France's citizen king.

• Author: Bakshian, Aram, Jr.
• Position: A Taste for Intrigue: The Multiple Lives of Francois Mitterrand - Book review

Philip Short, A Taste for Intrigue: The Multiple Lives of Francois Mitterrand (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014), 640 pp., $40.00.

Some of the greatest historical coups de theatre have been staged by actors playing against type. The most obvious American example would be hard-line anti-Communist Richard Nixon's dramatic opening to Chairman Mao's China. No less dramatic--though of considerably less international importance--was the election of Francois Mitterrand as the first socialist president of the French Fifth Republic nearly a decade later.

In both public and private life, Francois Mitterrand was a man of quirks and contradictions, sometimes verging on the absurd. He was the second most important French leader of the twentieth century, outpaced only by Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle resurrected France twice, first from the ravages of the Nazi occupation and then from the political paralysis of the Fourth Republic. At the height of his influence he did more than lead France; he embodied it. Francois Mitterrand's achievement was different. He successfully led the French Left to power for the first time since de Gaulle's rule and then proceeded to govern in much the same fashion as Le Grand Charles himself. As an imperial president, Mitterrand reduced the French Communist Party--which he had run in coalition with--to an insignificant force in French politics, and twice governed in conjunction with conservative prime ministers and legislatures in an arrangement the French referred to as a state of political "cohabitation."

While the comparison would have irked him, Mitterrand played a transitional role in French politics similar to that of Harold Wilson in British politics a generation earlier--a temperamentally moderate, socially middle-class leader of a political faction traditionally dominated by militant trade unionists and radical members of the intelligentsia. Neither man is remembered for towering individual achievements, but both avoided class warfare at home while remaining staunch members of the Western alliance. And neither ultimately drove his country leftward. Harold Wilson, like Tory prime ministers before him, was a steadfast advocate of the "special relationship" between Britain and the United States, even on Vietnam, despite rumbles on the left of his Labour Party.

In the case of Mitterrand, this meant crucial, and rather courageous, support for the deployment of Pershing missiles--the so-called Euromissiles--as a deterrent to Soviet aggression against nonnuclear NATO allies such as West Germany. The occasion was an address to the Bundestag in Bonn in 1983 on the twentieth anniversary of the Franco-German friendship treaty initiated by Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer. The speech Mitterrand was to give had gone through numerous wishy-washy drafts before he sat down at a typewriter and put it into his own words:

A simple idea governs French thinking: war must remain impossible and those who are tempted by it must be deterred. [It is] our conviction that nuclear weapons, as the instrument of deterrence, are, whether one likes it or not, the guarantee of peace from the moment that there is a balance of forces ... The maintenance of this balance requires that no region of Europe be left defenceless against nuclear weapons directed specifically against it. Anyone who gambles on "decoupling" the European and American continents would, in our view, be calling into question ... the maintenance of peace. I think--and I say--that this "decoupling" is a danger in itself, ... a danger which weighs particularly on those European countries which do not possess nuclear arms. As British author and journalist Philip Short remarks in his exhaustively researched new biography of Mitterrand, certainly the most comprehensive one in the English language, the much-revised speech "turned out to be worth waiting for":

Decades later, it is difficult to appreciate the impact of those few sentences. Mitterrand's argument was that the pacifists, by seeking to leave Europe defenceless, were inviting a new war in which non-nuclear powers like West Germany would find themselves in the front line. Later that year he would encapsulate the thought in an aphorism: "Pacifism ... is in the West, the missiles are in the East." The speech was a game-changer.... Mitterrand's backing comforted [West Germany's] Christian Democrats in their support of deployment and helped [Helmut] Kohl to victory in the parliamentary elections which were held two months later. The Americans, after drawing a deep breath, applauded. Henry Kissinger telephoned to say he had found the speech "quite remarkable." Reagan, declaring that Mitterrand's remarks were "of inestimable value," thanked him for "strengthening the Alliance at a time when the European countries have to admit their ... anxiety before the pressure of public opinion." To men like Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan, it all came as a...