It may be true of Francois Mitterrand that he embodied the Fifth Republic in France better than anyone, even Charles de Gaulle in the early years, almost alone, he spearheaded the opposition when most of the left wing politicians of the failed Fourth Republic had been discredited. It was said that de Gaulle only decided to stand for a second term as president in 1965 because Mitterrand had declared his own intention and the General could not let the challenge go by default.
Whether that was the case or not, there were few people whom de Gaulle disliked more, and it is the supreme irony of recent French politics that Mitterrand moved on to become president for longer than any of his predecessors and to prove that the stuffy Gaullist republic was capable of alternance (a change of regime) without collapsing.
With him, yesterday, died one of the great political craftsmen of the past half century. He survived some dubious connections during the Vichy period, was a minister in the Fourth Republic, and during the 1960s, with consummate patience and skill, he pieced together the disheartened fragments of the non Communist left with a double purpose to outflank the Communists and become the dominant force on the left, and to defeat the right wing parties, who seemed unassailable under the power structures set up by de Gaulle. He succeeded brilliantly in both, and his victory in the presidential election in 1981 was a tribute to his catlike cunning.
In power, Mitterrand relished the extent to which he was able to control the political process, and there is no doubt that, during the first experience of cohabitation with a right wing government (under Jacques Chirac), he consistently outmanoeuvred his prime minister. But the results of his two terms as president were mixed. Pierre Mauroy's Socialist government, formed in 1981 with an ambitious programme of social and economic reform, was soon overwhelmed by recession, and the austerity policies it introduced led just over two years later to a series of electoral defeats, paving the way for loss of control in the National Assembly in March 1986. Before that there had been a humiliating climb down from a plan to secularise the schools.
As a Socialist, Mitterrand was a very good pragmatist, and some leading social democrats, like Willy Brandt, distrusted his judgment. He quarrelled, too, with some major figures in French socialism, such as Michel Rocard, which did nothing to keep the party together as it began to disintegrate under the combined effects of unpopularity at the polls and corruption scandals. His second term was overshadowed by growing economic strains and unemployment, with the concomitants of racism and urban deprivation, which finally drove the Socialists out of office.
If the roses of 1981 quickly faded on the domestic scene, it was different in foreign policy. Mitterrand was dedicated to the Maastricht objectives, all the more so as he saw them as a counter balance to Germany's greater power after unification, and he also played a leading role in reshaping the Western alliance in the post communist era. His strong advocacy of the Paris Bonn axis with Helmut Kohl, following a political line begun by de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer and continued by Valery Giscard d'Estaing and Helmut Schmidt, gave continuity and stability at a time of great stress inside and outside the Community.
It is too early to say that his Gaullist scope in these matters has been dissipated by his successor. But that may well be so.