Word: mitterrand
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...prove Mitterrand's point, the movie opens this week in a France that seems more awash than ever in the ambiguous legacy of its last Socialist President. Mitterrand's image dominated a Parisian courtroom last week as it finished taking testimony about a vast wiretapping scheme driven in part by Mitterrand's personal obsessions. His illness, first diagnosed in 1981, the year he took power, resurfaces in lurid detail this week in a book - written by his personal doctor, Claude Gubler - originally banned by a French court in 1996 for breaching the President's medical privacy. His foreign policy, often...
...Taken together, the various releases demonstrate the deep shadow Mitterrand still casts over France nine years after his death. "He remains fascinating to people of the left and the right," says ex-Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine, a key Mitterrand adviser and current president of the Institut François-Mitterrand, an institution devoted to preserving Mitterrand's memory. "Sixty years of political life during very troubled political times, his move from the right to the left, his intellectual authority, psychological strength, and stupendous culture - it all adds up to a romantic figure...
...Paris' highest court last week, Mitterrand came off as a paranoid liar. Since last November, 12 former officials and police officers have been on trial, accused of wiretapping at least 150 people during the initial years of his presidency. The court showed a tape filmed by two Belgian television journalists who interviewed the President in March 1993. The interview was essentially over as soon as they asked about the boiling scandal over the wiretapping. "The Elysée listens to nothing," Mitterrand said before excoriating the journalists. "I didn't think one would stoop to such a vile level. Merci...
...fact, testimony presented in the case alleges that the wiretapping unit was set up at Mitterrand's request and that he selected some of the targets - notably journalist Edwy Plenel, who was ousted as managing editor of Le Monde last November, and Jean-Edern Hallier, a writer who had once threatened to reveal the existence of Mitterrand's daughter Mazarine. A judgment in the case is expected in the coming months. "After all the court has heard, Mitterrand's appearance was disastrous," says Marie-Amélie Lombard-Latune, who covers the trial for the daily Le Figaro. "Here...
...Mitterrand's nobler initiatives are in the air these days as well, particularly in foreign policy. Next week sees the publication of the French edition of an award-winning work by German historian Tilo Schabert, the result of three years of unprecedented access to Elysée files and personnel in the early '90s. His conclusion: far from stalling the reunification of Germany, as some British and American scholars have argued, Mitterrand saw it as inevitable. His main concern was that a reunified Germany be firmly anchored in a unified Europe. "One can discuss Mitterrand's ethics or morals...