IN MEMORIAM: FRANCOIS MITTERRAND JANUARY 8, 1996 TRANSCRIPT

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Today, the man who succeeded Francois Mitterrand is President Jacques Chirac, said that he had--Mitterrand had written one of the most important pages in the history of France. Do you agree with that, and what made it important?

JIM HOAGLAND, Washington Post: I think that is true, Charlayne. I mean, Francois Mitterrand will be remembered as one of the two great political leaders in France since World War II, the other one being Charles DeGaulle, who was his life-long nemesis and rival. Francois Mitterrand was president for 14 years, but that's not the real measure of his importance. He participated in or created a great deal of change in three areas; certainly in France, then in European union and unity, and on the world scene in his relations with the United States and the then Soviet Union, later Russia. France, of course, is the place where his impact was the most immediate. When he took power in 1981, it was an alternating of power in France that many had not expected to see. The conservatives and Gaullists and held power since 1958, and had written a constitution that was tailored specifically for DeGaulle. Mitterrand, in fact, attacked that constitution constantly, calling it a permanent coup de tat against democracy. But when he became president, it showed, first of all, that the left would be allowed to come to power, and secondly, that eventually the left would exercise power in responsible ways, in ways that the right would accept. France became in many ways less divided because of Mitterrand's victory and because of the socialist victory.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: But he started as a conservative.

MR. HOAGLAND: Started as a conservative, he became a Socialist president who then in 1983 in the course of one weekend totally changed his economic program because he saw that it wasn't working, and it could not work, and he was quite capable of doing a U-turn right away when he saw that power was threatened. He understood power. He understood human nature, and he understood history.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: So his legacy to France in that regard is what?

MR. HOAGLAND: Well, that he showed that power could be passed responsibly from the right to the left; that a Socialist president could ask workers, the unions of France, to make sacrifices in the name of fighting inflation; that he could make a sort of a union with Germany, and make it the motor of European unity. He had been a prisoner of war in a German prisoner of war camp, but he saw a German-French union, or at least a working agreement, as very important maintaining peace. He never trusted Germany at the end of his days, and sought to imbed a reunited, much stronger Germany in a federal Europe.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: You also said that, well, we're talking about his political odyssey from liberal to--I mean, from liberal to conservative. There were also those who said that no one was quite sure what he stood for, and they often called him a sphinx.

MR. HOAGLAND: That's right.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: What light can you shed on that?

MR. HOAGLAND: Mitterrand spoke in very elliptical terms. He loved to mystify those who listened to him. He loved an elegant phrase that did not convey a great deal of information. He was also a great writer, as well as a major politician.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And an intellectual.

MR. HOAGLAND: And an intellectual who really, I think, will be remembered for what he did to the face of Paris by restoring the Louvre Museum, by building many new projects for as much as his political work. But at the same time, he was fascinated with being elusive, being the sphinx, with never quite being someone you could nail down, you could seize. One of his rivals, Michel Jobere, who was French foreign minister under Gaullists, talked about Mitterrand as having the quality of the dew on a rose, that you could never seize Mitterrand in a way.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: What about those who say that Machiavelli should study Mitterrand?

MR. HOAGLAND: Well, that was the other nickname that the French used for him, was the Florentine, that here was a man who really loved dividing his opponents. He practiced when the right took power in the National Assembly twice during his 14 years as president, his main objective then became dividing the right, forcing the right wing parties to fight each other. And he did it quite masterfully.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: What about, what about the controversies in his life, especially the accusations which you later, I guess, acknowledged of working with the Vichy--the pro-Nazi Vichy French, did that affect him at all among his constituents in Paris?

MR. HOAGLAND: Probably not as much as we Americans would think it would. After all, Mitterrand was not the only person in France to have claimed perhaps a greater role in the Resistance than actually occurred. It seemed like once France was liberated everyone had been fighting the Nazis, when, in fact, that wasn't quite true. But Mitterrand, it's clear, did play an important role in the Resistance. He may have well hedged his bets by working with Marshal Petain and the Petain government as well, but I think there's enough of a record that shows that he fought with the Resistance to at least establish him as a credible figure during that time.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: The picture we see of him going to Bosnia even when he's racked with pain from the pancreatic cancer, traveling to the United States for seminars, and stuff, what does that say in the final analysis about him as he ended his days?

MR. HOAGLAND: This was a man who really achieved power as an act of will, and it was through the force of his personality and his intellect that he imposed himself on history and on his nation. And I think the fact that he could do something like that, he could go to Sarajevo when he was that sick, and in a war in which actually he had favored the other side to a great extent, showed that will power.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Well, Jim Hoagland, who covered Mitterrand and were with him often, thank you for sharing that with us.

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