LE PRESIDENT
Franz-Olivier Giesbert
Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990
394 pp.
The jacket-cover, which shows him at his most inscrutable, with a faintly sardonic smile and shrewdly pursed eyes beneath the bushy brow, a touch of gray hair visible below the shadow cast by the ominous black hat, and a red scarf wound around his neck under the dark-blue raincoat collar, might lead one to think that the hero of this book was the “godfather” of some flourishing Mafia corporation. In fact, however, he is the present pater patraie of France, President Francois Mitterrand, the shrewdest and most devious of French political operators and one of the prima donnas of the contemporary world scene.
This is by no means the first attempt that has been made to relate the extraordinary “success story” of this versatile individual, the once acid critic of Charles de Gaulle's “dictatorial” ways and of his atomic force de frappe, who in a costume change worthy of the great actor Fregoli, has since stepped into the general's boots, asserted the primacy of the presidency over prime minister and Parliament (particularly in matters of defense and foreign policy), and Partly preempted the political and economic platforms of his right-wing adversaries by making himself the promoter of a “mixed economy,” combining what are supposed to be the best features of free enterprise and centrally planned economic systems.
Fraught with mystery
Over the past ten years more than a dozen books of biographical description and dissection have been written in France about the fourth president of the Fifth Republic. So baffling and fraught with mystery have been the implausible ups and downs in the career of this master maneuverer that at least two of these biographical analysts have felt moved to write more than one book about him.
The first is an able radio journalist, Catherine Nay, who, after undertaking a first overflight of his career (from 1916 to 1984) in a work bearing the neo-Stendhalian title Le Noir et le Rouge (the black and the red), followed up with another book probing seven masks or facets of Francois Mitterand's complex personality - Les Sept Mitterrand, published by Grasset in 1988.
The second of these biographical analysts is none other than the author of the present work, a brilliantly successful editor named Franz-Olivier Giesbert. His first biographical survey, titled Francois Mitterrand, ou la tentation de l'histoire, was published in 1977 at a time when his hero had established himself as the boss of the once moribund Socialist Party. This he had made in strictly numerical terms the leading party in France, but it was a party that nonetheless seemed condemned to twenty more years in the political wilderness. The sequel to this first work, published thirteen years later under the laconic title Le President, carries the story forward to the end of 1989. It is the fascinating tale of phoenix who managed to rise from the ashes of defeat in 1974 to a pinnacle of power and a veritable apotheosis, unequaled in this century by any Frenchman save for Charles de Gaulle.
Last April, at the time of its
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