Like her French, Camilla's visit was 'formidable'

The Duchess truly charmed us on her first solo trip abroad, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

 

A member of staff shows the Duchess of Cornwall around the Louvre Museum Photo: AFP/GETTY

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Paris

7:00AM BST 02 Jun 2013

There was something delightfully pre-celebrity about the Duchess of Cornwall’s visit to Paris last week. For one thing, most of us knew nothing about it. Nice middle-aged English lady takes train; goes to charity shop; has a slice or two of saucisson in the Boulevard Raspail street market; nips into Dior to be shown fairy-tale size-zero dresses into which neither she nor any of her entourage has a hope of fitting; takes in the Mona Lisa at the Louvre; looks at horses; and rounds up proceedings with a drinks do at the British Embassy and a cosy dinner with friends. This is firmly Don’t Tell Alfred territory, belonging in those earlier times when France was a kind of sunny hinterland for Mitford sisters of the not-enough-married (Nancy) or too-married (Diana, Lady Mosley) variety.

Non-Royal reporters here in France (that’s everyone except Paris Match and Gala) remained in blissful oblivion of this event: the first solo visit by the future British Queen abroad. Camilla – we call her just “Camilla”, just as France Soir in its 1960s heyday chronicled the ups and downs of “Tony et Margaret” (Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret) – hopped off her Eurostar at Gare du Nord with very little fracas, and with her pared-down entourage, went largely unremarked in the streets until she was called upon to perform.

She sent off a bike expedition for Help for Heroes from the grand courtyard of the Invalides, and made a short speech in excellent but accented French at the Communauté d’Emmaüs at Bougival, West Paris. Like her mother-in-law, although perhaps more approachably, she showed perfect, smiling courtesy throughout. But you could tell she really felt in her element with the Garde Républicaine horses, their riders, even their farriers. (How many Gardes Républicains does it take to shoe a horse? Three – one to hold the horse, one to hammer the red-hot shoe, one to speak to Camilla, carefully omitting that Napoleon is buried next door.)

The visit couldn’t have been better calibrated to French sensibilities. Emmaüs UK, the charity of which the Duchess is a patron, is a 1990s-created offshoot of perhaps France’s best-loved movement, founded in the immediate post-war years by a Catholic priest and former Resistance member from Lyon, Abbé Pierre, who relinquished his MP seat to take up the defence of the homeless in a country still scarred by the war and under rationing edicts. Until his death in 2007, Abbé Pierre regularly polled at the top of a list of France’s most-liked personalities. Emmaüs, which concentrates on giving the destitute a place to live and to work, is a kind of French Oxfam, with low overheads: no glittering fundraisers or expensive headquarters.

As the Duchess visited one of the Emmaüs thrift shops, the British ambassador, Sir Peter Ricketts, made a point of buying her a pretty, rectangular Cartier-lookalike watch, a snip at 10 euros. This was no Chinese fake, but bore the name of the defunct Lip watchmakers, France’s only would-be workers’ commune back in the 1970s. If intended, this was an elegant historical reference and a dream diplomatic gesture, appreciated by anyone in François Hollande’s Socialist government: a Lip watch bought at Emmaüs is worth 10,000 social- conscience cred points.

In short, in terms of easing the Duchess into her next big part, you could say the visit was a real low-key success. The French, like the rest of the world, had happily gone Diana-mad in the 1980s and 1990s. Following Charles and Diana’s state visit to Paris for this newspaper in 1988, I well recall the crowds, the press photographers in their dozens, the breathless segments opening the evening news. We got Diana at the Elysée with François Mitterrand, and Diana at the Hôtel de Ville with Mayor Chirac (a presidential hopeful at the time, he was very keen on the reflected glamour), and the reception at Versailles with former president Giscard d’Estaing (who would much later write a rather silly self-insertion roman à clef in which he had an affair with the princess). It was all about the bling.

Last week’s Paris trip was pretty much the exact opposite of that (no novels in the offing, I suspect), so much in fact that no one even thought of bringing up comparisons. Characteristically, when she posed in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, the Duchess made sure that she wasn’t obscuring Leonardo’s picture on the photographs (“Can’t have that!”) – this wasn’t going to be a Taj Mahal photo-op.

When Sidney Toledano, the CEO of Dior – and the man who personally fired the most famous Briton in French fashion, John Galliano, two years ago – showed Camilla around the present-day ateliers and the New Look frocks of the Dior museum, nobody mentioned that Dior had named a handbag after Diana (her ubiquitous Lady D quilted bag). Instead, everyone made much of the Duchess’s charming second-hand raffia clutch, a novelty item with no pretensions to It-ness, embroidered with the word “Paris”.

Nor did French fashion writers make anything of her Anna Valentine outfits – although the online comments sections weren’t always as charitable: a floaty printed dress worn with a sharply-tailored mustard jacket passed muster; so did a classic Burberry trenchcoat; the dowdyish coat-dresses (“housecoats!”) didn’t.

This didn’t matter. In today’s depressed climate, France is nursing what feels like the mother of all Eurozone hangovers: right now, the nation can take neither overbearing First Girlfriends with a waspish line in tweets, nor size-zero princesses in 5in nude heels and look-at-me clothes. The French are notorious for being coldly, elegantly uncomfortable, but right now they are atypically amenable to a bit of cosiness – and Camilla looked cosy all right, especially as she didn’t really need a refashioned image in the first place.

We are tolerant of affaires de coeur. We never really held Charles’s infidelity against him to begin with. In fact, one of Gérard Depardieu’s best movies, Bertrand Blier’s award-winning Trop Belle Pour Toi (1989), described a rather similar set-up, with the Depardieu character neglecting his high-maintenance, beautiful wife, the former Bond girl Carole Bouquet, for the homely but warm Josiane Balasko. We gave it a slew of Césars (the French Oscars) and the Prix Spécial du Jury at Cannes.

With no monarchy in our own country, the French like kings and queens abroad. And while we require a great deal of majesty from our presidents – the Fifth Republic, after all, was tailored to Charles de Gaulle’s specifications; it’s one of François Hollande’s many political mistakes that he described himself as the “normal” president – we prefer, all things considered, the more relaxed type in neighbouring nations.

The one reigning French citizen is the Prince Consort of Denmark, Henri de Laborde de Monpezat, husband to Queen Margrethe, and for years the Danish royal couple have spent family holidays in South-West France with minimum fuss. The French see the Queen herself as a grandmother and an animal lover (yes, we do like animals: one of the longest-running television programmes here is a much-loved show on pets called 30 Millions d’Amis), as well as a kind of monument. An extraordinary constant over the years.

On present form, Camilla seems well placed to ease herself, almost by stealth, into solid monumenthood.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn: A Frenchman sunk by a sex scandal?

