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When the eight Mitterrand children sat down to dinner, their father forbade traditional bourgeois table talk, "speaking ill of others" and "talking money." Says Mitterrand: "My father knew he was living at the end of an era, and he was irritated at the outdated rites that accompanied its demise. He looked to the future as one watches a child grow up. But since he found peace in the beauty of a sky or the affection of a dog, it didn't matter."
Mitterrand grew up alienated like his father from many of the classic middle-class values. His mother Yvonne's influence was equally compelling. A voracious reader, she instilled in her son a lifelong passion for books. Her favorite works are instructive: Honoré de Balzac's great panoramic novels of French society, Alphonse de Lamartine's romantic poetry and, above all, Maurice Barrès' intensely patriotic fiction. Says Mitterrand: "I lived my childhood in another century and it cost me some effort to jump into our own."
When the young François arrived in Paris to complete his higher education in 1934, he was by no means leaning left. At the Catholic school where he had completed his secondary education, he had heard no mention of Marx. Latin prosody was more in Mitterrand's line. "Vergil was my happiness," he recalls.
Studying law and political science at the Sorbonne, he made friends who were right-wing or faintly bohemian. "They were more madly in love with music and literature than with politics. Thanks to them I got to know [the composers] Erik Satie, Arthur Honegger and Igor Stravinsky, before I became acquainted with [the politicians] Gaston Doumergue and Edouard Daladier."
Socialism then held no attraction for him. "At the university I was intimidated by my socialist comrades. To tell the truth, I was embarrassed to hear the Marxist left speaking a French that was translated from the German. The isms burned my ears. One can only guess what I endure these days."
Still, the seemingly impassive 20-year-old university student was capable of being stirred by the election of a leftist coalition government under Léon Blum in 1936. "A great wind of joy among the people" had blown in with the victory of the Popular Front. "I remember election night in the streets of Paris. The rejoicing brought back to me the races I used to run until there was no breath left in me; I discovered that there were still causes worth living and dying for. I loved the fact that I had turned 20 just as the world was being rescued, though I knew nothing of its suffering. I did not make a political choice. I could not distinguish between the forces that were at work. I did not have the key. But without understanding the reasons, I believed I could see on which side lay right and justice."
This stage of Mitterrand's political evolution concluded with his detachment from the world view of his family, his parochial corner of France and the dogmas of the Catholic Church. "Since the church was not on the side of suffering or of hope, I told myself I had to go on without it. Thus did I leave the path of my father so that I might better find him again."