Ten years after his death, François Mitterrand still evokes passions in France, but a new film only scratches the surface of the former president's regal lifestyle, writes Lara Marlowe in Paris.
François Mitterrand was still president of France when he said farewell to the country on New Year's Eve 1994. "I believe in the power of the spirit, and I shall not leave you," he said with creepy mysticism, five months before leaving office and a year before his death.
In many ways, the man known to all France as "Tonton" (uncle) or "the Sphinx" remains with us. Mitterrand's monuments to himself - the glass pyramid at the Louvre, the Bastille Opera, the Grande Arche de la Défense, the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand - are scattered across Paris. The "French social model", now under attack from economic liberals, is also part of the legacy of Mitterrand's 14-year rule.
As historian Pierre Nora says, Mitterrand is the subject of "a perpetual biography". In February, Le Promeneur du Champs-de-Mars, a film about the last years of Mitterrand's life, broke the taboo against portraying French presidents in the cinema. It was released in Ireland yesterday as The Last Mitterrand. During this year's campaign for the constitutional treaty referendum, the socialists argued over how Mitterrand would have voted. His widow, Danielle, thought he would have opposed the constitution. Pro-treaty Mitterrandistes such as Élisabeth Guigou and Jack Lang cited his "European commitment" and his personal battle, while suffering from terminal cancer, for ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992.
As the French socialist party tears itself apart in the aftermath of France's No vote, Mitterrand continues to evoke strong emotions. Laurent Fabius, the leader of the No campaign, whom Mitterrand appointed as France's youngest prime minister, claims to be Mitterrand's legitimate political heir. Like Mitterrand, Fabius believes that to win in French politics it is necessary to seduce the far left and govern from the centre.
A former socialist minister admits privately that he "doesn't much like Mitterrand" - still enough of a heresy for him to ask not to be quoted by name.
"There was ambiguity and duplicity in everything he said and did," the official explains, recalling Mitterrand's youthful flirtation with the extreme right and the election law he devised to break the centre-right opposition by bringing the extreme right-wing National Front into the National Assembly in 1986.
Within the same socialist party are men such as Hubert Védrine, the former foreign minister and one of Mitterrand's closest aides, who believe Mitterrand will go down in history as a great man: for his abolition of the death penalty, social legislation that reduced the working week and increased annual holidays, and especially his pursuit of European integration.
"The 1980s were France's most pro- European decade," says political scientist Raymond Cayrol. "Mitterrand convinced the French that Europe was our future."
THE ADORATION AND loathing for Mitterrand are not unlike Ireland's mixed feelings about the French president's friend, former taoiseach Charles Haughey. Mitterrand visited Haughey's island of Innisvickalaun with one of his mistresses, probably Anne Pingeot, the mother of Mitterrand's secret daughter, Mazarine. When Mitterrand died in January 1996, Haughey insisted on attending the memorial service in Notre Dame Cathedral.
On trips to Paris, Haughey occupied a suite at the Hôtel Meurice, overlooking the Tuileries Gardens, and bought custom-made shirts at Charvet on the Place Vendôme.
Mitterrand's appetite for luxury, and his way of placing himself above the law, were monarchical. The French president ran up huge, often unpaid bills with antiquarian booksellers. One mystery of his later life involved a spectacular €21.34 million villa in Antibes. It was razed in 2002 because it violated planning laws. The putative buyer was a property speculator, but architects' plans showed a "president's bedroom", a "president's bathroom" and a "president's WC".
The Last Mitterrand portrays accurately Mitterrand's vision of himself as the embodiment of French culture and history. In one scene, he flies over Chartres Cathedral in a helicopter, reciting a poem by Charles Péguy. In another, he caresses the faces of supine statues of French kings on tombs in the basilica at Saint-Denis.
Michel Bouquet, who plays Mitterrand, is one of France's finest actors. Yet, despite a superb performance by Bouquet, the film is disappointing, focusing as it does almost entirely on the relationship between the dying president and a young, unknown journalist whom Mitterrand has asked to help draft his memoirs.
The film is based on a book by the young journalist, Georges-Marc Benamou, published the year after Mitterrand's death.
"Tell them I am not the devil," the president tells the Benamou character at the beginning of the film. Benamou was lucid about Mitterrand's reasons for choosing him: "Perhaps . . . at the end of his life, the only power he had left was to prefer polite prowlers to bloodthirsty ones. Perhaps . . . he found me to be of leather more supple than the others . . ." he writes. Yet Benamou never overcame his own awe at being honoured with the president's confidence.
Robert Guédiguian, the director, hitherto made heartwarming films about working-class people in Marseilles. Guédiguian told Le Monde that he made the film "to improve Mitterrand's image". Bouquet's Mitterrand is grandfatherly, capricious and mischievous. The imminence of death may have softened Mitterrand's character, but viewers are surprised to find no trace of the cut-throat, Machiavellian plotter.
NOT SURPRISINGLY, THE film was well- received by the old guard of Mitterrandolâtres (worshippers of Mitterrand). It was symbolic that one of Mitterrand's closest friends, former foreign minister Roland Dumas, went directly from a private screening of The Last Mitterrand last winter to the Palais de Justice, where he testified in a trial over the wiretaps that Mitterrand had placed on the telephones of his political adversaries. Dumas claimed the illegal taps were justified in the interest of the state.
The film never mentions the wiretaps, or illegal financing of the socialist party under Mitterrand, or the Elf trial in which close Mitterrand associates were convicted of stealing hundreds of millions of francs from the state-owned oil company.
It skips the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, the framing of three "Irlandais de Vincennes" by Mitterrand's personal "anti-terrorist unit" and the suicide of François de Grossouvre, called "the pimp" by Mitterrand's driver for his role in ensnaring women who interested the president. It does not allude to the mistresses whom Mitterrand appointed to high government office, and whom he called "my livestock".
Mitterrand's role during the second World War is the only uncomfortable episode addressed at all. When it emerged in 1994 that Mitterrand had been decorated for his role as an official in the Vichy collaborationist government, public opinion turned against him. The dying president called journalists who pursued the issue "dogs". The crucial question - raised but not answered by the film - is whether Mitterrand joined the Resistance only when it became certain the Allies would win.
Filmgoers are given only the tiniest glimpse of the court that surrounded Mitterrand. His wife, Danielle, and main mistress, Anne Pingeot, do not appear.
Fearing a lawsuit by the Mitterrandolâtres, Guédiguian and Benamou left out the best chapter in Benamou's book. A week before his death, on New Year's Eve, Mitterrand crunched and slurped his way through two tiny, yellow-throated songbirds called ortolans.
Director and writer did not dare show this pathetic yet shocking image: a dying monarch, indulging in a delicacy so rare that most Frenchmen did not know it existed.
As etiquette prescribes, Mitterrand devoured the birds with a white linen tent over his head.
The Last Mitterrand runs at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin, until Thur, Aug 25. www.ifi.ie