If the allegations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn end the popular IMF chief's presidential candidacy, it would be a first for France, writes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in Paris.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn to appear in New York court over alleged sex attack on hotel maid Photo: AFP/GETTY

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 7:04AM BST 16 May 2011

IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s likely candidacy – and probable victory – next year against Nicolas Sarkozy in the French presidential elections (he had been leading by double digits in every poll in recent months, even without declaring himself officially) should have ushered in a series of firsts for France’s political life. First French Socialist leader to have officially discounted Marxism; first Jew directly elected to the presidency; and first seriously rich president in a country where money, not sex, is a dirty word.

Instead, DSK, as he is known here, will go down in history as the first French politician whose career imploded because of a sex scandal, not a financial one. When the news broke in Paris early yesterday that France’s former finance minister had been arrested by the New York police for alleged sexual assault on a hotel housekeeper, reactions here were split between sheer disbelief, suspicions of entrapment and all-too-many knowing shrugs.

“Dominique Strauss-Kahn is well-known as a seducer,” his official biographer, Michel Taubmann, said. “I can’t believe he would force himself on an unwilling woman. That doesn’t make sense.”

Such a statement would come across as damning in most Western countries. In France, it is seen as a spirited defence. Until today, complicated sexual lives, multiple divorces and serial adultery never hampered political careers. François Mitterrand famously ran three parallel families while president. He appointed a former girlfriend of his, Edith Cresson (a married woman) as prime minister in 1991. His predecessor, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, used to borrow a Ferrari from his friend Roger Vadim, the film director and Brigitte Bardot’s first husband, when he went on the pull. (He once crashed it into a milk float early one morning on his way back to the Elysée.) Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy were known for eyeing up comely reporters and female junior ministers.

In that context, DSK’s notorious penchant (and more) for a legion of pretty women did him no harm at all. “If anything,” Taubmann recalls, “he was the one harassed, not the reverse — I’ve seen time and again women MPs, party workers, etc brazenly passing on notes, hoping he would notice them.”

Alleged assault, however, is another matter entirely. “If the whole situation isn’t exposed for being a political set-up in the next 24 to 48 hours,” French leading polling expert Stéphane Rozès warns, “Monsieur Strauss-Kahn’s political career is finished. He is, of course, presumed innocent until proven guilty, but even suspicion of attempted rape will make it impossible for him to stand.”

It is well worth noting that it took the long arm of New York’s finest to make the Strauss-Kahn scandal incontrovertible even to the very cagey French press. With the help of the internet — the great difference with the Mitterrand years, where the average French voter was left ignorant of the president’s natural children, for instance, and stringent privacy laws were supplemented by thousands of illegal phone taps directly commandeered by his private office — all the stories about his womanising have filtered down for years.

What is more surprising is that DSK has also been accused in the past of assault along eerily similar lines, if not as brutal as what the NYPD spokesman has alleged. Journalist and novelist Tristane Banon, a god-daughter of DSK’s second wife Brigitte Guillemette, recalled in a 2007 book, then in a TV chat show that same year, going to interview Strauss-Kahn to an address “he gave me, neither his office nor his flat; an elegantly appointed studio, with a bed in an alcove”, in which, she said, he grabbed her, tore off her bra, and she only managed to escape after a serious scuffle. “I kicked him, I called him a rapist, he didn’t seem to care,” she said. (DSK’s name was bleeped out in the chat show.)

Banon’s mother, Anne Mansouret, a Socialist local politician, confirmed the story yesterday to the respected website Le Post. Banon consulted a barrister, but finally decided not to sue, a decision her mother now regrets having encouraged her to do so. “She was just starting out in journalism,” says Mansouret. “I was afraid she’d be defined by this story.” She says her daughter will give a press conference “in the coming days”.

Other instances may well resurface. Aurélie Filipetti, a respected Socialist MP and Ségolène Royal supporter, said in 2008 that she had been groped by DSK and would “forever make sure” she was never “alone in a room with him”.

And yet nobody among DSK’s spin doctors and advisers seemed to think this would blow up in the face of their candidate. In recent weeks, as the probability of his candidacy looked certain, and politicians and the press made hay of his taking a ride in a Porsche owned by his main adviser, Strauss-Kahn and his wife Anne Sinclair sued France-Soir, a Paris newspaper, for disclosing the benign fact that he had bought three suits from a French bespoke tailor in Washington, who also dressed several US presidents, for a sum estimated “between $7,000 and $35,000 apiece”. Looking rich – he is in his own right and his wife, the granddaughter of one of France’s great art collectors, is even more wealthy – was seen as infinitely more toxic.

On the other side of the divide, Nicolas Sarkozy’s team were rubbing their hands at the prospect of their own man’s taste for bling, Rolex watches and expensive pens being negated by DSK’s own tastes for luxury.

“What are holidays in my wife’s family house on the Mediterranean next to a three million euro riyad in Marakesh?” Sarkozy himself was reported to have said to Cabinet members.

When he was appointed to the IMF in 2007 with the support of Nicolas Sarkozy — who saw a welcome opportunity of ridding himself of a dangerous opponent, at least for a time — most DSK-watchers warned that Dominique, for all his sophistication and razor-sharp intelligence, would do well as head of the world’s economic watchdog, but might not realise the cultural gap between life in Paris and Washington. Sure enough, barely a year later, DSK’s affair with an IMF economist, the Hungarian Piroska Nagy, made international headlines.

Amazingly, he survived that crisis. It probably helped that the disclosures occurred exactly three days after the beginning of the financial meltdown, on October 18, 2008. After an internal inquiry, the IMF published findings that Strauss-Kahn, universally seen as a safe pair of hands in difficult times, had neither favoured his mistress, nor harassed her. Bowing to American mores, DSK apologised publicly to his high-profile wife, something he had never bothered to do before in France, and Ms Nagy soon afterwards took the opportunity of a well-compensated redundancy when DSK decided to bring cost-cutting home to the IMF, and shed 600 top jobs.

In the following years, he burnished his credentials as a hard-working boss, criss-crossing the globe to help bail out failing financial institutions and defaulting countries, all the while avoiding criticism from the Right or the Left — he is one of the stars of the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, for instance, in which he details the work done to keep the economic sphere from exploding, and calls for more regulation of financial institutions in moderate, convincing tones.

Unlike most of France’s political elite, but like Nicolas Sarkozy — and Marine Le Pen — Strauss-Kahn is not a civil servant and a graduate of the top government school, ENA. He found himself, as finance minister, constantly sneered at by his supercilious mandarins for what was seen as his “inferior” education, even though he has taught at Stanford and Harvard, and co-authored major economics books. When, between political mandates, he turned to the private sector to make a living, instead of sliding back effortlessly into a well-paid, guaranteed-for-life civil service job, he was derided for a supposed crass love of money. Helping to save the world economy and being constantly voted France’s most popular politician, on track for the presidency no less, was essential recognition at last.

But all this came to a crashing halt on Saturday, as DSK was walked out of the first-class cabin of Air France flight 23 sitting on the tarmac of JFK airport, to be arraigned at the Harlem Special Victims Unit of the NYPD, and subsequently charged with “attempted rape, [a] criminal sexual act, and unlawful imprisonment”.

The French presidential race is wide open again, as DSK’s closest contender in the Socialist primaries, the lacklustre François Hollande, and Nicolas Sarkozy refrain from commenting for fear of appearing too eager to take advantage of their rival’s meltdown.

