How François Mitterrand reinvented Europe — with Margaret Thatcher 

The French President, Emmanuel Macron, is making a pilgrimage today to Jarnac, a small town in the middle of nowhere, where one of his predecessors, François Mitterrand, is buried close to his birthplace. Mitterrand died 25 years ago today, consumed by prostate cancer in a Paris apartment.

In May 1981, he defeated the late Valery Giscard d’Estaing, to become the first Socialist President of the Fifth Republic. Giscard long outlived his foe, dying a few months ago. Giscard’s real successor as a liberal reformist President without a party base is Emmanuel Macron, who began as a Socialist but then launched his own movement. Now Macron is paying homage to the supreme political animal, who outwitted his opponents, as much on the Left as the Gaullists.

He reigned – there is no other word – for 14 years and Macron hopes some of the Mitterrand magic will rub off on him. As long as Macron only has to face Marine Le Pen – the unelectable Jeremy Corbyn of the French Right – he will probably win his second term in May 2022. But if anyone with half the political skill of Mitterrand emerges from the mainstream centre-right in France, Macron will be in trouble.

Mitterrand arrived at a crucial point in world history. In Britain and America, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were initiating the liberal conservative economic revolution that has dominated the democratic world ever since. It is basically an updating of the Enrichessez-vous (Fill your boots) political-economic system of mid-19th century France. While Thatcher was privatising and deregulating, and, like Reagan, ripping up the post-war social settlement with an assault on trade union membership and negotiating power, Mitterrand went in the opposite direction.

He nationalised banks and firms, increased the legal minimum wage, and to begin with brought in clunky protectionism. For example, he made all Japanese video-recorders go for customs clearance in Poitiers, in the hope that slowing down the arrival of imported goods from Japan would allow a French replacement to emerge.

Yet despite his statist policies, on the international stage Mitterrand was a virulent anti-Communist. He supported Reagan’s installation of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Germany, telling the Bundestag: “The protestors are in the West, the Soviet missiles that threaten us are in the East. I consider that an unequal relationship.” He went to Moscow and at a Kremlin banquet told his Soviet hosts to release the dissident Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov, at a time when the Iron Lady was proclaiming she could do business” with Gorbachev and the communist tyrants ruling Russia.

When the Falklands were invaded, the first call of support Mrs Thatcher received was from the Elysée. At the time, the Reagan administration was cosying up to the anti-Semitic military junta in Buenos Aires, which Jeanne Kirkpatrick and others saw as a bulwark against the Left in Latin America.

The Mitterrand-Thatcher connection was remarkable. He said she had the mouth of Marylin Monroe, but the eyes of Caligula. Yet they worked together to join England and France via the Channel Tunnel and to support the enlargement of Europe to take in then poor countries like Spain, Portugal, and Greece.

Above all, the two mono-lingual big beasts of 1980s Europe joined to force through the Single European Act, the biggest sharing of national sovereignty seen since the Treaty of Rome. For Thatcher this was about exporting her liberal economic, free market and open trade ideology across the Continent. For Mitterrand, it was about a further reduction in the nation-first politics, the Europe des patries championed by his old rival Charles de Gaulle. In his view — shared by the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, another mono-lingualist — a Europe based on nations, without some sharing of powers, was the Europe that led to the two great wars of the first half of the 20th century.

The English have never really “got” Mitterrand. Journalists mocked his affairs, or his undeclared daughter, never realising that before long there would be an occupant of Downing Street who would make Mitterrand look like a novice in the adultery and procreation stakes.

I wrote the first biography in English of Mitterrand in 1982 and, other than a solid biography by Philip Short, there have been hardly any good books on him compared to the annual “new” biographies of De Gaulle British writers churn out, even though Mitterrand had far more influence on today’s Britain than the General.

There are an endless attempts by British commentators — like Andrew Neil who don’t know France or much French, even if (like Lords Lawson and Lilley) they have holiday homes in France — to prove that England does better than France and the Thatcher heritage is more significant than that of Mitterrand.

It is a pointless debate. Both countries have stronger and weaker points. France is far more liberal in economic terms today than it was when Mitterrand won power in 1981. Boris Johnson insists he wants to put right the social ravages of Thatcherism, with his levelling up agenda aimed at winning working class votes in Northern “Red Wall” seats which Mrs Thatcher ignored.

The big difference is Europe. Mitterrand allied with Kohl and Thatcher to lay the foundations of today’s European Union. With Mrs Thatcher’s support, he sent his economically liberal finance minister Jacques Delors to lay the foundation of the Europe that the Continent still has today.

We have taken a different route with Brexit. Emmanuel Macron is openly contemptuous of Brexit ideology. The next years will decide whether the 1980s vision of a more integrated Europe advanced by Mitterrand wins out. Or whether a Brexitised Europe — returning to a cluster of nation states huddling behind their borders, the ideology which Mrs Thatcher came to adopt and promote shortly before Mitterrand’s death in 1996 — re-emerges in the second quarter of the 21st century.

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