Word: mitterrand
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...Mitterrand's 37-year march to power began after France's liberation in 1944. First he ran for Parliament under the aegis of several moderate or center-right parties. Then he held a succession of eight Cabinet posts in the Fourth Republic, including the key post of Minister of the Interior under Pierre Mendes-France...
...Mitterrand began gravitating toward the socialist left as his quarrel with De Gaulle grew sharper and he needed broader support for his fight against the general's "dictatorship." It was then that Mitterrand decided to become a spokesman of the opposition...
...Mitterrand's fight against De Gaulle's investiture as President of the Fifth Republic cost him his parliamentary seat. After winning it back in 1962, he embarked on a long-term strategy of strengthening the non-Communist left and then joining forces with the Communists. To his critics his maneuvering looked like sheer opportunism. To close associates it was a matter of pragmatism motivated by a respect for "republicanism...
...Mitterrand's strong race against De Gaulle in the 1965 presidential elections, run with the support of both Socialists and Communists, was the beginning of his rise to power in the left. In 1971 he became head of the Socialist Party, and the following year masterminded the five-year Socialist-Communist Common Program. The reverses he experienced did not deter him, even when he ran for the second time for the presidency in 1974 and lost to Giscard by a mere 424,599 votes. As Mitterrand's closest comrade, the late Georges Dayan, observed, "Mitterrand's great...
...Mitterrand the long wait before his ascension to power may have been easier than for politicians with fewer extracurricular interests. "Literature is always for me a privileged paradise," he says. A closet poet, he is lyrical when he speaks of the wonders of nature, and he reads incessantly. "He loves literature," says one of his advisers. "When things are not going badly he will talk about nothing but literature; he only talks politics when he is worried." His favorite writer is Chateaubriand. But he also reveres Balzac, Emile Zola, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Nobel-prizewinning French poet Saint-John...