FRANCE’S POLITICAL world united yesterday in tribute to Danielle Mitterrand – Resistance member, rights campaigner and wife of former president François Mitterrand – after she died in Paris aged 87.
The former first lady, whose husband died in 1996, had been taken to hospital complaining of fatigue and breathing difficulties at the weekend. Mitterrand was highly respected for having broken the mould of French presidents’ spouses. Determined not to allow her husband’s political career dominate her own life, she became a tireless campaigner for the rights of Kurds, Tibetans and other minority groups. She was considered more left wing than her husband, and raised eyebrows for her embrace of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and her open criticism of her husband’s right-wing prime minister, Jacques Chirac.
Mitterrand was born Danielle Gouze on October 29th, 1924, in the eastern French town of Verdun, and was politically active from an early age, joining the French Resistance at 17. Her father was a school headmaster and committed socialist who was sacked by the Vichy government during the second World War for not giving the Nazi occupiers the names of Jewish pupils and teachers at his school.
It was in the Resistance that Danielle met her future husband, who was then head of a cell in Burgundy and operating under the code-name Captain Morland.
The couple married in October 1944 and Mitterrand went on to launch his political career in the Socialist party. He became president in 1981, was re-elected in 1988 and remains the only left-wing head of state in this history of the current French republic.
When Mitterrand died in 1996, Danielle caused a stir by appearing at his funeral alongside his mistress Anne Pingeot, with whom he had a daughter, Mazarine.
Danielle Mitterrand’s death brought warm tributes from across the political spectrum. “Neither setbacks nor victory caused her to deviate from the road she had laid for herself: giving voice to those that no one wanted to hear,” President Nicolas Sarkozy said.
François Hollande, who hopes next year to become the first socialist since Mitterrand to take the Élysée Palace, saluted the former first lady as a “grande dame” who was “among the first to join the resistance against Nazi-occupied France, and who poured her energy into the cause of freedom”. Her nephew Frédéric Mitterrand – the current culture minister – highlighted the “important role she played in the life of our republic, showing how the president’s spouse can retain her liberty of thought and expression”.
