A Taste for Intrigue: The Multiple Lives of François Mitterrand - Hardcover

Short, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805088539 ISBN 13: 9780805088533

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 2014

Synopsis

The man who changed the course of modern France

In 1981, François Mitterrand became France's first popularly elected socialist president. By the time he completed his mandate, he had led the country for 14 years, longer than any other French head of state in modern times. Mitterrand mirrored France in all its imperfections and tragedies, its cowardice and glory, its weakness and its strength.

In the wake of the Observatory affair (in which he orchestrated his own assassination attempt), his secretiveness and mistrust grew more pronounced, especially when details of a second family came to light; he was a mixture of "Machiavelli, Don Corleone, Casanova and the Little Prince," said his doctor.

During the German occupation, Mitterrand hedged his bets by joining Petain's Vichy government. Later in 1943, under the nom de guerre of Morland (and 30 other aliases), Mitterrand quit Vichy for the Resistance and a paramilitary organization.

He changed the ground rules of French social and political debate in ways more far-reaching and fundamental than any other modern leader before him, helping set the agenda for France and Europe for generations to come. Philip Short's A Taste for Intrigue will fill the gap and become the standard against which all other Mitterrand biographies are set.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Short is the author of several books, among them the definitive biographies Mao: A Life and Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. He has been a foreign correspondent for The Times (London), The Economist, and the BBC in Uganda, Moscow, China, and Washington, D.C.

Reviews

Upon his death, in 1995, a colleague and longtime observer of François Mitterrand remarked: I could never get the parts to add up, and perhaps those inconsistencies were his real strength. Indeed, as the biographer and journalist Short repeatedly indicates, Mitterrand was a tangled web of ­contradictions in both his personal and political life. He was an inveterate womanizer who still managed to maintain relationships with two wives, one official and one he actually lived with for many years. During WWII, he served with honor in the collaborationist Vichy regime and their Nazi masters but then risked life and limb as a leader of the Resistance. As a political opponent of De Gaulle, he campaigned against government high-handedness while he engaged in dirty tricks, including apparently staging a bogus assassination attempt upon himself. As president of France for 14 years, he talked the socialist talk, but many of his economic policies relaxed state controls. Short, like so many others, can’t conclude if Mitterrand was a cynical opportunist, a savvy pragmatist, or both, but this is a comprehensive and balanced biography of one of the most important European leaders of the last century. --Jay Freeman

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805088539
• ISBN 13: 9780805088533
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 640