His own words are the best guide to an elusive man
Do not imagine that my life is filled with politics. It is not the first in my order of priorities. Politics is the servant of science and the humble interpreter of philosophy. It does not have the creative virtue of art. Estranged from the knowledge of nature and the workaday life of man, politics is like a cut flower, quickly withered. I have worked, dreamed, loafed, learned to love things and beings. Nothing speaks to me better of spirit and matter than the light of summer at 6 o 'clock in the evening as seen through a stand of oaks.
He has been called mysterious, elusive and unknowable—as convoluted as the great Charente River, which flows through his native town. He has been compared with exceptionally diverse figures: Niccolo Machiavelli, whose name is synonymous with conniving politics; Lorenzo the Magnificent, Renaissance Florence's benevolent, art-loving ruler; Chateaubriand, 19th century France's aristocratic writer-statesman; Alexander Kerensky, who first led Russia to a democratic revolution that quickly succumbed to the Communists. In the bestiary of epithets used to characterize French politicians, he has emerged as the "chameleon." His recondite politics is inevitably labeled Florentine in the press. His most recent biographer, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, described him as "ambivalent." Wrote Giesbert: "He is misanthropic and sociable, naive and calculating, sincere and deceitful." In fact, François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand is as much an enigma to the French, who elected him President of the Republic, as he is to the rest of the world.
The mystery of this fiercely private and almost neurotically shy man has endured in spite of his exposure to 37 years of public life. It has been reinforced by his bizarre shifts from right to left and, especially, his zigzag relationship with the Communist Party. Most of all, the mystery has been fostered by the distance Mitterrand has placed between himself and all but his family and a few intimate friends. In the end the best analyst of the character—and the methods—of Mitterrand may be Mitterrand himself. His observations, perceptive, witty and often elegant, run through his eleven books.
In his autobiography, My Own Truth, published in 1969, Mitterrand describes the improbable background that produced France's pre-eminent leftist. He was born in 1916 in Jarnac, a small southwestern town in the Cognac region. His upbringing was seemingly strictly conventional—piously Roman Catholic and petit bourgeois. His father Joseph was a railway stationmaster who inherited a prosperous vinegar business. Mitterrand explains, "To be a Catholic in a small town in the provinces automatically classified you as politically on the right." Yet, strangely, Mitterrand père thought differently and had his problems. Writes Mitterrand: "When a man went to Mass but refused to associate himself with the arrogance and the injustices of the right, he was nowhere. Such was my father's case."