Philip Short, A Taste for Intrigue: The Multiple Lives of François Mitterrand (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014), 640 pp., $40.00.

SOME OF the greatest historical coups de théâtre have been staged by actors playing against type. The most obvious American example would be hard-line anti-Communist Richard Nixon’s dramatic opening to Chairman Mao’s China. No less dramatic—though of considerably less international importance—was the election of François Mitterrand as the first socialist president of the French Fifth Republic nearly a decade later.

In both public and private life, François Mitterrand was a man of quirks and contradictions, sometimes verging on the absurd. He was the second most important French leader of the twentieth century, outpaced only by Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle resurrected France twice, first from the ravages of the Nazi occupation and then from the political paralysis of the Fourth Republic. At the height of his influence he did more than lead France; he embodied it. François Mitterrand’s achievement was different. He successfully led the French Left to power for the first time since de Gaulle’s rule and then proceeded to govern in much the same fashion as Le Grand Charles himself. As an imperial president, Mitterrand reduced the French Communist Party—which he had run in coalition with—to an insignificant force in French politics, and twice governed in conjunction with conservative prime ministers and legislatures in an arrangement the French referred to as a state of political “cohabitation.”

While the comparison would have irked him, Mitterrand played a transitional role in French politics similar to that of Harold Wilson in British politics a generation earlier—a temperamentally moderate, socially middle-class leader of a political faction traditionally dominated by militant trade unionists and radical members of the intelligentsia. Neither man is remembered for towering individual achievements, but both avoided class warfare at home while remaining staunch members of the Western alliance. And neither ultimately drove his country leftward. Harold Wilson, like Tory prime ministers before him, was a steadfast advocate of the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States, even on Vietnam, despite rumbles on the left of his Labour Party.

In the case of Mitterrand, this meant crucial, and rather courageous, support for the deployment of Pershing missiles—the so-called Euromissiles—as a deterrent to Soviet aggression against nonnuclear NATO allies such as West Germany. The occasion was an address to the Bundestag in Bonn in 1983 on the twentieth anniversary of the Franco-German friendship treaty initiated by Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer. The speech Mitterrand was to give had gone through numerous wishy-washy drafts before he sat down at a typewriter and put it into his own words:

A simple idea governs French thinking: war must remain impossible and those who are tempted by it must be deterred. [It is] our conviction that nuclear weapons, as the instrument of deterrence, are, whether one likes it or not, the guarantee of peace from the moment that there is a balance of forces . . . The maintenance of this balance requires that no region of Europe be left defenceless against nuclear weapons directed specifically against it. Anyone who gambles on “decoupling” the European and American continents would, in our view, be calling into question . . . the maintenance of peace. I think—and I say—that this “decoupling” is a danger in itself, . . . a danger which weighs particularly on those European countries which do not possess nuclear arms.

As British author and journalist Philip Short remarks in his exhaustively researched new biography of Mitterrand, certainly the most comprehensive one in the English language, the much-revised speech “turned out to be worth waiting for”:

Decades later, it is difficult to appreciate the impact of those few sentences. Mitterrand’s argument was that the pacifists, by seeking to leave Europe defenceless, were inviting a new war in which non-nuclear powers like West Germany would find themselves in the front line. Later that year he would encapsulate the thought in an aphorism: “Pacifism . . . is in the West, the missiles are in the East.” The speech was a game-changer. . . . Mitterrand’s backing comforted [West Germany’s] Christian Democrats in their support of deployment and helped [Helmut] Kohl to victory in the parliamentary elections which were held two months later. The Americans, after drawing a deep breath, applauded. Henry Kissinger telephoned to say he had found the speech “quite remarkable.” Reagan, declaring that Mitterrand’s remarks were “of inestimable value,” thanked him for “strengthening the Alliance at a time when the European countries have to admit their . . . anxiety before the pressure of public opinion.”

To men like Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan, it all came as a pleasant surprise; the first socialist president of the French Fifth Republic had proved a more stalwart supporter of the Atlantic alliance than some of his conservative predecessors. But, then, for friends and foes alike, François Mitterrand had always been a puzzle. Far from being an authentic man of the people or a politician with a consistent ideological commitment to socialism, he had begun life as a child of a conservative, affluent bourgeois family with deep Catholic and monarchist roots. An early dabbler in far-right politics between the world wars, a fledgling journalist of flexible convictions on the eve of World War II, a minor functionary in the Vichy regime headed by the elderly Marshal Petain after France’s humiliating defeat by Hitler, a late-in-the-day member of the French resistance as the fortunes of war began to shift—the only consistent thing about the young François Mitterrand was his unflagging ambition and his unshakeable belief in a personal destiny.

