What took Francis Mitterrand to the top?

Of a dashing political rival, François Mitterrand once remarked:

He was more intelligent than I was, he thought faster than I did, he was more seductive to women. In some ways, he gave me a complex. But he lacked perseverance.

The man of whom Mitterrand spoke was a certain Félix Gaillard, whose claim to fame during the Fourth Republic was to become France’s youngest ever prime minister at the age of 38. He lasted barely five months in the job (1957–58) and was never heard of again. As Philip Short — who has previously written works on Mao and Pol Pot — makes mordantly clear in his well-rounded, albeit meandering biography, Mitterrand’s career path to the summit of French politics was an altogether more tortuous and drawn out affair.

Short, who was the BBC’s correspondent in Paris in the 1980s for ten years of Mitterrand’s presidency and interviewed him several times, describes ‘a gifted, devious man, part visionary, part pragmatist, who when he was not shooting himself in the foot could run rings around his political opponents.’

As France’s first popularly elected socialist president (1981–1995), Mitterrand showed that the left could be a viable alternative to the hegemony of the right. To his credit, he abolished the death penalty, reduced the centralised power of the state, helped to anchor a united Germany within the European community and combined with Margaret Thatcher to bring about the channel tunnel. On the debit side there was a mismanaged economy with a whopping trade deficit, a lot of indecisiveness over Rwanda and Bosnia, under-the-table dealing with Middle Eastern terrorists and a number of dodgy friendships which did not speak well for his probity.

The bourgeois son of Catholic, right-wing parents from Jarnac, a small commune in south-western France, Mitterrand, for all his alleged erudition, was by no means a child prodigy — his deficiency in maths, science and English meant he had to repeat a year at school.