Since the days of the Dreyfus case, one of the perennial features of French government has been l'affaire—that unique combination of intrigue, scandal and politics that seems to come along at times of great political unrest and to suggest the existence of deep, deadly and corrupt forces at work in the body politic. Last week, faithful to this national tradition, President Charles de Gaulle's fledgling Fifth Republic uneasily probed its third*and most fascinating political scandal—I'affaire Mitterrand.
It broke at a moment when France's rightists bitterly challenged De Gaulle's offer to negotiate a cease-fire with the Algerian rebels, and when one member of the French Assembly dramatically announced that assassins had crossed the Pyrenees, eager to put a few holes in Frenchmen who were considered soft on Algeria. So many French politicians had received assassination threats that there was joking about a "Condemned-to-Death Club." One of its charter members would undoubtedly be left-wing Senator François Mitterrand, 43, a fervid anti-Gaullist and outspoken proponent of a negotiated peace in Algeria.
In the Geraniums. Shortly before 1 a.m. on Oct. 16, Mitterrand left the Brasserie Lipp, favorite haunt of Parisian journalists and politicians, and headed in his blue Peugeot 403 for his apartment on the fashionable Rue Guynemer.
Mitterrand had gone only a few blocks when he noticed that he was being followed by another car. As he later told the story, Onetime Resistance Leader Mitterrand did not panic; instead, he pulled his car to a stop, piled out. leaped over an iron fence into the adjacent Luxembourg Gardens and took cover in a bed of geraniums. Seconds later a burst of submachine-gun fire riddled his empty Peugeot.
Next morning every front page in Paris headlined Mitterrand's escape, and most praised his coolness. A longtime ally of ex-Premier Mendès-France and ten times a Cabinet minister under the Fourth Republic, brilliant Franç Mitterrand was regarded by many of his colleagues as overambitious and opportunistic, but few doubted his basic honesty. Yet why attack Mitterrand? As a member of the ineffectual left-wing opposition, he had had no voice in shaping De Gaulle's Algerian policy. The attacks suggested that France's frustrated rightists were capable of anything. The government offered ois bodyguards to all prominent citizens who wanted them, including the bitterly anti-Gaullist Pierre Mendès-France.
Confession. In this jittery atmosphere, the ultra-right-wing weekly Rivarol appeared with a mocking, triumphant story. A onetime Deputy of the crackpot Poujadist right wing, one Robert Pesquet, 42, charged that he had faked the attempt on Mitterrand's life, and he had done it in connivance with Mitterrand himself. Leftist Mitterrand, said Pesquet, had conceived the scheme as a means of provoking a police crackdown on the rightists, had worked out the details in a series of three rendezvous with Pesquet. The only hitch, according to Pesquet, had come after Mitterrand had jumped the fence into the gardens; Pesquet and his driver had been obliged to hold their fire until a cruising taxicab and a pair of lovers got out of the way. The delay, Pesquet recalled, had prompted Mitterrand to call out impatiently from his geranium bed: "All right, get going!"