The only untroubled beneficiary is the Front National’s Marine Le Pen. “I am utterly unsurprised,” she said yesterday. “He must be presumed innocent - but everyone in the Paris political village knew of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s pathological relations with women.”

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2011

Jacques Chirac's trial holds little fear for the ultimate bon vivant

Jacques Chirac's long-awaited corruption trial will begin in Paris this week. But, as Anne-Elisabeth Moutet writes, he can go to court on Tuesday with serenity.

Jacques Chirac - Photo: GETTY

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Paris 7:00AM GMT 06 Mar 2011

When Jacques Chirac finally shows up for his corruption trial, on Tuesday, in the Première Chambre Civile of the Paris Law Courts – the same where Queen Marie-Antoinette was once judged – he will sit on a special upholstered chair instead of the usual wooden bench in the dock.

There will be an extra lectern for the former French President's notes and documents, requested by his barristers; and a secured room within the historic Law Courts building will be made available to him to rest any time he "feels tired."

The court will already have sat for a full day; but Chirac, who is now aged 78 and in questionable health, has exceptionally been allowed to show up only on specific dates, the ones on which he is scheduled to be questioned by the judges.

Otherwise, we are asked to believe, the former president, now "a private citizen" after enjoying immunity from prosecution during his two consecutive terms from 1995 to 2007, will be tried like any other French politician accused of confusing official and party funds.

The case goes back to the early 1990s, when Chirac was Mayor of Paris.

On the city payroll were, it turned out, dozens of full-time employees who never did a stitch of work for the city. They were instead detailed to the right-wing RPR Gaullist party, there to help Mr Chirac's eventual, and successful, 1995 bid for the presidency.

The facts are not in dispute: other Chirac associates have already been sentenced for them, most notably former PM (and current Foreign Minister) Alain Juppé, who at the time was – conveniently – both Secretary General of the RPR and Paris Deputy Mayor for Finances.

Finally tried in 2004, Juppé was given a 12-month suspended jail sentence, and was declared ineligible for office for one year: he had to take a visiting professor's job in Canada for two years, before he could resume his political career.

The question is whether Chirac knew of his party's financial arrangements.

Although he denies it, he signed last year an out-of-court agreement with the capital's authorities whereby he and his party would refund them to the tune of €2.2 million. In exchange, the City relinquished its suit – to see it taken up by a group of Parisian taxpayers, outraged at what they see as a sweet deal for "less than half the true outlay".

As the case stands, Chirac, while theoretically facing up to 10 years in jail, a €150,000 fine and a five-year voting ban, wouldn't seem to be in really hot water.

For one thing, the state prosecution office – which operates under the direct authority of the justice ministry – has already said it was pushing for a dismissal, "because there isn't enough proof."

Only cynics, perhaps, will observe that we stand barely a year from the next presidential election, and Nicolas Sarkozy will need the entirety of the Gaullist party, nostalgic Chiraquiens and all, squarely behind him in what will be a tight race.

For another, the 6'3" beer-drinking, calf's head scoffing, larger-than-life bon vivant the French always had a soft spot for is suddenly rumoured to be "frail", "ailing", and suffering from Alzheimer's – rumours which Chirac and his high-profile wife, Bernadette, have carefully denied in targeted public statements. (That's officially what the special chair and lectern and side room near the courthouse are all about.)

This should be enough to ensure, in the worst-case scenario, a suspended sentence.

Never mind that only two weeks ago Chirac couldn't bear to miss the Paris yearly Agricultural Show, which he has faithfully visited on opening day for the past four decades, whether in office or out.

There he was mobbed by the crowds, basking in the admiration and love of tens of thousands of his favourite constituents, French farmers, who feel nobody has or will ever fight their corner as fiercely again. Nicolas Sarkozy is usually booed at the Salon de l'Agriculture.

It is ironic that the trial should take place barely one week after one of Chirac's protégés, Michèle Alliot-Marie, was sacked from her job as foreign minister merely for having accepted free flights from a relative of Tunisia's just-deposed strongman, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. (It is even more amusing that she should be replaced by none other than Alain Juppé, who at the time of his sentencing, for the same facts Jacques Chirac is now being tried for, was said to be bitter at having to carry the can for persons unnamed.)

In the last a couple of years, the climate in France has become starkly intolerant of corruption, extra perks, dodgy political financing and the like.

The public used not bat an eyelid at secret second families housed and guarded at the Republic's expense (François Mitterrand's), lavish holidays paid by exotic tycoons in five-star palaces (Mitterrand, Chirac), gifts of diamonds by megalomaniac African tyrants (Valéry Giscard d'Estaing), secret state funds re-routed to political campaigns (everyone's, even staid, Calvinist Socialist PM Lionel Jospin), not to mention a comfortable blurring of the private and public use of what must surely be the loveliest official real estate in the world, all the aristocratic palaces of France's nobility, complete with their furniture and artworks, turned into ministerial offices and grace-and-favour homes.

No longer.

A combination of the economic crisis, Nicolas Sarkozy's perceived love of bling, and the globalisation of political sensitivities has made French politicians' life less comfortable of late.

One minister was recently sacked because he charged his office for €12,000 worth of Cuban cigars. (And he had to pay for the cigars.)

Another was a victim of an early reshuffle because she'd lent her grace-and-favour flat to her unemployed brother for one month. Yet another lost his job after favouring private planes over scheduled flights.

Besides the ousting of various strongmen, the Arab spring claims as collateral damage the reputation of a number of French politicos, as week after week their holidays with this or that tyrant are being made public.

What is perhaps surprising is the Teflon-like popularity of Jacques Chirac even today.

The French are largely aware that in or out of office, Chirac never paid for a luxury holiday in his life (in Morocco, in Oman, at the luxurious Hôtel du Cap-Eden Roc on the Riviera, as guest of the luxury tycoon and Gucci owner François Pinault in his St Tropez compound.)

They know Chirac was proven to have spent some €4,000 a day in "entertaining and food expenses" when he was Paris Mayor. They know the Chiracs have been living rent-free since they left the Elysée palace in 2007 in a luxurious 4,300 square foot Paris flat on the Seine, 3 Quai Voltaire, just opposite the Louvre, "loaned" by the family of Lebanon's slain PM, Rafik Hariri. But apparently, they don't care.

However strange it may seen, Chirac, who is the scion of a provincial industrialist, married to the aristocratic daughter of an early De Gaulle supporter, and whose constituency home is a 17th century château he had listed in the early 70s to make its maintenance tax-deductible, is seen as having the common touch, being one of the people.

His second term as president was marked by strikes and rising unpopularity, but now that Nicolas Sarkozy's poll numbers have sunk even lower than his ever did, he is considered fondly by Right and Left alike.

The former regret his more consensual style. The latter give him credit for opposing the Iraq war from the start.

