La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (28 page)

If the French followed him, they hadn’t been cowards; they hadn’t betrayed their fellow citizens; they weren’t emotionally and morally hollow. They could convince themselves of this “certain idea of France,” as de Gaulle called it, a heroic image of military bravery, courage in the face of hardship, and moral rectitude at a time of crisis. They could re-create “the eternal France”: an old country with long-standing institutions built around security and tradition, not innovation and iconoclasm.

De Gaulle demonstrated a primal element of political seduction: the ability to promulgate a myth about a people. He embraced and reassured the French at a time when they were in desperate need of self-confidence and self-respect. Amid the chaos that followed World War II, France woke up, looked in the mirror, and was ashamed at what she saw. De Gaulle whispered in her ear, telling her exactly what she wanted to hear.

As a war hero, de Gaulle was not a womanizer and didn’t need to be; his virility was assumed. According to one account a woman, exiting a particularly engaging meeting, hurried toward him and with ecstatic eyes said, “Oh, my general, if you only knew how much I love you.” De Gaulle was momentarily surprised, then answered with a smile, “Well, madame, I thank you, but keep this secret to yourself.”

One woman who managed to seduce him—intellectually—was an American, Jacqueline Kennedy. De Gaulle had been “irritating, intransigent, insufferably vain, inconsistent and impossible to please” during President John F. Kennedy’s official visit to Paris in 1961, according to the president’s aide Theodore Sorensen. De Gaulle was suspicious of Kennedy’s promise to come to Europe’s defense and vowed to continue France’s project to develop its own nuclear arsenal. But Jackie chatted with him in her excellent “low, slow French” during lunch in the Élysée Palace, and he was charmed. De Gaulle told Kennedy that his wife “knew more French history than most Frenchwomen.” By the end of the visit, de Gaulle had warmed up to both Kennedys, and from then on, he treated the American president better.

When de Gaulle resigned in 1969 after a defeat in a referendum, it was as if he had been abandoned by the love of his life. A year later, when his successor, Georges Pompidou, announced de Gaulle’s death on radio and television, he said, “General de Gaulle is dead. France is a widow.”

Years after de Gaulle’s death, Jean-Luc Hees, the president of Radio France, interviewed Alain Peyrefitte, the de Gaulle confidant and former minister who had written several books on him. After the show, Hees asked Peyrefitte a critical question.

“I asked, ‘Did he have lovers?’” Hees recalled. “He said, ‘De Gaulle? Are you joking?’” Then Peyrefitte relented. “Well, maybe in Warsaw, and maybe in Beirut, before the war, but not after. There were rumors.” Hees asked Peyrefitte if he was serious.

“Not after June 18, 1940,” Peyrefitte replied. “He belonged to history after that. So he couldn’t have any affairs with women, you know.”

But by this time, Peyrefitte had become fully engaged in the topic. Out came another revelation. “Well maybe, there was an exception,” he said. “To celebrate the victory of Bir Hakeim.” Bir Hakeim, in the Libyan desert, was the site of a key battle in 1942 in which the forces of the Free French halted the advance of German and Italian troops. Peyrefitte stressed again that this was only a rumor. But that didn’t stop him from keeping it alive and passing it on.

It is the fate of kings to be loved more in death than in life. And so it was that in January 2006, ten years after François Mitterrand’s death and eleven after the end of his presidency, the French plunged into a warm bath of nostalgia for him. It came with a flood of books, magazine and newspaper supplements, no fewer than six television films and documentaries, and dozens of hours of commentary and speeches about his life. Although a Socialist, Mitterrand was among the most regal of French presidents, reviled by some, tolerated by others, loved by a few. He could be petty, cruel, vindictive, sadistic, secretive, and dishonest. He rarely apologized or admitted he was wrong. But somehow he became the gold standard for French leadership in the modern era. His election in 1981 was a revolution, the end of twenty-three years of conservative governments under de Gaulle and his successors Pompidou and Giscard.

