Word: mitterrand
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...autobiography, My Own Truth, published in 1969, Mitterrand describes the improbable background that produced France's pre-eminent leftist. He was born in 1916 in Jarnac, a small southwestern town in the Cognac region. His upbringing was seemingly strictly conventional-piously Roman Catholic and petit bourgeois. His father Joseph was a railway stationmaster who inherited a prosperous vinegar business. Mitterrand explains, "To be a Catholic in a small town in the provinces automatically classified you as politically on the right." Yet, strangely, Mitterrand père thought differently and had his problems. Writes Mitterrand: "When a man went...
...Sergeant Mitterrand was shot in the chest, then captured by the Germans near Verdun. He felt his imprisonment in a Nazi P.O.W. camp was his "first real encounter with other men." He recalls: "At noon the Germans distributed tureens of rutabaga soup and loaves of bread. At first, it was the survival of the fittest-government by the knife. The first men to get hold of the soup or the bread served themselves, passing on no more than a few drops of dirty water to the others." After three months, however, camp leaders emerged to "cut the black bread into...
After two aborted attempts to escape from the camp, Mitterrand finally succeeded in 1941. Returning to Occupied France, he organized a small group of former P.O.W.s who furnished forged papers to members of the Resistance. It was then that he first tangled with Charles de Gaulle. When Mitterrand flew to Algiers to meet with the Free French leader, De Gaulle asked him if he would agree to merge his small P.O.W. group with a larger unit under the command of one of the general's nephews. Mitterrand refused, and De Gaulle curtly dismissed him. It was the beginning...
...also the beginning of Mitterrand's cyclical flirtations and disillusionments with the Communists. "I began working with the Communists during the Resistance. The friendships I made during this period are as strong as ever. Among the other benefits that I owe them, they have taught me never to close an eye if I am to avoid being crushed by their fearsome machine...
While in the Resistance movement (his alias was "Morland"), Mitterrand spotted a picture of a girl in an apartment used for exchanging messages. Mitterrand asked a few questions about her and then said, "I will marry her." That year he wed Danielle Gouze after, legend has it, introducing her to his parents with a staccato biography: "Danielle, nonreligious, democrat, socialist." Now a human rights activist in the party, she wrote a letter last month to Maureen Reagan asking her to use her influence to change her father's position on El Salvador...