All things considered, he can go to court on Tuesday with serenity – nothing, not even a judicial rap on the fingers, can seemingly change his reputation.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2011

The French know that there's nothing romantic about a coalition government

We are used to uneasy alliances being formed between people who have spent campaigns taking potshots at one another, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet .

The French are watching the Cameron-Clegg lovefest with bemused eyes. We’ve had coalition governments galore; in fact, single-party domination is the rarity here.

We are used to uneasy alliances being formed between people who have spent campaigns taking potshots at one another and can barely stand to be in the same room. Think Mitterrand and the Communists in 1981, or Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Jacques Chirac in any number of unhappy permutations.

When the troops all finally get to stand together on the steps of the Elysée Palace, nobody tries to put on a brave face. You can almost hear the whirring as minds calculate how best to trip up the chap with the job you want.

People argue that Clameron – that’s what they’re calling the happy pair on the internet – come from such similar male, white, expensively educated backgrounds that it’s normal they should find it easy to deal with one another. Think again. You would be hard-pressed to find a more narrowly homogeneous ruling class than the French. They all attended the same government school, ENA, and, 20 or 30 years on, still mention the exit ranking of colleagues with the same contempt or respect Britain would give to Cameron’s Eton schooling, or John Prescott’s cruise stewarding. Paris watched the Love, Actually remake in the garden of Number 10 and thought, to a French (wo)man: “Come off it, you two.”

Forgetting one’s differences and working together for the public good? We haven’t bothered with that since 1945, with de Gaulle. It lasted less than a year (although it did create our National Health system, la Sécurité Sociale, and nationalised Renault, the banks, insurance companies, utilities, and mines). One of our wilier politicians’ lines, “Promises only commit those who believe in them” generally obtains in the horsetrading that gives birth to most of our governments.

And in France, nobody is ever allowed to forget who won the most votes. Cameron may not be President of Great Britain, but the Tories have more than 300 seats. The idea that he would dilute his hold on the house by ushering in PR seems suicidal – and stupid – to us.

The Sarkozy way would be to entice the dozen or so MPs needed for a full majority to cross the floor, lured by plum jobs and gongs. The threat of PR is only used to divide your opponents: the elder Mitterrand stayed in power by introducing PR. It gave Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front a couple of MPs in the National Assembly and was abolished two years later, but that was enough to ensure the FNs political durability, while keeping marginal constituencies out of the Right’s hands.

The French do think, however, that Cameron was right to ignore those hard-liners who felt it might have been better to leave a Lib-Lab coalition to make a hash of things, before calling another election. Sarkozy has few Shakespearean traits, but he does understand about tides in the affairs of men. Victory should always be seized, he would say, and has a momentum of its own.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2010

Françoise Giroud, a flawed heroine of French feminism

Françoise Giroud, who has died aged 86, was a former minister for culture, founding editor of L'Express, and flawed heroine of French feminism. Both she and her contemporary Katharine Graham, the owner and publisher of the Washington Post, influenced journalism and politics in their countries. However, Giroud, unlike heiress Graham, was the self-made daughter of a Turkish journalist.

She was born in Geneva, and left school at 14 to learn secretarial skills. She got a job at a bookshop in Paris, found work as a continuity girl on some of France's best-known films, including Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion; and quickly graduated to screenwriter, then assistant director. During the second world war, she was jailed by the Gestapo at Fresnes prison and narrowly escaped being deported, like her younger sister Douce.

Post-war, Giroud was hired by Hélène Gordon Lazareff for her new women's magazine, Elle, whose editor-in-chief she became within months; she also produced some of France's best sketches for France Soir and France Dimanche.

Giroud will primarily be remembered, though, for creating L'Express in 1953, initially a campaigning weekly opposing colonial war in Indo-China and Algeria. She set it up with her married lover, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, maverick scion of a publishing family. The duo transformed it with great success 10 years later, adapting the glossy Time/News-week newsmagazine formula in France.

When Servan-Schreiber's first wife, the novelist Madeleine Chapsal, finally left him in 1960, he married a younger writer: Giroud made a much-publicised suicide attempt. She went into psychoanalysis, aged 40, in 1966, with the charismatic Jacques Lacan. Years later, she wrote in her memoirs, Leçons Particulières (Private Lessons): "Had I met Lacan when I was 25, my entire life would have been different. I would have loved different men, I would not have created L'Express."

Giroud was famous for her elegant, spare writing style. She contributed to the political demise of Gaullist premier Jacques Chaban Delmas when she dismissed his 1974 candidacy for the presidency: "You don't shoot an ambulance." Unlike Servan-Schreiber, she was a workaholic perfectionist who would rewrite copy and polish headlines far into the night before sending out the week's L'Express to the printers. She encouraged a new generation of women journalists, helping them polish their writing and personal style, then sending them to ferret out stories from France's notoriously vain male politicians.

Yet she never called herself a feminist, rarely believing in the frontal attack. Her women journalists were competent, often talented; but they were also notorious for their affairs with politicians and business tycoons. A former Giroud protégée who refused to play this game turned to foreign reporting, in which she was equally encouraged by Giroud.

Giroud, a lifelong left-winger, crossed party lines in 1974 when she agreed to become president Giscard d'Estaing's junior minister for women. Servan-Schreiber, with whom she worked at L'Express until he started his own Radical party in 1969, was in the same cabinet, as minister for reforms, a job he held for 13 days. Giroud was made of sterner stuff, and having tested the limits of her portfolio (the most important feminist reform, the liberalisation of abortion, was defended in the Assemblée Nationale in 1975 by health minister Simone Veil), she stayed on in politics in the 1976 Barre cabinet as minister for culture.

By 1978 she left, and in 1981 she voted for her Socialist friend François Mitterrand, whose portrait as a promising politician she had been the first to sketch in France Dimanche in 1951.

From then on she returned to writing. In 1974, Servan-Schreiber had sold L'Express from under her to a conglomerate: Giroud soon found a home at its left-leaning rival, Le Nouvel Observateur, writing a weekly column from 1983 until last week.

She also wrote some 30 books of varying quality: forgettable biographies; a few romans à clef (the most notable, Le Bon Plaisir, told the thinly veiled story of Mitterrand's lovechild, which Giroud had always forbidden her journalists to break: Giroud wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation). There were several first-rate memoirs, in which her unique voice can be heard: Le Journal d'Une Parisienne, the ferocious La Comédie du Pouvoir, on her ministerial experiences, and On Ne Peut Être Heureux Tout Le Temps (One can't always be happy).

She married briefly in the 1950s: her son died in an accident, and she is survived by her daughter, the child psychoanalyst Caroline Eliacheff. Over the last 30 years, her constant companion was the late editor and publisher Alex Grall.

