Francois Mitterand

WHAT WE KNOW HIM FOR

President of the French Republic from 1981 to 1995, François Mitterrand was born on October 26, 1916 in Jarnac (France). He died on January 8, 1996 in Paris (France). He was a socialist.

François Mitterrand played, as a politician, a considerable role in the history of the Fifth Republic and of the left. From the Vichy regime and the Resistance to the Elysee, his career is that of an ambitious young man. The one who led France for fourteen years leaves behind great social advances for his country without hiding some troubled affairs.

WHAT WE CAN REPROACH HIM FOR

The most beautiful of these secrets is undoubtedly called Anne Pingeot, mother of her daughter Mazarine, mistress of the shadows for more than thirty years, great mute discovered by the whole of France behind the coffin of the former president and almost immediately disappeared, as in a formidable last conjuring trick of the socialist Machiavelli. Silence has an end. Former curator at the Louvre and Orsay museums, Anne Pingeot knows that history has a meaning, that nothing can resist its erosive march, that everything resurfaces one day or another from the sands of time. That there are "forces of the spirit" that haunt you so much that it is better to resolve to exorcise them. So she ended up talking to Philip Short. And, punctuating the 900 and a few pages of François Mitterrand, portrait of an ambitious (Editions Nouveau Monde), methodical, quasi-scientific disembalming of the sphinx of the left by the British journalist, his words have the resonance of an explosion.

Mitterrand and Pingeot loved each other, it became known. Passionately, we will never have measured it as much as with the revelations of Mazarine's mother. Daughter of the Clermont bourgeoisie, she was 20 when she met the socialist leader. He is 47, he is already married to Danielle, father of two sons, Jean-Christophe and Gilbert, and ready to unbolt General de Gaulle from power. Young and beautiful, passionate about the arts and cultivated, Anne will be the true rose of his garden which he keeps secret, impenetrable, labyrinthine. Sponsor of the inverted and semi-underground pyramid of the Louvre decades later, Mitterrand wants to be the architect of the invisible.

In 1965, when she began to become a museum curator, after four years in law school, he helped Anne to write a dissertation, between the two rounds of the presidential election. "I am ashamed of it in retrospect," Pingeot confides in François Mitterrand, portrait of an ambiguous. A candidate for the presidency of the Republic had other things to do than help me do my duty on the unions of the communes… He did it out of love and to prove to himself that he was the master of his time. »Managing his love life was something else… The same year, Mitterrand showed Pingeot an old sheepfold, located in a clearing, near Hossegor, in the Landes. Latche. The ideal place to take refuge in their clandestine loves. Before he officially separates from the mother of his sons, he promises it. It's a lie : Danielle Mitterrand, who is fully aware of her husband's escapades and herself experiences an adulterous affair with a gym teacher, Jean Balenci, refuses a divorce. Mitterrand folds. Latche pines bleed their sap. For Anne Pingeot, from a Catholic and conservative family, these are tears. “His letters were passionate, I believed them. I had made drawings for the sheepfold, for the furnishings… I thought it would be our house, as he wrote to me. The idiot that I am! », Entrusts Pingeot to Philip Short