Wounded memory buys wounded son's cigarettes

Jean-Christophe Mitterrand is a wounded man. Wounded by "the crushing weight" of his late father Francois, by his childhood in boarding schools, his absent parents. Now, at the age of 54, he is wounded by the French magistrate who put him under investigation for arms trafficking, influence peddling and embezzlement in the "Angolagate" scandal - charges Mitterrand denies.

His publisher has invited a few journalists for a luncheon book launch, but the chain-smoking, overweight Mitterrand is tired and depressed, personal flotsam in the wake of his powerful father.

His bank accounts are frozen, and he lives with his mother Danielle in the family apartment. The advance on his book, Wounded Memory, pays cigarette money.

Gossip kills, Jean-Christophe writes in the foreword, which he started during three weeks in prison last winter. "What remains of slander?" he continues. "Slander itself. An indelible stain, which neither the love of those close to me, nor friendship, nor Prozac ... can ever erase. Slander is a wound that you lick like a hurt animal."

He does not live among "the Mitterrand tribe", Jean-Christophe says, although his mother and brother defended him during his incarceration. His half sister Mazarine Pingeot is a real Mitterrand, the adored, secret daughter; literary, with a degree from "Normale sup". "We all knew that Mazarine existed, but no one ever spoke about it," he writes.

There was so little communication in the Mitterrand family that Danielle left notes to catch her husband's attention. In 1993, when Mazarine was 17, Jean-Christophe confronted his father, who arranged a restaurant dinner for his estranged offspring. She met the rest of the family at Mitterrand's funeral.

Over duck salad and a bottle of Bordeaux, Mitterrand recalls his ten years at the ╔lysΘe Palace as an archivist, then in charge of African affairs. He clashed with another advisor, the "viperous" Francois de Grossouvre, who shot himself in his ╔lysΘe office. "To this day, anything that goes wrong in Africa, they say it's my fault. I hope they're not going to blame me for the World Trade Centre!" Two days after the catastrophe in New York, Mitterrand's self-pity is grotesquely misplaced. An awkward silence falls over the table.

"What weighs on me the most is that I've been locked inside France," Mitterrand says. "They took my passport away from me nine months ago - it was my tool for working. I have to report to the gendarmes every week to prove I haven't fled." After his father's death, Jean-Christophe moved to Mauritania, where he set up a fishery. "We're trying to process the raw material on the spot, instead of exporting it, to break out of the colonial cycle," he says with a glimmer of enthusiasm.

And what about the accusations of arms trafficking? Mitterrand plunges into the intricacies of Angolan politics. We repeat the question. "Angola had cash," Mitterrand explains. "And I hear people say, 'Angola bought weapons with your taxes.' And they claim I'm responsible!"

Pierre Falcone, the businessman at the centre of the scandal, in prison for the past ten months, paid Jean-Christophe $1.8 million through a Swiss bank account, but Mitterrand insists his role was solely political and economic.

"Falcone was neither buyer nor seller, but an agent authorised to use Angolan accounts to finance purchases for Angola," he says.

"He didn't buy weapons. Angola bought weapons." A big French corporation fired Mitterrand on the day of his father's funeral. Another defeat, another wound. Jean-Christophe then collected hundreds of thousands of francs in unemployment benefits. "I really was unemployed," he tells me. The salary he received at the same time was paid after he'd finished a consultancy contract. "The benefits were owed to me; I had contributed," he insists.

Jean-Christophe dedicated his book to his own son Adrien (18).

"I've been very careful that my absence not be felt as I felt my father's absence," he says. "Not a day passes without me speaking to him on the telephone." When he was growing up, his parents never hugged him. "Our relationship is much more physical - even if it is by telephone." The Canard enchΓinΘ nicknamed Jean-Christophe "Papa-m'a-dit" (Daddy told me). As his book makes clear, Mitterrand pΦre didn't tell his son much. "Perhaps I had waited my whole life for the few words that my father said to me before he died," Mitterrand writes in his epilogue.

On his deathbed, the former president opened his eyelids without looking at his son. "Forgive me, I did you a lot of harm ..." were his last words to Jean-Christophe.