· Françoise Giroud, journalist and politician, born November 21 1916; died January 19 2003

© Copyright © Guardian News and Media & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2003

Elites, élan et l'Etat

The Ecole Nationale d'Administration is a launch pad for meteoric careers in the civil service, politics and industry. Anne-Elisabeth Moutet asks how its unabashed elitism will serve France in the 2000s

They are all alike. Or at least they look it. Smooth, clever, quick with an analysis, sometimes impressively efficient; often infuriatingly flippant and detached from the nuts and bolts of the organisations they run. France is the only country – apart from Japan, with omnipresent Tokyo University ('Todai') graduates – which has a seamless front linking top civil servants, government officials, business leaders, even finance wizards. The President of the Republic, Jacques Chirac, is a member of the club. So is his prime minister (and Socialist political opponent), Lionel Jospin. So are their rivals within their parties. So are the chairs of France Telecom, Renault, oil giant Elf-Aquitaine, 17 of the 20 largest French banks, water utility giant Vivendi, four out of six broadcast television channels (public and private), half the French Cabinet, two-thirds of partners at Rothschild et Cie merchant bank. And so on, and so on.

All these people are graduates of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, known in France as ENA. It is a government school whose students enter via a gruelling competitive examination (only 120 are admitted each year) and exit with a precise ranking that will determine their careers.

The influence of ENA has been compared with Oxbridge in the UK. It is at the same time more and less meritocratic, ENA-bred technocrats will argue almost convincingly. 'In France, you succeed and are integrated into the highest levels of society only through scholarship,' says one. 'In one generation, you can become a firm member of the establishment. In the US, in one generation you can become very rich but you will not become a Wasp. What is undemocratic is that once you belong to the elite, you will never fail. There are no sanctions, except for political ones, and these are not final, because the same people come back two years later. There is a network of solidarity.'

ENA was created on October 9, 1945, by a decree signed by General Charles de Gaulle, then heading the newly liberated France's provisional government. He wanted to remove once and for all the largely Napoleonic French administration 'that sadly had shown in 1940 how obsolete it had been allowed to become'. Behind this lay an old French fear – the defeatism and failure of its elites, as shown by the large number of high-level collaborationists in the Vichy government during the Second World War. Much the same had happened in 1871, when Professor Emile Boutmy created the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, later IEP (familiarly known as Sciences Po) directly after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

The school was the brainchild of a future prime minister, Michel Debré, who would later draft the Constitution of the Fifth Republic in 1958. He said he wanted to give 'young students of all conditions' access to the kind of studies until then 'the preserve of the children of the rich Parisian elite, studying at the Institut des Etudes Politiques'. Ironically, Sciences Po, which had fulfiled its promise in 1914, had failed in 1940 to vote for the government of Marshal Henri Pétain, and was nationalised in the same legislation that created ENA.

No one could have known, in the flush of liberation, quite how much influence ENA graduates, or énarques, would eventually wield in France. Yet their image – there are now around 4,500 énarques in France – evolved to evoke some of the very things ENA was created to dispel: a haughty, inbred caste of privileged young men (and about 20% women) firmly believing that their destiny is to rule the country in close association with other énarques, with little more than contempt for whoever is not cast in their mould.

The scarcely concealed real power is evident when you start listing famous ones. According to another study, only 10% of politicians are énarques, yet they hold almost all the high-profile jobs. Of all France's presidents of the Fifth Republic, only two – Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Jacques Chirac – were young enough to attend the new institute. De Gaulle tended to pick old Resistance companions as his chief ministers, with the notable exception of Georges Pompidou (who, like his contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre, taught French literature in a lycée during the Occupation).

Pompidou's resulting inferiority complex made him pick his own best and brightest from among the énarques, rather than from the ranks of historic Gaullists, whom he felt would always remind him of his wartime attentism, or lack of political commitment. Hence the brilliant careers of politicians and industrialists such as Chirac, Raymond Barre, Michel Jobert, Jacques Calvet and Edouard Balladur. Similarly, the Left had its own énarques: Lionel Jospin, Michel Rocard, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, Laurent Fabius, Pierre Joxe, Jacques Attali, and later, Martine Aubry and Elisabeth Guigou, among others.

The former Speaker of the Assemblée Nationale, Philippe Séguin, as well as his successor, Fabius, are énarques. The governor of the Banque de France, Jean-Claude Trichet, is an énarque. Autodidact big bosses, who may harbour their own opinion of énarques, still hire a few – so that those crucial telephone calls or discreet meetings can always be arranged between 'old colleagues'. Foreign governments send a few of their best and brightest to ENA to have someone who will help them understand France: there is a special programme for foreigners at the school, the only notable differences are that they are not ranked (ensuring they have a better time among the fiercely competitive students) and spend only three months doing a practical trainee stint (le stage) in a French administration, as opposed to two stints of six months for French students. Such high-flyers as the German Joachim Bitterlich (currently tipped to become the European Union's foreign policy representative) or the Briton Matthew Kirk of the Cabinet Office attended ENA; most European nationalities are usually represented, as well as Japan, South America and Africa.

Edith Cresson, that famously crusading anti-énarque, who ordered the school's removal in 1992 to Strasbourg in a failed attempt to lessen its influence, still employed three énarques in the top jobs among her staff when she was prime minister. Probably the most accurate criticism I have heard of her was that 'she didn't know how to pick her énarques. The ones she got were absolutely the wrong ones, no charisma or organisation. They let themselves be trampled all over by everyone else's énarques during inter-ministerial staff meetings. Of course, later she gave up on énarques and hired her dentist.' Thus speaks another énarque – a chief of staff for one of Cresson's former ministers.

You can rise pretty high in France without belonging to this caste but, as the example of the late prime minister Pierre Bérégovoy shows, you are never allowed to forget that you are not quite top drawer. You will not be forgiven your mistakes. Bérégovoy – driven to suicide in the early 1990s by the disclosure of an interest-free loan he was given by a shady business friend of François Mitterrand – was the target of cruel jokes from members of his own government. Interior Minister Pierre Joxe, himself an énarque and the son of a Gaullist minister, once 'defended' Bérégovoy against criticism by remarking: 'You only have to look at Pierre Bérégovoy's socks to know he's an honest man.'

What is conveniently forgotten is how weighted the scales are in favour of those students who already know what the game is all about, usually because their families have been there first. The oral examination that ends the round of written tests to get into ENA is as much a test of social ease, a certain type of detached repartee, of social background, as it is of general knowledge. The selection committee, which in addition to professors, includes old boys and girls of every variety, tries to put the student off, with questions such as: 'What trade did [JM] Keynes' wife practise?' (One student who actually knew the correct answer – a Ballets Russes dancer who ran with the Bloomsbury crowd – was still not passed: he had committed, he recalled with bitterness 30 years later, the cardinal sin of shooting back his answer 'too earnestly, as if I were sitting in a quiz show instead of making a flippant joke of it'.) 'Who, for you, is the woman who best represents the average French female?' 'Do you prefer Athens or Sparta? Talleyrand or Fouché?' The same unlucky candidate gave Michèle Morgan as the epitome of French femininity, only to be countered languidly by a white-haired diplomat with: 'But what about Brigitte Bardot?'

