François Mitterrand

François Mitterrand appears in the book at the intersection of presidential power, literary reputation, and political misjudgment. His relationships with the polemicist Jean-Edern Hallier and with the commentators the narrator calls “subtle minds” show how cultural discernment could coexist with compromised political judgment. The sharpest test comes during the August 1991 coup attempt: Mitterrand congratulates those he believes to be the new Soviet masters, then argues that they should be judged by their actions, as if the coup itself were not already decisive evidence.

President and literary patron

Mitterrand is presented as a president proud of his sophistication and literary taste, a self-image given a revealing form in his esteem for Jean-Edern Hallier. Hallier had supported Mitterrand’s 1981 presidential campaign, hoping for a reward such as a ministry or a television station. Mitterrand made no secret of calling him a great writer. The contrast is central to their subsequent antagonism: Hallier had expected political recognition, but the hoped-for reward never came, and he became the new president’s sworn enemy.

The narrator portrays this break not as a quiet disagreement but as a conversion of literary ambition into political attack. Hallier circulated a pamphlet called The Lost Honor of François Mitterrand, but no one dared publish it. He therefore relaunched L’ Idiot, a weekly that had not appeared for fifteen years, and recruited writers whose brief was to write whatever came into their heads so long as it was scandalous. The paper attacked Mitterrand’s favorites and the causes associated with his second term, including SOS Racisme, human rights, and World Music Day. Its declared allegiance was to style over ideas and to writers’ opinions rather than journalistic fact. Mitterrand’s admiration for Hallier’s literary stature thus sits beside a press campaign built to attack his government.

Hallier’s rebellion and surveillance

Hallier’s attacks included rumors about Mitterrand’s associates who had collaborated with the Nazis during the war, his cancer, and an illegitimate daughter. The narrator carefully marks the uncertain status of these claims: some would later be described as open secrets, but they had not been established as such in the narrator’s own experience and were news to him at the time. The distinction matters in an account of a newspaper that welcomed slander and treated scandal as a literary weapon.

The conflict also acquired a state-security dimension. The antiterrorism task force at the Élysée Palace spent substantial time listening to Hallier’s telephone calls and those of his friends; even the pay phone at the Closerie des Lilas, where Hallier often spent time, was tapped. The book does not present this as a personal order from Mitterrand, but places the surveillance alongside the president’s political feud with a former supporter. Hallier’s answer was to make the conflict public through his pamphlet and newspaper, turning opposition to the president into the organizing principle of a writers’ circle in which insults were welcomed and libel suits accumulated.

Romania and the subtle minds

The narrator’s criticism of Mitterrand extends beyond Hallier. In his account of Romania, he introduces “subtle minds”: diplomats, journalists, and observers who made a specialty of contradicting official discourse, media clichés, and humanitarian assumptions. They argued, for example, that the KGB and the Securitate were not simply institutions of death and darkness, and disputed conventional judgments about Elena Ceauşescu’s scientific work. The narrator presents Romania’s manipulation and deception, including the mass graves that had aroused compassion in the West, as especially fertile ground for this contrarian style of interpretation.

Mitterrand had the ear of these commentators, and the narrator says they made their mark on his foreign policy. Their influence is significant because the book frames their skepticism not as neutral correction but as a habit of minimizing what public outrage was trying to name. In this portrait, the president’s sophistication becomes politically consequential: the appetite for readings that appear more complicated than common accounts can leave power better served than truth. The criticism is directed at the political effect of this intellectual posture, rather than offered as a full account of Mitterrand’s Romanian policy.

The August 1991 coup

The most concentrated judgment of Mitterrand comes during the failed coup in the Soviet Union. As the coup unfolds, he hurriedly congratulates the people he believes to be the new masters. When criticized for doing so, he answers loftily that they should be judged by their actions. The narrator’s reply is that a coup is itself an action, and a significant one. The exchange makes Mitterrand’s language of measured judgment appear detached from the event it is supposed to assess.

That response stands against the book’s description of the resistance in Moscow. Boris Yeltsin organized opposition from parliament, known as the White House; crowds defended it with barricades and their bodies, while tanks backed away and soldiers received flowers. After four days, the feared restoration of Soviet rule had not occurred. The coup’s failure was remembered as both frightening and exhilarating, and its organizers appeared as buffoons rather than terrifying heirs to the old order. Against that public drama, Mitterrand’s early congratulations look not like prudence but like a failure to recognize what the attempted seizure of power already revealed.

The episode also places him among the few international supporters the narrator associates with the putschists, alongside Fidel Castro, Muammar Gaddafi, and Saddam Hussein. That company intensifies the contrast between Mitterrand’s cultivated image and the political company his judgment temporarily kept. Across these episodes, the book does not reduce him to a single motive or supply a complete portrait of his presidency. It shows instead how literary admiration, contrarian counsel, and a preference for postponing judgment could converge at moments when the consequences of power were already visible.