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.