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Mitterrand's fight against De Gaulle's investiture as President of the Fifth Republic cost him his parliamentary seat. After winning it back in 1962, he embarked on a long-term strategy of strengthening the non-Communist left and then joining forces with the Communists. To his critics his maneuvering looked like sheer opportunism. To close associates it was a matter of pragmatism motivated by a respect for "republicanism."
Mitterrand's strong race against De Gaulle in the 1965 presidential elections, run with the support of both Socialists and Communists, was the beginning of his rise to power in the left. In 1971 he became head of the Socialist Party, and the following year masterminded the five-year Socialist-Communist Common Program. The reverses he experienced did not deter him, even when he ran for the second time for the presidency in 1974 and lost to Giscard by a mere 424,599 votes. As Mitterrand's closest comrade, the late Georges Dayan, observed, "Mitterrand's great strength is that he knows how to wait."
For Mitterrand the long wait before his ascension to power may have been easier than for politicians with fewer extracurricular interests. "Literature is always for me a privileged paradise," he says. A closet poet, he is lyrical when he speaks of the wonders of nature, and he reads incessantly. "He loves literature," says one of his advisers. "When things are not going badly he will talk about nothing but literature; he only talks politics when he is worried." His favorite writer is Chateaubriand. But he also reveres Balzac, Emile Zola, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Nobel-prizewinning French poet Saint-John Perse. He came to Marx late and has never read him in his entirety. Several years ago, at a summer cultural festival in Avignon, he remarked, "The day when there will be a socialist art, I will no longer be a socialist."
Not content with having produced his eleven books of nonfiction, he still hopes to complete a novel on Lorenzo the Magnificent, which he has been researching for more than a decade. In his book The Straw and the Grain, he wrote, "If I had the time, I would write the history of the rivers I have known." Journalist Paul Guimard calls him "a great writer." Literary Critic Bertrand Poirot-Delpech rates him with Léon Blum and De Gaulle as the most literary of French politicians: "Each phrase of Mitterrand, even spoken, bears the mark of someone who has never ceased to read the great writers, to scribble, to scratch out and, in short, to dream with words."
Though he does not enjoy the Paris cocktail-party circuit, Mitterrand likes to dine with such old Socialist comrades as Claude Estier, Louis Mermaz and Pierre Joxe. Other close friends include a businessman from his native region and the owner of a taxi fleet. He is seen from time to time in Left Bank restaurants with one or another of the attractive young women whose company he enjoys. But he is also a family man who spends most weekends with his wife, visiting friends or staying in his converted sheep barn in southwestern France.