Mitterrand by Philip Short

Author:Philip Short [Philip Short]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

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fn1 Mitterrand confessed years later that he put the codes in his jacket pocket and promptly forgot about them, remembering their existence only the next day when the suit was already on its way to the cleaners. Jimmy Carter had a similar misadventure, although in his case the codes were recovered more easily as his suit had been sent for cleaning within the White House.

fn2 Such fears have been a constant of American foreign policy under both Democratic and Republican administrations. In the 1960s the Vietnam War gave rise to the domino theory in Asia; in the 1980s Washington worried that Communist participation in government would spread from France to Italy, Spain and Portugal; thirty years later, after the Arab Spring, there was anxiety that anti-Western Islamic regimes would replace the Arab dictatorships ousted by popular revolts. Only once in the last century have these predictions of ‘contagion’ been borne out, and that was in the case of decolonisation after the Second World War which, for ideological reasons, the United States supported, not always to its own advantage.

fn3 There were other sources of terrorism in France in the 1980s, but none came close to attaining the intensity of those originating in the Middle East (or with Middle Eastern connections, like Action Directe, an extreme left-wing French group, some of whose members had attended training camps in Lebanon, which had links to the Rejectionist Front as well as to the Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction). Corsican separatists, after a brief truce when Mitterrand took office, resumed their attacks, but they were either directed against property – empty holiday homes belonging to families from the French mainland – or were symbolic actions against French police stations. There was also some spillover into the French Basque country from the ETA conflict in Spain. During Franco’s rule, France had turned a blind eye to ETA activities on its soil. After the Dictator’s death attitudes changed slowly. It was not until 1982, when the Spanish Socialist, Felipe González, took office, that the French and Spanish police forces began to cooperate and the first ETA members were extradited. With rare exceptions, Corsican and Basque terrorism in France were no more than irritants, as were the occasional actions of Breton nationalists.

fn4 There are conflicting versions of why the relationship ended. Jean was still living at the rue de Bièvre at the time of Mitterrand’s election but, as he explained later, found Danielle increasingly taken up with Third World causes and his own role reduced to that of a factotum, ‘looking after the dogs and the garden at Latche . . . By then I was forty-five and I felt that I needed to think about the future.’ Danielle may also have thought that, with her husband now President, the time had come to break off the arrangement. Others, including Pierre Tourlier, have written that she was deeply unhappy at Jean’s departure. Wherever the truth lies, Mitterrand stayed on good terms with Jean throughout

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