The two-year course includes a practical stage in an administration, state-owned company or even a foreign country, as well as lectures in public law, economics, history and political science. Tension is kept at a high pitch; the final exam includes a ranking that effectively will decide the énarques' future career for the next 40 years. Only the top 15 students of their 120-strong year at ENA (la botte) can join the civil service grands corps (Inspection des Finances, Cour des Comptes and Conseil d'Etat). These are inter-ministerial bodies that control state finances and procedures of the state administration. Inspection des Finances is by far the strongest network – they are superénarques who believe they are a different breed from all other énarques. Most of them then go on for a stint at the French Treasury: no anti-Frankfurt advocates need apply. The rest will become préfets, diplomats, and so on, their networks never as high powered as expected; their careers and pay never quite hitting the heights.

The result of this inbreeding, critics have repeatedly warned, is to create structural weaknesses in the French economic and political fabric, a tendency to do deals with one's peers rather than let them assume the full weight of their decisions – witness the constant bailing out of ailing French companies by the government, from Dassault to Air France.

The French elite rise to the top without any business experience; they apply to every situation the strong authoritarian hierarchic mould they learnt in the civil service; they are remarkably insular and ignorant of the world outside France. For example, Jacques Attali insisted that an 'Anglo-Saxon plot' had cost him his job at the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development, not his lavish spending on the bank's headquarters. They demoralise the majority of civil servants, politicians, and businesspeople who, knowing they are not members of the club, realise that most top jobs will escape them, even if they have spent an entire career in their company or political party.

Unlike Whitehall civil servants who come from a slightly more varied academic background, even if a great many are Oxbridge, they have read an infinity of different things there, énarques have spent their formative studies swotting on narrow subjects. 'While the studies were of a very high level,' remembers one British énarque, who enjoyed his time at the school, 'I found it impossible to have real debates with my classmates. They were amazingly bright but they would never "waste time" in conversation or intellectual debate when they could be gaining the few points that meant a difference in ranking. All they always wanted was "the right answer" – it dismayed many of our lecturers.'

The danger with Oxbridge graduates can be dilettantism; but it has advantages – a sense of distance that the average énarque cruelly lacks. On the other hand, it does not much matter what your social background is when you have been to ENA; the school makes you. And in France, accent and delivery have got to do with education, not background. However, the snobbery is confined within the school. The Inspection des Finances actually prints its own annuaire (listing of past graduates of inspection), distinct from the less exalted annuaire de l'ENA. Anyone thinking that Jospin (ranked in the 80s, foreign ministry) is on the same level as Chirac (ranked tenth, Cour des Comptes) or Fabius (first, inspecteur des finance) is missing a key nuance in French politics.

Through France's mathematical and scientific tradition, and because the only other school that approaches ENA in terms of social promotion is the top engineering school Polytechnique – which your brightest énarques, from Giscard d'Estaing to author Alain Minc, have also attended, énarques are usually much better plugged into technology and business. One example is Michel Bon, chairman of France Telecom, universally acknowledged to be the best among European telecommunications chiefs. Bon, an atypical enough inspecteur des finances that he headed the hypermarket chain Carrefour for several years, really understands what industrial policy is about.

But then French culture is about top-down industrial policy all the way from Louis XIV: anything that requires massive investment and infrastructure, from the high-speed TGV trains to fibre optics, telecommunications, etc. Your average énarque, however, is blind to the 'bottom-up', that 'post-industrial revolution that takes place in the bedrooms of 14-year-olds', as the writer Adam Gopnik once put it. The Internet baffles them – they cannot comprehend that it has no centre.

And yet most members of this elite still feel they have to prove themselves in different areas, always with the detached attitude of the amateur. The solution in France? Literature, of course. Attali, Jean-Yves Haberer, Juppé, Giscard d'Estaing have all written rather bad, bloodless novels. Jean-Claude Trichet writes poems and essays on poetry. Banque Nationale de Paris' Michel Pébereau, even in the middle of the bank's current hostile takeover bid for Société Générale and Paribas, reviews science fiction books for a highbrow magazine. Having monopolised almost all positions of power in France, énarques still crave recognition from circles that they know have little power.

© Copyright The European & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1999

François Mitterrand - a personal memoir

What was it like meeting the former French president, who died last Monday? Our Paris Bureau Chief followed his career for 15 years and remembers.

On the first day that they learned of François Mitterrand's death, Parisians couldn't quite decide where to go and pay their last respects. At first people streamed to 22, rue de Bièvre, the narrow Fifth Arrondissement lane just on the south side of the Seine from Notre Dame, where the president had owned a house since the mid-70s: during the 14 years of his reign, rue de Bièvre had been increasingly restricted, then closed off to cars and passers-by, until iron gates had actually been erected at each end of the street, guarded 24 hours a day by police.

And yet those in the know - many people, as it turned out - chose to take their red roses and their private or political grief to another part of Paris, still on the Left bank, but in the infinitely more bourgeois surroundings of the Champ-de-Mars next to the Eiffel Tower, 9, rue Frédéric-Le Play, where the ex-president, it was officially known, had his "offices" after he left the Élysée last 17 May 1995. In fact the 450-square-meter flat loaned by the State was both office and home to Mitterrand, where he slept and entertained his longtime mistress Anne Pingeot and their 20-year-old daughter Mazarine.

Mitterrand died on the morning of Monday 8 January: he had been very weak for several weeks that had included a last trip to his beloved Upper Nile at Aswan, with Mazarine and Mrs. Pingeot, in mid-December, then proper Christmas celebrations at his Latche country home with his wife of 51 years, Danielle, their two sons Gilbert and Jean-Christophe, their grand-children and close friends. He woke up around 7:00 am, his doctor Jean-Pierre Tarot reported, said that he was very tired, and would try to get some more sleep. From that sleep he never awoke.

For a few hours the fiction that Mitterrand had died "at his desk" was maintained. TV crews were sent to interview passers-by, local shopkeepers and mourners to both rue de Bièvre and rue Frederic Le Play. This duplicate commemoration was in a way emblematic of François Mitterrand's entire life, spent on both sides of the political divide, of arguments, of policies, of families and friends, and ultimately of history.

This is why it is so difficult for anyone who crossed his path, even without being completely engulfed by his powerful personal charm - which he wielded with consummate artistry - to think back of him with anything approaching objectivity. I met François Mitterrand about half a dozen times between 1980 and 1994; before that, as a history student and a sometime member of the Jeunesses Socialistes, I hawked the Programme Commun, which he had drawn up to rebuild the Left in 1972, with complete conviction.

I would like to be able to say that at the time, aged 17, but coming from a family with deep-rooted Socialist traditions - my grand-father was a co-founder, with Jean Jaurès, of the SFIO, the ancestor of the Socialist party, in 1905, and later served as a minister in Leon Blum's Popular Front Cabinet - I had understood Mitterrand's cunning strategy to circumscribe and enfeeble the strong, neo-Stalinian French Communist party in an electoral alliance. The truth is that I bought the official line that the Communists were our friends and comrades. With longer memories, my parents - who unflinchingly voted Socialist at every possible election throughout their lives - muttered things about Kravchenko (Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag" was only published the following year) and about the 1920 Congrès de Tours (when the SFIO split between its Bolsheviks, the SFIC Communists, and its Mensheviks, the tattered remnants of the SFIO).