In an era when a presidential term was seven years—not five as it is today—Mitterrand served two full terms, which made him the longest-serving head of state since Napoléon III (1852–1870). An intellectual who championed the causes of the left, Mitterrand ended capital punishment, strengthened regional governments, and promised a new economic model that would protect the ordinary Frenchman. A master of the nuances and rhetorical richness of French, he used lofty language, elegiac tones, and a religious-sounding register to evoke the necessity of socialism. He predicted that France would never be the same after he left office. “I am the last of all the all-powerful presidents,” Mitterrand boasted.

He had no head for economics; he considered money base, and the French liked that, even though his policies—leading to universal retirement at sixty, a reduced workweek, and a bloated civil service—set the country on a downhill economic course that plagues it to this day. He wooed his people by spinning the myth they wouldn’t need to get their hands dirty with work, money, or sacrifice but could still lead comfortable lives.

It was Mitterrand’s personal aura, his mystery, his success in flouting convention that bred admiration, in life and death. “I know only one thing: to live outside the ordinary and to take to its maximum the intensity of living,” he wrote in a letter to a friend in 1942.

He put women under his spell because he genuinely loved them, and they knew it. A magazine called
Influences
devoted an entire issue to him in 1988, in which this was made clear. The actress Marthe Mercadier called him “
un grand amateur de femmes
”—a great connoisseur of women. Yvette Roudy, a former secretary of state for women’s issues, said that “the word seduction…is too limiting” in describing his aura, adding, “He takes time for you.” Catherine Lara, a rock musician, described Mitterrand as a magician. “Everything in him seduces me,” she said. “…Also, I find that he is aging marvelously well, like a good wine, a good Bordeaux.”

My favorite comment came from Françoise V., a prostitute. “When I am with a client and I lack inspiration, I think about the rare men who still make me fantasize, including François Mitterrand,” she said. “I find him marvelously gentle, sensual, and very gracious.” I can’t imagine an American prostitute in the late 1980s having the same on-the-job fantasies about George H. W. Bush.

In the fall of 1994, as his presidency neared an end, a
Paris Match
long-lens photograph offered graphic proof of what had only been whispered: that Mitterrand had fathered an out-of-wedlock daughter with Anne Pingeot, a museum curator and a scholar of nineteenth-century sculpture who had had a relationship with him for more than two decades. When the daughter, Mazarine, was ten years old, Mitterrand legally acknowledged paternity, with the caveat that it be kept secret from the public until his death. In her memoirs, Mazarine wrote that when she was asked at school to identify her father’s profession, she crossed out the line.

Mazarine and her mother lived at government expense in a state-owned apartment near the Eiffel Tower. French taxpayers did not know that their president spent a considerable amount of time with a second family, including occasional weekends at a state-owned château. Mitterrand spent his last Christmas, before his death, with his mistress and daughter, not with his wife and their two sons.

Years later, Lionel Jospin revealed in a memoir a private conversation he had had with Mitterrand after the
Paris Match
photos were published. “He told me, ‘Basically, there are two ways of doing it,’” Jospin wrote. One was to change wives, as Jospin had done, Mitterrand said. Or, he continued, “You can keep at the same time two women whom you have loved, whom you love, whom you respect.” Explaining her father’s choice of a double life, Mazarine said, “My father had an uncompromising concept of fidelity. One never betrays one’s friends; one never betrays an agreed-upon pact. He would always be flabbergasted that people got divorced.”

But for Mitterrand, as for the kings of centuries before, a wife and a favorite did not suffice. There were apparently other arrangements, including a lengthy relationship with the Swedish journalist Christina Forsne. As described in her memoir,
François
, it began as a sexual liaison and then turned into companionship. She was a regular lunch and dinner companion at the Élysée; she accompanied him on trips. Though there were many errors in her book, no one in Mitterrand’s circle challenged the main story line.

Assumptions were made about other relationships, in part because Mitterrand enjoyed the company of beautiful women. During a state visit to South Korea, he chose the actress Sophie Marceau, then in her twenties, to accompany him as the personification of French beauty. After Mitterrand’s death, his widow, Danielle, turned confessional in a television interview. “Yes, I had married a seducer,” she said. “And I had to live with it.” One of the most enduring images of Mitterrand’s funeral is a photo of Anne Pingeot, her eyes closed, the polka-dotted black tulle veil of her hat covering her face, her daughter by her side. There are still lively debates in polite circles about whether it would have been better if the mistress had stayed away. But what upset the French public more than the existence of a second family was the revelation that the French state had financially supported Anne and Mazarine, even giving them full police protection.

