Mitterrand years: “The promise” not to say too much

This is not the capital testimony that will change the way we look at this figure of French politics, as much adored as it is contested. It is a promise. That of a deputy secretary of the Élysée and sherpa who became a friend of President François Mitterrand. “Write this book in ten years, in twenty years… but do it.” Yes, do it, because the president, who was stingy with informal addresses, said “you” to this normal student and associate professor of physical sciences who occupied an office next to his.

Anne Lauvergeon will have waited before keeping her promise. More than twenty years later, she recounts anecdotes, decision-making, meals in the presence of the French head of state. In this book there are no secrets revealed about these 14 years of socialist power, no more alcove secrets of a fickle president who had a hidden double life before the press revealed the existence of his daughter Mazarine , born from his love for Anne Pingeot. About this passion, the photos from “Paris Match” and the publication of the correspondence have already said everything.

More than a story “seen from the next office”, it is a sideways look that she delivers. About a man of whom we wonder on every page how he was able to compartmentalize his life, his friendships to this extent, and find his moments to share between two families, to give “time to time” while the news and the presidential office monopolize it.

For him, France is landscapes, a history that he knows like the back of his hand, ordinary citizens, a culture and above all literature. With a preference for “hussar” writers, right-wing, and authors anchored in a land. His was the Morvan, an ancient massif where the Aedui, a Gallic people, founded their capital, Bibracte, and where Vercingétorix took the lead of the tribes hostile to Rome.

In this chosen land, the deputy before the president, had his habits: he stayed at the Auberge du Vieux Morvan, whose owners are close friends in the small town of Château-Chinon. It is here that he wanted to store and show to the public the gifts received during his first seven-year term in a dedicated museum. But we must add to this Mitterrandian geography the Charente, his shared origins with Chardonne, his favorite writer, Aswan for the holidays, Latche for his first family with Danielle Gouze-Mitterrand and the rock of Solutré which he climbed every month of June.

Loyalty and shadows

In Nièvre, he returns often, faithful to the friends of this acquired land who elected him deputy. Faithful yes, in friendship, and free in politics as in love. This loyalty is primarily reserved for former prisoners, deportees, resistance fighters like him, that it is reserved. Over time, other equally tight circles will be added: those of socialists of course, friends from Nivernais, advisors, etc.

We remember the accusations about Vichy, as “contractual for a year”, he qualifies; on his Francisque, Pétainist decoration; on his links with René Bousquet, who was one of the organizers of the Vel d’Hiv roundup, first convicted then acquitted for subsequent acts of resistance. Bouquet? He knew him as an administrator for “Dépêche”, a regional socialist daily which supported his candidacy, recalls Anne Lauvergeon. Vichy, in 1942 he was already a resistance fighter, providing false papers and founding the bases of his resistance movement, the National Rally of Prisoners of War.

Shadows, there were others. Sometimes blackened or real stains? Anne Lauvergeon pleads not guilty. We don’t say bad things about our friends. And then, Mitterrand was a resistance fighter under the name “Morand”, a prisoner who escaped after several attempts. To the point that he will join the first provisional government of Free France.

The silences and the forces of the mind

She explains what her Mitterrand told her about this life before, as the youngest minister of the IV^e Republic, war, old friendships with characters who had become sour that he never denied. His feeling of injustice regarding the accusations against him (the Observatory, Vichy), his sorrows (the suicide of Pierre Bérégovoy), his shyness, his modesty. His silences which earned him to be called the sphinx. But above all his suffering, killing, unspeakable, overcome to be present as best he could at the major international meetings, at the truth interview with the journalist Jean-Pierre Elkabbach. Because the president has been suffering from prostate cancer since his first term.

When you have encountered Mitterrand several times in your career as a young journalist, when you have lived through this historical period and when you have read a little, you do not learn much from this “promise”. But reading it reminds us of the political finesse of this Florentine and the human conscience that inhabited him, constantly having an existential questioning that he liked to confront with the values ​​of men of faith and philosophers. Because as he said in his last presidential address, he believed in “the forces of the spirit”.

We still read in a chapter devoted to a summit of heads of state that he could be touched by the tragedy experienced by an unknown person, the illness of a collaborator to the point of going to their bedside, all affairs ceasing . He also believed that by honoring and thinking about the deceased, we prolong their existence. This is what Anne Lauvergeon did for him. While the sharp silhouette of this president fades with time.

“The Promise”, Anne Lauvergeon, Ed. Grasset, 378 pages, April 2024, from 34.74 to 38.60 fr.

Olivier Bot has been deputy editor-in-chief since 2017, head of the World section between 2011 and 2017. Alexandre de Varennes Press Prize. Author of “Search and investigate with the internet” at Presses universitaire de Grenoble.More informations

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