This week, France is celebrating the 30th anniversary of François Mitterrand’s election as President of the Republic, and as always in our country with a short memory, we weave flowery praises (of roses?) in his memory while remaining silent on the disastrous record of the character.
What should we remember about the late Mitterrand?
The list is long, and we must recall:
– His work within the Legion of Combatants and Volunteers of the National Revolution in 1942, under the Vichy regime,
– The awarding of the Francisque by Marshal Pétain in 1943,
– His unwavering friendship with René Bousquet, former Secretary General of the Vichy police,
– The fake attack at the Observatoire in 1959, organized to revive his popularity,
– The covert financing of the Socialist Party (the URBA affair),
– The case of the Vincennes Three in 1982,
– The thousands of wiretaps set up to spy on French personalities,
– The numerous suspicious deaths and suicides of his “friends” (notably Pierre Bérégovoy),
– The explosion of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior ship,
– The contaminated blood scandal,
– The Société Générale affair,
– His at least controversial friendships: Roger-Patrice Pelat, the stalag comrade turned billionaire; Bernard Tapie, the company buyer-liquidator, propelled to minister and defended tooth and nail up to the prison threshold; Roland Dumas, surrounded by scandals and whom Mitterrand, in extremis, appointed president of the Constitutional Council, that is, the chief judge of the State,
– His lie about his illness (the presidential cancer discovered in 1981 but only acknowledged in 1992, after those who denounced the lie were treated as liars!),
– His very extensive use of the Republic’s facilities (secret funds, helicopters),
– His relentless attack on journalist Jean-Edern Hallier, guilty of proclaiming as early as the early eighties the existence of a presidential family maintained and protected at the state’s expense,
– His instrumentalization of the National Front, which he helped grow and develop to weaken the republican right,
– The appointment of his son Jean-Christophe to the position of advisor for African Affairs in the presidential cabinet, where he quickly earned the nickname “Papamadi”,
– His vision of the future strongly influenced by consultations with astrologer Elisabeth Tessier,
– His refusal to support Boris Yeltsin after he prevented the Moscow Coup orchestrated by the hard-line members of the Soviet Communist Party,
– The rise of unemployment and insecurity throughout the 1980s…
This is indeed the real record of Mitterrandism.
The French thought they had elected a President who would “change life”, but the reality was that he set the country on the path of deficits, debt, and the intensification of political mores corruption.
-Liberté Chérie is an independent non-profit association under the 1901 law, which defends liberal philosophy throughout French territory.
