand escaped with forged papers and made it to Metz, however he was denounced by the landlady of a hotel he rested at and was taken to a sorting camp for escapees in Boulay-Moselle.
Before he could be transferred to another camp, likely to have been in Poland, Mitterrand escaped through the barbed wire on 10 December and hid in a nearby hospital. He was sheltered by a nurse at the hospital, Marie Baron, who had helped several escapees in the village and who entrusted him to friends since she was being surveilled by the Gestapo. On 15 December, Baron collected him and took him to Metz where she contacted Hélène Studler, who operated an escape network. That evening, Mitterrand rendezvoused with three other escapees and a member of Sister Hélène's network at Saint-Martin Church , who took them to meet a smuggler at Metz train station. The escapees and the smuggler boarded a train towards the border between Moselle, which had been de facto annexed to Germany, and the occupied zone, bailing during a slowdown for roadworks, and crossed the border. Mitterrand reached Nancy where another member of Sister Hélène's network, a Brother of the Christian Schools, provided him with false identity papers and directions to the zone libre via Besançon and Mouchard, which he crossed into near Chamblay on 16 December.
Work in France under the Vichy administration: 1941–1943 With help from a friend of his mother, Mitterrand got a job as a mid-level functionary of the Vichy government, looking after the interests of POWs. This was very unusual for an escaped prisoner, and he later claimed to have served as a spy for the Free French Forces. Mitterrand worked from January to April 1942 for the Légion française des combattants et des volontaires de la révolution nationale ("Legion of French combatants and volunteers of the national revolution") as a civil servant on a temporary contract. Mitterrand worked under Jean-Paul Favre de Thierrens who was a spy for the British secret service. He then moved to the Commissariat au reclassement des prisonniers de guerre ("Service for the Reorientation of POWs"). During this period, Mitterrand was aware of Thierrens's activities and may have helped in his disinformation campaign. At the same time, he published an article detailing his time as a POW in the magazine France, revue de l'État nouveau (the magazine was published as propaganda by the Vichy Regime).reprinted in Politique I, in 1978.
Mitterrand has been called a "" (an expression used by the historian Jean-Pierre Azéma to describe people who supported Marshal Philippe Pétain, the head of the Vichy Regime, before 1943, but subsequently rejected the Vichy Regime).Robert Belot in La Résistance sans De Gaulle, éd. Fayard, 2006, et Henry Rousso in l'Express n° 2871, du 13 juillet 2006.