Francois Mitterrand
How is it possible for the great French nation, arguably the most intelligent
people in Europe, to have a man like Francois Mitterrand as their President
for fourteen years? One reason is that French journalists, unlike their
counterparts across the Channel, have always been afraid to expose, in
their newspapers and on their televison screens, the crimes of the men
in power. Their misdemeanours, felonies and greed go unreported because
of a law against intrusion into private lives. They cannot be brought
to justice while still in power, and when they are, the big cover-up begins.
Mitterrand, who was secretive, dangerous and ruthless while in power, was a master
of the cover-up. He was a member of the Vichy Government during the war, a collaborator
with the Nazis, and after the war managed to keep his old collabo. friends out
of jail for over fifty years. I began to take an interest in Mitterrand while
investigating war crimes in a village in South West France where the family of
a local Resistance leader, denounced by neighbours and murdered in Buchenwald
concentration camp, told me that the head of the Gestapo who had arrested him
had returned to the village after the war and spent his holidays there. In my
novel The Gold Bidet (Amherst Publishing, 2006), I describe what happens when
the French Milice and German soldiers pillage the home of the Resistance leader,
which they were allowed to do by the Vichy Government and the occupiers.
Mitterrand covered up for Rene Bousquet, Vichy police chief in Paris, who was
responsible for the rafle (round up) by the French police, of 4,051 Jewish children
who were sent by train from Drancy to Auschwitz in 1941.
Mitterrand knew about the treatment of psychiatric patients in French hospitals
during the war, as the Vichy Government ordered the increase of rations to civil
hospitals and the reduction to starvation level of food for mental patients.
Vichy could not go along with the murder of mental patients as the Germans had
done with their euthanasia programme for fear of an outcry by the Roman Catholic
church, so they solved the problem by starvation. French author Max Lafont wrote
that this crime against humanity had been "long hidden from historians" and "Between
1940 and 1944 "Daily life was horrific: patients fought with each other
for larger portions, the strong stole rations from the weak, starving inmates
picked through garbage and ate the bark of trees and their own excrement." During
this period of forced starvation between 40,000 and 50,000 French patients died.
The French have a strong body of militant nationalists, from Mitterand in his
youth to Jean Marie le Pen today, yet one third of the French population have
grandparents who were not French. If the nationalists got power and had a cull,
with their slogan "France for the French" about 20 million citizens
would have to leave. Oppressed people counted on France to protect them if they
sought asylum from persecution there, but the French police who rounded up the
Jewish children had already sent their parents to Auschwitz, all of them having
fled to France to escape the Nazis.
* After reading law in Paris Mitterrand , aged 20, joined the extreme right wing
group Les Camelots du Roi who almost killed Leon Blum, the Jewish Prime Minister
of France, beating him on the head with an iron bar because he sided with the
Spanish Republicans who fought Franco (Franco seized power from a legally elected
Spanish Government who were smeared as "red" but which had only two
communists members, the Ministers for Education and for Agriculture)
* He attended racist demos against immigrants, wrote articles on France for the
French, and was a close friend of a dozen Cagoulards (hooded men) who murdered
their political opponents. One Cagoulard, Jean Bouvyer, was in the Commissariat-General
aux Questions Juives in Paris and others were in Marechal Petain's collaborationist
government in Vichy, where Mitterrand supported the appointment of Pierre Laval
as Prime Minister (he was executed by firing squad after the Liberation)
* Mitterrand's friend Jean-Paul Martin was a police official working for Rene
Bousquet who rounded up the children (the Germans had not requested this) and
put them in the Paris cycle stadium en route to Drancy and death. Some chiildren,
aged 2 and 3, not even old enough to be toilet trained, in rags, filthy and covered
in sores, could not get down stairs to the lavatories and they cried all night
for the mothers they would never see again.
* It was Mitterrand who suggested forming the Milice, armed fanatics who tortured
and gouged the eyes out of Resistance men and women they caught. And in 1943
he blithely praised Nazi architecture in a Petainist review, saying it had "a
harmony of form that led to a harmony of the soul."