Though an indifferent student—he was held back a year while working for his baccalaureate—he proved a quick study with a clever, wide-ranging mind and a voracious appetite for history, literature and, in later life, women other than his wife. Although he would denounce the “Republican Monarchy” of Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, no one enjoyed the pomp, power and perquisites of high office more than François Mitterrand. He liked to think of himself as a refined, cultivated man of the world in a field dominated by vulgar mediocrities. To a considerable extent, he was. The personal physician who came to know him well in later life once described Mitterrand as a combination of “Machiavelli, Don Corleone, Casanova and the Little Prince.”

MORE THAN anything else, however, he was a twentieth-century reincarnation of Monsieur Jourdain, the titular Bourgeois Gentilhomme of Molière’s celebrated seventeenth-century comedy, a man intent on assuming the airs and graces of a true grand seigneur. But unlike Monsieur Jourdain, who fails laughably in the attempt, Mitterrand mastered the pose he aspired to. As Short points out:

Not least of the ironies of Mitterrand’s rule was that, having in opposition denounced the institutions of the Fifth Republic as a “permanent coup d’état,” and the manner in which de Gaulle utilised them as an abuse of personal power, he found, once in office himself, that they fitted him like a glove, and in the decade and a half he was President opposed any attempt to change them. They gave him greater powers over his own country than any other Western leader and, like his august predecessor, he used them to the full.

Those of us who accompanied President Reagan on his European trip in June 1982 witnessed this firsthand. The rather musty solemnities of an address to the House of Lords in London, a drowsy visit with Pope John Paul II in the gilded but cramped Vatican and the small-town, Rhenish charm of Bonn all were as nothing compared to the son et lumiére spectacle presided over by Mitterrand at Versailles. Even his presidential news conference, complete with liveried flunkies whose white gloves held the microphones pointed at the press corps, was more evocative of French royalty than French republicanism, and he obviously enjoyed every moment of it.

But there was more than stagecraft to Mitterrand’s mastery of his role. From time to time, he managed to come up with a witty put-down or bon mot that would have passed muster in the court of the Sun King himself. For instance, there is his description of Margaret Thatcher, whom he found impressive as a politician and fascinating as a woman. The Iron Maiden, he said, had “the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.” Or consider his thumbnail portrait of General Henri Giraud, whom he initially supported and then abandoned as an alternative to Charles de Gaulle as French leader-in-exile during the German occupation: “He had a justified reputation as a magnificent warrior . . . but once you took away the heroic images . . . his falsetto voice and tapering moustache, which seemed to be stuck on with glue, gave him the quaint, almost unreal, look of a soldier out of an illustrated magazine from before 1914.”

Nearly half a century later, Mitterrand still had the touch. Witness his deft riposte to the elder President Bush’s rather rambling thoughts on the post–Cold War role of NATO during a meeting at Key Largo in April 1990:

MITTERRAND: I’d like to know what we’re really talking about. If the American leaders would spell out what they mean by “the political role of NATO” everything would be a lot easier . . .

BUSH [struggling]: Well, in a political situation that has changed, NATO’s role will be different. Not just military, but more political . . . NATO will have to change gear . . . to get us through the critical period. We don’t know who the enemy is anymore.

MITTERRAND [silkily]: Yes, it’s a nuisance not having an enemy.

One of Short’s strengths is his ability to draw on only recently accessible official transcripts and accounts like the one above to show us what his subject actually had to say—if not what he was really thinking—as events unfolded around him. Short also managed, just in the nick of time, to secure interviews with a number of aging Mitterrand family members, friends and political sparring partners finally willing to speak candidly about a man some of them respected, some loved, some loathed, and almost all found intimidating—and enigmatic—while he was alive.

Part of the problem may have been deliberate. Mitterrand’s choice of historical role model says a lot about his view of public affairs and human nature: Cardinal Mazarin. Jules Mazarin was a seventeenth-century Italian adventurer who is better known for his political intrigues than for any positive achievements. Unlike Cardinal Richelieu, a statesman of formidable vision whose leadership led to France supplanting Spain as Western Europe’s dominant land power, Mazarin is mainly remembered as a venal opportunist who looted the royal coffers and practiced nepotism on a grand scale. He was probably the lover of the widowed Queen Anne, Louis XIII’s rather dim Spanish Habsburg consort, the mother of Louis XIV and regent during her son’s minority. While Mazarin did manage to keep the monarchy afloat through the civil unrest of Louis XIV’s childhood, he was also one of the main political irritants that exacerbated the civic strife to begin with. Above all, he was a glib survival artist with no moral or ethical core and no larger sense of purpose.