François Mitterrand, who himself had an extremely long and encyclopaedic memory, built his entire career on other people's forgetfulness, and on his acute instinct of how far he could blur the borders between truth and falsehood, ideal and manipulation. I first met him following his successful campaign of 1981. He had rebuilt the French Left and was about to carry it to power, a phenomenon of such magnitude in France that for the first months of Socialist rule in 1981, tens of thousands of people, not all very rich, frantically (and illegally) would be sending their money abroad rather than leave it to be appropriated by "the Reds". This panic was matched on the other side by the exhilaration of the campaign's last few weeks. From an old Fourth Republic warhorse with a few unsavoury episodes to his name - the faked assassination attempt in the Observatoire gardens in 1959, the Francisque decoration which he'd been awarded by the Vichy regime (but we all chose to believe he had had to accept it as a cover for his "Resistance work") - Mitterrand was transformed into the Left's Great White Hope.

He enjoyed it tremendously. He arrived late at practically every rally, having sometimes diverted the press pack to admire a little Romanesque church he knew in the area (he knew many), or invited some of the pundits of note (Jean Daniel of Le Nouvel Observateur, Jean Lacouture of Le Monde) to dinner at a gastronomic restaurant while the faithful were kept waiting in a state of frenzy with endless speeches by lesser figures of the party. He could do no wrong. Almost every journalist following the campaign had horror stories of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's hauteur, aristocratic pretensions, and his staff's iron control on the press, especially TV.

French political campaigns traditionally end 24 hours before the day of the vote, "to let people make up their minds in peace". Since elections are always held on a Sunday, this meant that Mitterrand's last campaign plane trip before his election took place on Friday 7 May, 1981 - a crazy dash from Épinal to Strasbourg to Rennes, crisscrossing France in private planes the cost of which none of us yet thought of questioning. Mitterrand used to chat with reporters, and that evening, he walked down the aisle to sit next to me, asking me questions about my grandfather, whose job as Colonies Minister he had taken over in the Fifties. I was so petrified with awe that I didn't know what to answer except a few platitudes. Smiling, he switched to literature and asked me if I'd read William Styron's "Sophie's Choice". I had, I said, and thought Styron had stolen the idea from the 1967 novel by Yael Dayan (Moshe Dayan's daughter), "Death had two Sons". This was apparently the wrong thing to say: Mitterrand had loved "Sophie's Choice". He suddenly switched off the charm. I had not passed. With a few words, he was on his feet again to chat with someone else, and what I remember most was the switching off bit - the way this incredible warmth, of which I was not consciously aware, suddenly vanished, leaving me feeling an abject, stupid failure. Later I also realised how addicted one could become to that warmth.

Partly by chance, I stood less than a yard from Mitterrand at half past six on Sunday, 10 May, 1981, when, after an interminable rainy afternoon of feverish waiting in the small lounge of the Hôtel du Vieux-Morvan in his constituency of Château-Chinon, an aide made his way through the swelling crowd and touched his arm, announcing that all the polls coincided - even though the voting booths in France's larger cities would only close at 8:00 pm, he had won the prize that had eluded him for so long. He was in the middle of a typical Mitterrand pose - taking his time to explain the vagaries of the Morvan climate to a pretty girl, this time the blonde correspondent from "Stern" magazine. For at least two full minutes he went on talking as if nothing had happened, about granite hills and how the clouds from the north-west were stopped by the heights. Then he looked around and asked: "Ca y est? Ca ne peut plus changer?" A pause. "Bon. Maintenant, les ennuis commencent."

Everybody remembers the amazing celebrations of that Sunday night, the hundreds of thousands dancing in the streets on Place de la Bastille and in so many cities in France. For years the election celebrations had taken place in les beaux quartiers, Gaullists in their nice Peugeots and Citroens driving up the Champs-Elysées tooting their horns, singing the Marseillaise and waving tricolours. This time the flags were red, the cars were beat-up 2CVs and 4Ls, and the music was rock. I don't think I was quite rid of the elation of that night when I saw Mitterrand again at his inauguration, on 21 May 1981, at the Élysée Palace.

Giscard, a sore loser, had stretched the 10-day period the outgoing president is allowed to stay to its utter limit. He greeted Mitterrand on the porch, had an insultingly short 15-minute meeting with him in his first floor corner office (which Mitterrand relinquished to Jacques Attali, preferring to settle in the central study that had been De Gaulle's own office) and decided, in a textbook display of everything that was wrong about his political and psychological instincts, not to drive but to walk out into the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, hoping perhaps to be applauded, or even pitied. Of course the crowd come to watch Mitterrand booed him mercilessly. We inside only saw this later on TV; we were waiting for that wonder of wonders, Mitterrand arriving at the Élysée for the first time.

Symbol was piled upon symbol. The 80-year-old Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose photographs of the first 1936 "congés payés" holidaymakers became the emblem of that era, was snapping away with his little Leica. The former Fourth Republic PM, Pierre Mendes France, the man who epitomized honesty and integrity for the entire Left, was there too: PMF was about the same age as Cartier-Bresson but a lot less sprightly - in fact his cheeks were gray and the lines on his face deeply-etched. Mitterrand, in a deliberate gesture, went directly to him when he entered the Élysée Salle des Fetes, and kissed him on both cheeks. It was said later that Mendes cried; certainly he was very moved. None of us, at the time, questioned the irony of the shortest-serving great leader of the Left - his high principles had caused him to always refuse compromise - being embraced, and, in a way trotted forward as the ideal alibi by the longest-serving politico of the Fourth Republic, who'd switched alliances and allegiances with enough brio that he took part in practically every Cabinet between 1946 and 1958.

Much later, another irony would find itself superimposed onto this dream publicity shot, when Mitterrand's Vichy past emerged - the sheer gall of his kissing the man whose luminous interview was at the centre of Marcel Ophuls's "The Sorrow and The Pity", the epoch-making documentary that opened the eyes of an entire generation to the realities of ordinary collaboration (and was banned from French TV for 14 years). In the film, Mendes had told of his being ostracised by fellow-officers in North Africa before being deported to be tried in Clermont-Ferrand by collaborationist judges, in front of a courtroom packed with Action Française goons. But we all believed, and would for quite some time, that Mitterrand had been a Résistance hero; it would be long before some of us would realise that those who vouched for his impeccable conduct (and he for theirs) were all his Angoulême school mates and Fascist-leaning law school friends of the Thirties.

Soon after the inauguration, Mitterrand organised a luncheon at the Élysée for the 20 or so reporters who'd followed his campaign regularly. The mood was light-hearted, the president was approachable and jocular, the food was excellent; under the white-and-gilt rococo panelling of the downstairs dining-room, we all, Mitterrand himself included, perhaps, still felt we were only visiting. Out of all the light, exhilarated banter I do remember the steel in him showing in two occasions, though. The new "free" FM-band radio stations were mentioned; at the time, they were not allowed to carry advertising. I argued that they should. "It's better to know where exactly the money comes from." (God I must have sounded naive.) "No," said Mitterrand, "let Radio Tour Eiffel (the Mairie de Paris, i.e. the Chirac FM station) cost them the maximum." His implacable "que çà leur coûte très cher" still rings in my ears. It was, I realised later, instructive. (The other occasion had to do with liberalising the money markets; Mitterrand and his chief of staff, later Minister for Justice Michel Vauzelle, were against it. I felt pretty silly again, although I would, later, be vindicated.)