* After the war Mitterrand gave evidence on five occasions in favour of Vichy
collaborators, including Martin and Bouvyer. In 1949, after much delay, Bousquet
came to trial and on the second day, the Minister for the Cabinet, Francois Mitterrand,
announced plans for an amnesty for all collaborators.
* As Minister of Justice (!) in 1955/56, when torture of Algerian prisoners was
authorised, he voted for the death penalty on Algerian guerrillas against a Presidential
pardon.
* In 1983 Mitterand opposed the abduction of Klaus Barbie (The "Butcher
of Lyon") from Bolivia to stand trial in France. Barbie had dragged Jean
Moulin, the Beziers Resistance leader, handcuffed, down a marble staircase in
Gestapo HQ in Lyon, and he died of brain damage on the train to Germany.
* He opposed the trial for crimes against humanity of Paul Touvier, the Milice
chief, who had seven Jews shot against a wall in Lyon. Touvier was hidden for
over forty years in Catholic churches and monasteries in France to avoid trial.
The story is told in a film The Statement (Touvier is called Brossard in the
film) portrayed by actor Michael Caine.
* When the Germans were defeated at Stalingrad and the Americans had landed in
North Africa, the chameleon Mitterrand jumped horses in mid-stream and called
himself a resistant. There was Rene Bousquet claiming to have been in the Maquis
at his first "whitewash" trial, helped by Mitterrand until the date
of a new trial approached and he was assassinated on 8 July 1993. The month before,
on May Day, Pierre Beregovoy, Mitterand's Prime Minister committed suicide.
The bizarre life of Francois Mitterand ended in 1996 when he was 79 years old.
Alive today are his widow, Danielle, 80, and a daughter Mazarine, 29, to Ann
Pingeot, with whom he had a permanent extra marital affair. To her, and others,
he answered to the nickname Tonton, the French for Uncle.
Footnote: Mitterrand had flown to Algiers to meet General de Gaulle,
and stayed with him, forever attentive. On one occasion de Gaulle stood
on a wall to make a speech, felt hands clasping his ankles, holding
him steady.
He looked down and said: "Oh, no. Not you again, Mitterrand!"
But de Gaulle knew Mitterrand's past and about his ruthlessness (Mitterrand gave
the order to sink the Greenpeace ship, a criminal act: later there was the mysterious
deaths of three people, the young daughter whose parents had been spying on the
ship in New Zealand and who had told her classmates about it, who were later
found dead in a villa in the South of France. The inquest was told that the girl
had shot her parents and then turned the rifle, a .22, on herself, failed to
kill herself with the first shot, and fired again. So she had shot herself twice!
Verdict: The girl committed suicide after murdering her parents.)
General de Gaulle was ashamed of people like Mitterrand, the Vichy
Government and the collaborators who had
dishonoured France, but he thought it better to keep it all hidden. When I was
on the Daily Express, George Millar
returned to work for them briefly. Like most young people he had chosen journalism
seeking adventure. When he
died I added some lines to his obituary in The Times. He had been the Express
correspondent in Paris when war broke out and returned to join his Scottish regiment.
Wounded in the western desert, a German doctor cured his crushed leg, and later
took him into the HQ tent and introduced him to Erwin Rommel, saying: "I
just wanted you to see, General, the kind of men we are fighting." "Golden
Millar", as Lord Beaverbrook called
him, was the German ideal with his burnished hair and Viking looks. Later he
escaped capture and returned to England and parachuted back into France to join
the Maquis. With the money he made out of his books he took his wife and yacht
to Paris, moored on the Seine and was approached by men in a Citroen who took
him to the Elysee Palace, where de Gaulle pinned a medal on him, kissed him on
both cheeks and said: "I do not want you to write about this, Monsieur Millar,
or talk about it. We have heard enough from the people who now claim they were
in the Resistance!"