Mitterrand so admired Mazarin that when his own longtime mistress insisted on having a baby before it was too late, he named the resulting daughter Mazarine. As Short remarks, “Much of what the cardinal wrote in his Breviary for Politicians could be taken as a vade mecum for Mitterrand himself,” as the following passage confirms:

Be sparing with your gestures, walk with measured steps and maintain a posture at all times which is full of dignity . . . Each day . . . spend a moment studying how you should react to events which might befall you . . . Know that how you will appear [to others] will be determined by the way you have fashioned your inner self beforehand. Always keep in mind these five precepts: Simulate; dissimulate; trust nobody; speak well of everyone; anticipate before you act . . . There is scant chance that people will put a good complexion on what you say or do. Rather they will twist it and think the worst of you.

However, Short adds, the saying that fit Mitterrand best was one he attributed to another corrupt seventeenth-century French cleric, Cardinal de Retz: “If you set aside ambiguity, it is always to your own detriment.” In his later years, Short says, Mitterrand’s “secretiveness and mistrust grew more pronounced,” but

his ambiguities had begun much earlier. In the 1940s Mitterrand was at Vichy and in the Resistance; in the 1950s he was elected to parliament by voters from both Left and Right. His personal friends ranged from communists to those who, before the war, had supported fascist groups. Even at his most doctrinaire, as head of the Socialist Party, he rejected ideological constraints. He believed in social justice, he said, which meant that he was on the Left. But he would not allow any else’s “-ism” to dictate to him what he should think.

IF MITTERRAND had a blind spot, a policy area where his own ignorance left him prey to the “-isms” of others, it was economics. He was a true economic illiterate. Between family allowances and the perks available to a member of the French governing elite, he never needed to think much about money and therefore acquiesced to a pie-in-the-sky series of socialist entitlements in the early days of his presidency: workers got a fifth week of paid vacation; the retirement age was lowered from sixty-five to sixty; the workweek was reduced from forty to thirty-nine hours with no pay cut; the minimum wage and welfare entitlements were substantially increased; and “hundreds of thousands of civil servants were recruited.” Banks, insurance companies and key industrial corporations were also nationalized, and 130,000 illegal immigrants were granted residency permits.

Intoxicated by the mood of the moment, Mitterrand himself would crow, “We’ve started the true rupture with capitalism. Class struggle is not dead. It is going to have a second youth!” But youth is fleeting. When Mitterrand came to power in May 1981, “the whole of the Western world was already in recession,” stricken with massive unemployment and runaway inflation. As Short points out, “Pursuing expansion at a time when the rest of the industrialized world was committed to deflation, as Mitterrand did in 1981 and the first half of 1982, was economic madness.”

“Reagan was no economist either,” he concludes, “but at least he had the good sense to do what his advisers told him. Mitterrand did not.” Actually, Reagan had majored in economics at Eureka College—for whatever that was worth—but the larger point is that perhaps the biggest blunder of Mitterrand’s presidency was the result of one of the few times he allowed socialist dogma to blind himself to economic reality. Today, the stagnant, stratified state of the French economy is still the largest, most lingering debit on the balance sheet of François Mitterrand’s fourteen-year presidency.

Why did he think and act the way he did? That unreconstructed eighteenth-century Tory, Samuel Johnson, presciently defined the Mitterrandian mind-set when he told Boswell that “your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear leveling up to themselves. They would all have some people under them.” Convinced of his own superiority, Mitterrand never had much respect for the mass of “oppressed” mankind. He did, however, nurture a deep resentment against those occupying social, economic or political positions above him. There are two striking examples from his early life. His family’s wealth was based on a vinegar distillery in the heart of cognac country, which was a little like brewing beer in champagne territory: respectable but not quite up to snuff socially. The Mitterrands were also Catholic in an area where most of the traditional commercial elite had Protestant Huguenot roots. So, while the young François was relatively affluent—dressing, dancing, and playing golf and tennis like the local grandees—socially he was on the outside looking in. Given his personal sense of real or imagined superiority, this had to rankle.

MITTERRAND ALSO professed a distaste for the officer class, claiming—after the fact—that on the eve of World War II, he had deliberately chosen to do his national service as an enlisted man rather than mingle with the official elite. Actually, he had done his best—insufficient, as it turned out—to join the officer corps, entering a preparatory course for officer cadets at the military college of Samur, originally set up to train cavalry officers after the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War. Short informs us that Mitterrand “failed ignominiously . . . because he botched a question about military theory.” As a result, Short adds, “His vanity was wounded. Just as he always passed over in silence the year he had had to repeat at the college in Angoulême, so now he put it about that he had decided not to seek a commission, preferring to serve in the ranks.”

