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François Mitterrand Biography

François Mitterrand

(Jarnac, Charente, 1916-Paris, 1996) French socialist politician, president of the French republic between 1981 and 1995.Born into a middle-class Catholic family, he graduated in Law and Political Science in Paris.During World War II (1939-45) he was mobilized and taken prisoner by the Germans (1940); then he escaped and joined the collaborationist Vichy regime; from 1942 he was active in the Resistance, but without adhering directly to Charles De Gaulle.After his resignation, Mitterrand entered politics, being elected deputy by Nièvre in 1946, under a centrist label (only gradually would he evolve to the left).

François Mitterrand

Between 1947 and 1957 he held multiple positions in the changing ministerial combinations of the Fourth Republic: secretary of state for ex-combatants, secretary of State of Information, Undersecretary of the Presidency, Minister of Colonies, Minister of State, Minister delegated to the Council of Europe, Minister of the Interior and Minister of Justice; his record of that period includes an ardent defense of colonialism and the repression of Algerian nationalists.But his leadership among former combatants and prisoners of war (he was president of the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance in 1953-58) attracted the sympathies of many progressives.

Charles De Gaulle's return to power in 1958 provoked Mitterrand's reaction, radically opposed to "Gaullism" and the granting of full powers to the general: using his ability to seduce, he rallied the opposition in a Convention of Republican Institutions (1964) and managed to present himself as the only candidate of the left in the presidential elections of 1965.De Gaulle defeated him on that occasion by a narrow margin, and the Federation of the Left chaired by Mitterrand ended up breaking down as a result of the crisis of May 1968.

A new victory for the Gaullist Georges Pompidou in the 1969 elections (in which the Socialists only obtained 5 percent of the votes) gave the definitive impulse to the process of unity of the French socialism, in which Mitterrand played a leading role, becoming first secretary of the newly created French Socialist Party on the same day he joined its ranks (1971).

After signing a programmatic agreement with the communists in 1972, Mitterrand failed again as a candidate of the united left in the 1974 presidential elections, which gave Valéry Giscard d'Estaing the victory.He completed his advance toward the majority by getting rid of the common program with the communists in 1977 and, finally, he prevailed in the 1981 elections, ousting President Giscard; in 1988 he would be reelected for a second term.

Adapted from the beginning to the high institutional role that the Constitution of the Fifth Republic provided for the president, François Mitterrand became a statesman jealous of constitutional continuity and of the France's international prominence in a typically Gaullist style.However, he began his mandate with measures of great symbolic power for the left, such as nationalizations, improvement of working conditions, abolition of the death penalty and administrative decentralization, putting the historic labor leader Pierre Mauroy at the head of the government.

The poor economic evolution of the country made him change course in a trait of pragmatism, passing the government to Laurent Fabius, representative of the technocratic wing of the party, who would undertake a liberal policy of reconciliation with the capitalist markets.This rectification failed to prevent the defeat of the Socialists in the 1986 legislative elections, which gave the center-right a majority in the Assembly.

Mitterrand devised the idea of ​​"cohabitation" for that occasion, giving way to the experience of cooperation between a president of the Socialist Republic and a conservative government (headed by Jacques Chirac).Mitterrand thus appeared as the bulwark of the welfare state against the neoliberal offensive, which gave him reelection in the 1988 presidential elections.In his second term, he put his former adversary Michel Rocard at the head of the government, whom he replaced by Édith Cresson in 1991 and by Pierre Bérégovoy in 1992.

Aware of the serious illness that afflicted him, Mitterrand wanted to go down in history as the great promoter of European unity, reinforcing cooperation with Germany, which was embodied in the Maastricht Treaty (1991).However, the situation did not evolve well, with a persistent unemployment problem and continuing political and financial scandals.The legislative elections of 1993 gave the right victory again, forcing a second "cohabitation" with a Balladur government.

Mitterrand, more concerned for posterity than for the fate of his party, after having incarnated political alternation for fourteen years within the framework of the 1958 Constitution, prepared his farewell from power by letting the socialists engaged in internal quarrels, while revealing to the public opinion with cynical sincerity his youthful fascist affiliations and the dark friendships maintained since then.He died of cancer shortly after seeing how Chirac prevailed in the 1995 presidential election over the improvised candidate for the Socialists, Lionel Jospin.

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