Mitterrand e l'«Histoire»

Autore: Patrizia Dogliani
In: Storica. 32 • anno XI, 2005
doi:10.1400/78566
Acquista PDF Acquista PDF Acquista PDF
Abstract

Mitterrand and l’Histoire
Ten years after the disappearance of the French President François Mitterrand there is a number of publications and image reproductions that pay tribute to his complex personality both as a person and as a statistician. The essay focuses mainly on the relationship that Mitterrand entertains with history, in essentially two main areas. Firstly, how Mitterrand’s life spanned and was influenced by as many as for different political systems (three republics and the Vichy regime) to such an extent that his may be termed an «exemplary life» given it’s political and personal contradictions; in this respect, the only possible comparison is with Charles De Gaulle. Secondly, the reader is asked to consider the use that Mitterrand made of French history, achieved through the careful selection of instances, places, personalities, emblems. A conscientious manipulation that was developed to a much greater extent than any of his predecessors of even his successor Chirac ever managed. Not only did Mitterrand redesign a part of Paris’s urban layout and redefine ceremonies and recurrences in the national calendar, but during his last years of sickness and in preparation for his two funerals, the state funeral and the private ceremony, he reinstated the right of the double body of the king, analysed by Ernst Kantorowicz and more recently re-appraised by Jacques Juillard and other historians: the natural and consequently mortal one, and the one given over to political sacredness, no longer correspondent to royal absolutism but to that of the Republic.