After being drafted, he rose to the grade of sergeant. He was wounded in action, decorated for bravery and escaped from a German prison camp. His experience as a noncommissioned officer and POW resulted in two of his few lifelong friendships based on a footing of equality. Both were with exceptionally able, “street smart” members of the working class. Two of Mitterrand’s finer qualities—his ability to step back and observe even life-or-death situations with calm objectivity, and a poetic strain in his nature that enabled him to view even trench warfare with a poetic eye—are on display in his account of the day he was wounded by German artillery fire near Verdun:

I was sleeping in a shell-hole . . . Suddenly at 5 a.m., machine-guns and artillery opened fire with a long barrage aimed in our direction . . . The Germans marched towards us, singing . . . Our commander [Edouard Morot-Sir, a philosophy professor in civilian life] ordered us to move towards Dead Man’s Hill. The weather was wonderful, and as though in tribute to the splendor of that month of June . . . the assault troops paused for a moment. Morot-Sir and I had only to stretch out our hands to pick the wild strawberries that carpeted the hillside. Then a shell exploded above our heads . . . I was knocked out by the explosion.

Mitterrand was even able to strike a gallows-humor note when describing how, while he was being wheeled along in a stretcher as part of a retreating crowd of troops and refugees, Italian aircraft appeared and machine-gunned the column. Everyone ran for cover, including the orderly in charge of Mitterrand’s stretcher,

who left me with the comforting words, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back!” I remained there, immobile, looking up at the sky, watching the planes punching holes in the road with a rosary of bullets. The alert over, we resumed our wandering. Everywhere we went, there were wounded . . . At Esnes-en-Argonne, surgeons were operating in a cave, amputating arms and legs. I wasn’t keen [on that], so we pressed on.

It was his experience as a soldier and then as a POW that provided Mitterrand with a base on which to build a political career. As a Vichy functionary dealing with the repatriation of French POWs, he was able to use his arguably collaborationist position to become a covert member of the Resistance with a potential constituency of thousands of combat veterans behind him. It paid off, and continued to do so under the fragmented Fourth Republic, a demoralized, ramshackle parliamentary system with short-lived governments presiding over a destitute country recovering from an alien occupation and simultaneously losing most of its overseas colonies. There were ups and downs, but Mitterrand, by carefully hedging his bets and cultivating the right leaders, benefited from what might be called political “bracket creep,” occupying numerous cabinet posts in transient governments while biding his time.

Gradually, however, his star began to wane. From being one of the bright, promising young men to emerge from the Resistance, he morphed into a middle-aged professional politician in a rut. By 1959, with Charles de Gaulle freshly installed as an empowered president under a new constitution, the game of political musical chairs was over, especially for a man increasingly identifying himself with the Left. This led to what can only be described as a grotesque episode. Mitterrand became involved in a complex scandal that has never been fully explained: the “Observatory Affair,” so called because the staged shooting occurred beside the seventeenth-century observatory erected by Louis XIV near the Luxembourg Gardens. This much, however, is clear: Mitterrand was party to a faked, prearranged assassination attempt designed to boost his popularity. It backfired because some of the dubious characters who set it up had their own agenda—including showing up François Mitterrand.

For most politicians, that would have been the end. Not for Mitterrand. Slowly but surely he started anew, climbing the greasy pole to leadership of what remained of the French Left. Reorganizing and energizing it, he led it in several losing elections—but with gradually improving showings—until he finally came to power as the first socialist president of the Fifth Republic.

AT THIS point le bourgeois gentilhomme finally came into his own, playing a twentieth-century role in French politics that might be compared to that of Louis Philippe in the nineteenth century. Louis Philippe was an intelligent but not particularly charismatic member of a junior branch of the French royal family. When the last legitimist Bourbon king, Charles X, was sent packing by the Parisian mob in 1830, he became the “Citizen King,” surviving for eighteen years by juggling ministries, manipulating public opinion and playing the role of a superior but benevolent “first citizen.” The revolutionary fervor that swept Europe in 1848 brought an end to his experiment in bourgeois monarchy, but it had been a good show while it lasted. Like Mitterrand’s fourteen years in office, however, Louis Philippe’s reign had been more of an exercise in personal political survival than a serious attempt at productive, principled governance.

What Mitterrand rather ungraciously said of Charles de Gaulle’s immediate successor, Georges Pompidou, could just as easily have been applied to Louis Philippe or Mitterrand himself: “What will he have left as a memory of his time? Nothing or so little.”

And yet there is something so quintessentially bourgeois French about François Mitterrand that one hopes he will be remembered, if not as a great statesman, then at least as the embodiment of a venerable French tradition. He was a leader both devious and dignified who—having retired from public office to die quietly and with courage from terminal cancer—would be attended at his graveside by both his wife and legitimate sons and his mistress and illegitimate daughter; a man who was flagrantly unfaithful to his lifelong spouse but, for many years, tolerated her own affair with a live-in lover considerably her junior who often made a third party at their breakfast table.

If it hadn’t all happened in real life it would have made for an excellent, if not entirely plausible, Feydeau farce. But it did happen, and the twisted, tragicomic tale of a man who represented many of the contradictions—and some of the ideals—of the problematic nation he led has now been chronicled with insight and exactitude by Short.

Aram Bakshian Jr. is a contributing editor to The National Interest and served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan.