Mitterrand, Enigmatic Ex-Leader of France, Dies

PARIS —  Francois Mitterrand, whose political career spanned half a century, from right-wing sympathizer to Resistance fighter to Socialist Party icon and finally French president, died Monday morning at his office apartment near the Eiffel Tower. He was 79.

One of this country’s most respected and enigmatic leaders, Mitterrand retired in May after an extraordinary, zigzag political career that concluded in the Elysee Palace, where two seven-year terms made him the longest-serving head of state in modern French history.

He had battled prostate cancer for more than two years and, though weakened, had energetically presided over a dozen official functions in the days before he handed over power May 17 to Jacques Chirac, the 62-year-old conservative politician who had twice failed to defeat Mitterrand.

Chirac, in a nationally televised address Monday, paid his respects to his longtime Socialist adversary, calling him a man “of complexity” who had, with his election to president in 1981, helped France “discover that it could have an alternative policy without it leading to a major political crisis.”

World leaders on Monday praised the former president for standing solidly with North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies during the Soviet challenges of the early 1980s, the Persian Gulf War and the peaceful revolutions that ended East-West divisions.

President Clinton called him “a man of vision” and added, “Not only France, but the United States and the entire world benefited from his strong and principled leadership.”

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin sent his condolences by telegram, applauding Mitterrand for “his support of democratic reform in our country.” To Mitterrand’s widow, Yeltsin described him as “an outstanding statesman and politician.”

Former President Ronald Reagan said in a statement issued in Los Angeles: “Despite differences in political philosophies, our meetings were always well focused on mutual goals for arms reduction and economic stability in the world.”

Since his retirement, Mitterrand had spent most of his time with his wife, Danielle, and other members of his family, which includes two grown sons and a 20-year-old daughter by a longtime mistress. As was his custom, he spent the Christmas holidays in Egypt. According to his wishes, he will be buried Thursday in a private ceremony at the family plot in his hometown of Jarnac, in southwestern France.

To the end, Mitterrand was an enduring mystery to his 58 million fellow citizens. Though one of his country’s most able and clever politicians, his legacy was debated strongly in France. His tenure was marked not only by economic growth but also by increasing unemployment and a widening gap between rich and poor.

His greatest achievements were on the world stage, especially his relentless pursuit of greater European unity. And his abiding conviction that France was still a world power went down well with the citizenry.

As a leader, Mitterrand embodied many of the traits the French have historically admired in their leaders. Behind the lips pursed in a permanent frown was an aloof intellectual and lover of literature but also a cunning politician. Tough and resilient, he experienced both devastating political defeat and soaring victory.

Capable of being imperious as well as inscrutable, he was a man so revered and complex that dozens of books were written to explain him--and none of those books failed to make the bestseller list.

“He was a literary figure, fantastic,” said Franz-Olivier Giesbert, editor of Le Figaro, the conservative Paris newspaper, and himself the author of a Mitterrand biography. “Our fascination with him was incredible. But he was very full of ambiguity. Very pragmatic, but very courageous too.

French political analysts, even those who didn’t like Mitterrand’s politics have compared him to Charles de Gaulle, Resistance leader and the president who ushered in the Fifth Republic in 1958.

“More than De Gaulle even, Mitterrand was the man of the century,” said Serge July, editor of the left-wing daily Liberation and also author of a book on Mitterrand.

“He fascinated the French,” July continued. “But it wasn’t always the fascination of love. Sometimes it was the fascination of hate. He was a person who remained, even to his death, mysterious. He was someone we all wanted to know, to understand.

“Just when you thought you understood him, he became something else,” July added. “He was a little Machiavellian in that way. But very French. Very French. His contradictions were like a mirror for the French people.”

While Mitterrand’s supporters thought him strong-minded and good-hearted, his many critics considered him a political animal with a taste for the jugular and one ambition only--power.

In his last two years in office, though, after the conservatives had dealt his Socialists a devastating defeat in legislative elections, Mitterrand won plenty of sympathy when the regal aloofness he had nurtured for a lifetime began to soften.

In 1994, revelations by a Paris magazine that Mitterrand had a daughter by a mistress seemed to humanize him. And while some criticized the decision to reveal Mitterrand’s long-held secret, few were left untouched by the photograph showing the aging leader with an arm placed tenderly on his daughter’s shoulders.

Mitterrand’s frank discussion of his illness, an openness unprecedented in a French political leader, also seemed to seal his personal relationship with the people.

In a newspaper interview 17 months ago, he had acknowledged that his health was failing. Saying he would like to write an autobiography, he added, “But that takes time, a book, and I don’t have much left.” His only wish, he said then, was to finish his term of office.

Instead of writing his memoirs, Mitterrand opened up to a French author in an apparent attempt to set the record straight about his early years. But the revelations only added to the contradictions.

He admitted that as a teenager, he had been a member of a far-right Roman Catholic youth movement, taken part in at least two extreme-right student demonstrations and written for a conservative journal.