There were other meetings later: press conferences, foreign trips, political rallies, and a long but rather disappointing interview for ELLE magazine on the eve of the 1988 campaign. Mitterrand, who was about to embark on a vote-pleasing discourse on equal rights, more or less shot down his argument in flames before he started by telling me and our photographer, as we entered his upstairs private apartments: "I'm sorry I can't offer you anything to drink, my wife isn't here." (I wanted to start my piece with the anecdote, but French ELLE vetoed it.) Still, after two years of uneasy cohabitation with Chirac, marked by a series of petty battles which the wily old Élysée householder usually won, Mitterrand looked a lot better than the Right. A few days after our interview, he gave his last campaign rally at Le Bourget, one radiantly sunny afternoon, in front of some 40,000 people, with a rousing hour-long speech in beautiful French, the barrister in him blending with echoes of great political speakers of the past. He was just way above the rest, and I duly voted or him.

And then of course it all started coming tumbling down: les affaires, the Péchiney scandal, the irresistible elevation of Bernard Tapie. Mitterrand treated them with contempt - contempt seemed to have become his overriding sentiment, together with an arrogance fueled by the courtiers gathered around him. It was as if, not having to campaign for reelection again, he had given up the seduction game - except when it pleased him. I remember the 1989 Bicentennial celebrations, and the Élysée garden-party that day, with the 10,000 or so guests trying to touch the President as if he were a faith-healer, like the people outside Versailles used to wait and be touched by the King. The mantle of Louis XIV is tempting for any French leader with hubris, and Mitterrand didn't lack it. We had a great Bastille Day party, just as we were given a great Opera, a great Pyramid, a great Arch, et caetera.

I came peripherally across the track of another, quite different François Mitterrand in 1991, while researching a story - which The European broke - on the cosmetics company L'Oréal, disclosing that it still employed a war criminal and noted collaborationist, Jacques Corrèze, as head (and key shareholder) of its American sister company, Cosmair. L'Oréal's founder Eugène Schueller had given Mitterrand a job and a salary in 1946 (as editor of the magazine "Votre Beauté"). Schueller had funded the Cagoule, a fascist group, in the Thirties, to which Robert Mitterrand, the president's brother, had belonged. He had also funded one of the nastier pro-nazi collaborationist parties during the occupation, the RNP. Robert Mitterrand married Corrèze's niece Edith. Schueller's daughter Liliane (still today the majority L'Oréal shareholder, and France's richest woman) had married a school friend of Mitterrand's, André Bettencourt, supposedly a Résistant - but it turned out he had been certified a Résistant by Mitterrand's own shadowy organisation. (Bettencourt had in fact written shrilly pétainiste articles for a German Paris-based Propagandastaffel publication during the war.)

And still it never occurred to me that Mitterrand himself was at the heart of this tangled web - I remember being reassured by a remark he made after our story broke (complete with damning Bettencourt quotes) at a small Élysée dinner-party attended by a friend. "Bettencourt made some mistakes when he was very young, but he made up for them later on in the war," the President said dismissively, and being told of this, I remember feeling reassured.

It was, of course, illusory. Even before Pierre Péan's biography disclosed Mitterrand's Vichy career in 1994, some of the President's more provocative moves came under public scrutiny. Every year, for instance, he had the local Préfet - the official representative of the Republic! - lay a wreath on Pétain's grave. During his customary 1992 Bastille Day interview, he flatly refused to acknowledged any French responsibility in the rounding up and deportation of Jews by Vichy (75,000 died). As René Bousquet, the former secretary general of the Vichy police, finally seemed about to be tried, Mitterrand took his defence in "casual" conversations with journalists - and it became obvious that they had remained friends throughout the years (Mitterrand even played a cruel joke on his chief aide of 11 years, Jacques Attali, who is Jewish, by once inviting him to lunch "with a few friends" at the restaurant Dodin Bouffant - then after the lunch telling him who exactly the perky elderly South-Western notable sitting next to him really was.) I later asked Attali how he accounted for Mitterrand's attitude and past, and he wouldn't answer - it was plain he had been and still is seduced by the president's charm and vast intelligence, but was wounded. ("Le silence est la forme ultime de la gratitude", he said with some elegance and not a little meaning recently.)

Ultimately, what I can't forgive François Mitterrand are less his youthful mistakes (although they were far more important than he let Péan on to) and certainly not his private life vagaries (though we'll be hearing in forthcoming weeks of two more illegitimate children, the youngest of whom is only 8) but the fact that towards the end of his mandate, and his life, he had become so convinced of his own powers that he tried the ultimate sleight of hand on the French people - make them accept that truth mattered little, and principles not at all. I shan't even go into the shady money dealings: the tip of that iceberg was revealed by investigative journalist Jean Montaldo, and I am equally certain that the huge amount of misappropriations by the president and his various family members will come out in a short time. This is the man who for PR purposes hijacked the funeral of his former PM Pierre Bérégovoy, an honest man goaded beyond endurance to suicide, and whose anguished telephone calls he had refused to take for several weeks.

When the Péan book came out Mitterrand gave a nauseating interview to TV pundit (and state channel chief) Jean-Pierre Elkabbach: half of it was devoted to brushing away the sins of Vichy as minor misdemeanours. Mitterrand - a law graduate! - said that as late as 1942, he wasn't aware of the "statut des Juifs", the stringent 1940 legal racial restrictions imposed on France's Jews. (He also said they applied to "foreign" Jews, a revealing slip of the tongue.) He justified his criticising of the maquis fighters among the Resistance organisations (how untidy!) The second half of the interview was devoted to long, stoic, beautifully phrased answers about his prostate cancer, designed to make him look good, noble, brave. The implications were clear: collaboration was OK because so many people were involved; while how could such a heroic character as he be criticised for anything he chose to do in his life? It was pure, unadulterated self-sanctification. He had been more or less in power (or a member of the Establishment) for over 50 years; he wrote elegant (if contrived) French; his friends were the best and the brightest of the Left bank; he practically walked on water. In front of my TV set, I simply felt sick.

There are no points awarded in France for plain honesty; and admitting to one's mistakes is laying yourself open to ridicule, to the very least. But a Socialist president elected to "Change Life" (his perhaps unrealistic campaign promise of 1981) and vowing his regime would restore "morality" - Robespierrian virtue! - to Giscard's France could have taken one or two steps in the right direction. Instead François Mitterrand elevated lying and betrayal to an art with such brilliance that if I were a believer, I would have little doubts as to where he is now - back to running that rather warm place down there. No wonder he was angry with Gorbachev for letting East Germany go.

© Copyright The European & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1996