Mazarine Pingeot: Daughter of President François Mitterrand
IN NOVEMBER 1994, the magazine Paris Matchfinally broke the French media's self-imposed code of silence over President François Mitterrand's second family when it published on its front page a zoom-lens photograph of the head of state and his secret daughter, Mazarine, leaving a restaurant together. The image, headlined "The tender gesture of a father", caused a sensation.
Mitterrand had raised two sons with his wife, Danielle, but during his 14 years in the Élysée Palace, he also played an active father’s role in his second family – museum curator Anne Pingeot and their daughter Mazarine. Anne and Mazarine even lived for a time in a wing of the Élysée; whenever the child left the palace, she hid under the seat until they were a few roads along.
Journalists, bodyguards and others had known of Mitterrand's second family, but for 13 of his 14 years in office, the public remained oblivious. French people still talk of the shocking effect of that Paris Matchcover – not least Mazarine Pingeot herself. "Suddenly my face was all over the news-stands, the illegitimate daughter of a politician was my new calling card," she wrote in her memoir. "I was born out of wedlock and hidden. The shame of the republic, an affront to morality." When Mitterrand died in 1996, his coffin was accompanied by his widow Danielle and his sons Jean-Christophe and Gilbert. Just behind them walked Anne Pingeot, his mistress of 30 years, and their 21-year-old daughter.
Mazarine Pingeot, now 35 and married with three children, is a writer, blogger, literary critic and occasional broadcaster. The first of her six books was a novel published when she was 23, but despite strong sales it endured a critical mauling – because of who her father was, Pingeot said. She enjoyed considerably more success with an intimate account of her childhood ( Sealed Lips), and stirred controversy in 2007 when she published a novel about a mother who kills her newborn baby and puts it in the freezer. The plot had echoes of a real infanticide case that had shaken France the same year.
In her memoir, Pingeot portrays Mitterrand as a loving, devoted father who took a keen interest in her upbringing, but she has also admitted that her “hidden childhood” weighed so heavily on her young shoulders that she later had to seek counselling for depression.
In recent years, Pingeot has become one of the strongest defenders of her father’s legacy. She sits on the council of the Institut François Mitterrand and recently changed her identity papers and registered herself as Pingeot-Mitterrand. “As for my son, I’ll let him decide when he is older whether he wants the name Mitterrand too,” she has said. “It’s a heavy name to carry.”