Mitterrand earned degrees in public law and political science in Paris and was drafted into the army in 1939. A year later, he was wounded near Verdun and taken prisoner by the Nazis.

After 18 months, and two failed attempts, he escaped. But soon he was working for the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, as a civil servant. Mitterrand told the biographer that his decision to work for Vichy was not, as his friends had suggested, a cover for work in the Resistance but a sincere expression of support for Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the Vichy premier.

Like many at that time, Mitterrand saw Petain, the aging hero of World War I, as France’s only hope of throwing off the German yoke and rebuilding the country. But he grew disenchanted with the Vichy regime and became one of the greatest Resistance leaders. He remained loyal to Petain’s memory, though, and placed a wreath on his tomb each Armistice Day until 1992, when he stopped, under pressure from French Jewish groups.

To Mitterrand, the war and the Nazi occupation were never as black and white as later generations of leaders and writers portrayed them.

He remained personally committed to the Franco-German relationship, shocking some of those with tortured memories of the war by allowing German soldiers to march in the annual Bastille Day parade in 1994, and, a decade earlier, by holding hands with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl as they honored French soldiers who died during World War I at Verdun.

In one of his last official acts, Mitterrand created an uproar in France by referring, during V-E Day commemorations in Berlin in May, to the “courageous” soldiers of World War II, “no matter what uniform they wore,” and saying he “never considered the Germans to be our enemies.”

Mitterrand was born Oct. 26, 1916, in the Cognac region of southwestern France, one of eight children of a railroad stationmaster and his wife. Mitterrand’s upbringing was Catholic, conservative and bourgeois in the days of the Depression and the rise of fascism.

After the war, Mitterrand was one of the many bureaucrats in postwar France, holding posts in 11 governments between 1947 and 1957. But when De Gaulle set up the Fifth Republic, Mitterrand chose not to join the bevy of political figures who rallied around the general--and, in fact, became one of De Gaulle’s fiercest critics.

When the Socialist Party managed only 5% of the vote in the 1971 election, Mitterrand, who was not even a member of the party, showed up at a party conference and proposed a united left to wrest control of the government from De Gaulle and the right.

His idea was welcomed, and he became, overnight, a member and the new leader of the party. He slowly built it up and, after forging a key alliance with the then-important Communist Party, eventually convinced the French that the left represented a strong and democratic alternative.

Mitterrand’s journey across the political landscape prompted many French analysts to label him an opportunist, a man loyal only to himself. Some considered him vindictive and even devious.

But his anti-political mannerisms, as much as anything else, inspired confidence among many French. A man of deliberate speech, he would often pause while speaking as if in thought, presenting a stark contrast to the energetic showmanship of other French politicians.

He won his first presidential election in 1981, at age 64, defeating incumbent President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, a conservative though not a Gaullist. The victory was hailed as the greatest political change in the country in at least a quarter of a century.

For Mitterrand, who had twice before been defeated for president--by De Gaulle in 1965 and, narrowly, by Giscard d’Estaing in 1974--the victory was an amazing resurrection. Written off, time and again, as a permanent loser, he was suddenly president.

“This is a victory above all for the forces of youth, the forces of the workers, the creative forces and the forces of renewal who gathered together in a great national effort,” Mitterrand said in his victory speech.

He dissolved the right-wing Parliament, was given a left-leaning one by the voters and then oversaw a rash of anti-capitalist measures, including an extensive nationalization program. But, a few years later, he backed away from his socialist economic model. “Beware,” he once said. “Socialism has not always been my bible.”

When the right took control of Parliament in 1986, Mitterrand was forced to select conservative leader Chirac as prime minister. During that uneasy “cohabitation,” Mitterrand focused on European and foreign affairs, a strategy that in 1988 helped him defeat Chirac’s bid for the presidency and win a second term.

Mitterrand’s political mien was evident in a nationally televised debate with Chirac in 1988. As the two clashed over whether an Iranian diplomat suspected in some Paris bombings should have been allowed to leave the country, Chirac challenged Mitterrand: “Dare you look me in the eye and dispute my version of the facts?”

Mitterrand, without blinking, replied: “Looking you in the eye, I dispute it.”

One of Mitterrand’s passions, shared by many previous French leaders, was building, and his architectural projects have transformed the skyline of Paris. He oversaw a renovation of the Louvre museum that included the controversial I.M. Pei-designed glass pyramid in the courtyard. He erected the new, state-of-the-art Bastille Opera house. His last project, and the one closest to his heart, was the $1.6-billion National Library, the world’s largest and most expensive book repository.

Though criticized for his building campaign, which one newspaper labeled “Pharaonic,” Mitterrand strongly defended his projects. A year ago, he proudly told reporters that he had fought many a finance minister who complained of his “princely whims.”

“I told them, ‘You will never have an architectural policy if you make cuts all the time,’ ” he said.

Times staff writer Stephanie Simon in Moscow contributed to this report.