AdamKadmon
2 May 2012
News / Should Poles care who becomes French President or is it irrelevant? [45]
It is good to know the past when thinking about the future, n'est-ce pas?
François Mitterrand, like Margaret Thatcher, was an implausible candidate for the role he was to play in his country's affairs. Born to a practicing Catholic family in conservative south-western France, he was a right-wing law student in the 1930s and an activist in some of the most extreme anti-democratic movements of the age. He spent most of World War Two as a junior servant of the collaborationist government in Vichy, switching his allegiance just in time to be able to claim post-war credentials as a resister. It was only after the implosion of the old Parti Socialiste in 1969, following its electoral humiliation in 1968, that Mitterrand began to plot his role in its renais-
sance: a take-over bid launched in 1971 with the appearance of a new Socialist Party led by Mitterrand and a new generation of ambitious young men recruited to serve him. He once described his religious allegiances thus: 'Je suis né chrétien, et je mourrai sans
doute en cet état. Dans l'intervalle . . . ' ('I was born Christian and shall doubtless die in that condition. But meanwhile . . . '). In much the same cynical vein he might have added that he was born a conservative and would die one, but managed to become a Socialist in the meantime.
It is good to know the past when thinking about the future, n'est-ce pas?
François Mitterrand, like Margaret Thatcher, was an implausible candidate for the role he was to play in his country's affairs. Born to a practicing Catholic family in conservative south-western France, he was a right-wing law student in the 1930s and an activist in some of the most extreme anti-democratic movements of the age. He spent most of World War Two as a junior servant of the collaborationist government in Vichy, switching his allegiance just in time to be able to claim post-war credentials as a resister. It was only after the implosion of the old Parti Socialiste in 1969, following its electoral humiliation in 1968, that Mitterrand began to plot his role in its renais-
sance: a take-over bid launched in 1971 with the appearance of a new Socialist Party led by Mitterrand and a new generation of ambitious young men recruited to serve him. He once described his religious allegiances thus: 'Je suis né chrétien, et je mourrai sans
doute en cet état. Dans l'intervalle . . . ' ('I was born Christian and shall doubtless die in that condition. But meanwhile . . . '). In much the same cynical vein he might have added that he was born a conservative and would die one, but managed to become a Socialist in the meantime.