I thought of Mitterrand and his women when the story of a
burqa
-wearing French convert to Islam and her allegedly polygamous Algerian-born husband erupted into a political firestorm in 2010. The woman had been fined by the police for wearing the face-covering veil while driving a car, on the grounds that it was dangerous. The husband was accused by the government of having four wives who were claiming single-parent benefits for his twelve children. He was threatened with losing his French citizenship.

But the husband fought back, hired a lawyer, and claimed he had only one wife. The others, he insisted, were lovers. “If you can be stripped of your French nationality for having mistresses, then many French could lose theirs,” he told reporters.

Unlike the immigrant husband, however, Mitterrand was irresistible to the French people. “Half-vampire, half-seducer,” was
Le Monde
’s description of his enigmatic smile. Serge July, a founding editor of
Libération
, once called him “a master goldsmith in human relations.”

Mitterrand wrote about France as if she were a woman whom he knew well, confessing his “passion for her geography, her living body.” Jean Daniel of
Le Nouvel Observateur
said that this intense love of every part of France gave him universal appeal. “I took trips with him, and he knew its remotest nooks,” Daniel recalled. “He knew all the people in town. There was something demagogic about him, a kind of subversive seduction. He’d ask things like, ‘The butcher—has his baby been born yet?’”

The paradox is that Mitterrand also kept his distance, playing hard to get. That ambiguity appealed as well.

As a young politician, Jacques Chirac was rather dashing, a tireless campaigner who loved to throw himself into the crowds. On the road, he’d produce a fistful of cash—to buy a round of beers for the local guys or a bouquet of flowers for a woman he considered pretty. On the street, he’d sometimes sell his autograph to a woman for a kiss. In the early 1990s Brigitte Bardot called him “the only politician who makes me melt.”

Chirac’s amorous escapades were documented in a tell-all book by his former chauffeur, Jean-Claude Laumond, published in 2001. In the 1980s, Laumond wrote, the procession of women into Chirac’s office was so constant that women staffers would joke: “Chirac? Three minutes. Shower included.”

Laumond corrected the record. It took a bit longer, he said. “To an almost sickening degree, Chirac has had party militants, secretaries, all those with whom he spent five busy minutes,” he wrote.

Chirac saw no need to hide his habits, and while he was in office, neither the press nor the public held them against him. In a series of interviews with the journalist Pierre Péan, he confessed that he had loved many women in his lifetime “as discreetly as possible.” To reinforce the point, he repeated the line in his runaway best-selling autobiography in 2009.

For those who wonder how the wives of womanizing politicians tolerate their husbands’ seductive successes, Bernadette Chirac offered some illumination. She alluded to her husband’s extramarital affairs in her book
Conversation
, a question-and-answer dialogue with a journalist, published in 2001. “I have been jealous at times, very!” she said. “How could it be otherwise? This was a very handsome guy, with the gift of words besides…. The girls would line up at the door.”

For the sake of the children and other family reasons, she decided not to dissolve the marriage. “Convention dictated that one put up a facade and hung on,” she said, calling herself “a prisoner of familial traditions.” He was stuck as well. “I warned him many times: ‘The day Napoléon abandoned Joséphine, he lost everything.’”

During his twelve-year presidency, Chirac was never as monarchical, mysterious, or intellectual as Mitterrand. His appeal was as a man of the soil. He liked to pet farm animals. His favorite beverage was a Corona beer; his favorite dishes were peasant fare:
tête de veau
, charcuterie, sausages.

Chirac was the first French leader to acknowledge the guilt of the French state in the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II. He pushed through reforms of the health care and pension systems and abolished compulsory military service. He was a keen art collector, particularly of Asian and African art. He once told an interviewer for a weekly magazine that poetry was “a necessity of daily life.” But his dissolution of Parliament in 1997 led to an unwieldy and unworkable division of power with the Socialist Party known as cohabitation. And even when he had a united government afterward, he failed in fulfilling his promise to invigorate France’s flaccid economy.