Lettre ouverte d'un "chien" a Francois Mitterrand au nom de la liberte d'aboyer.

• Author: Friend, J.W.

Jean Montaldo, (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 170 pp., 78 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...