93 Facts About Francois Mitterrand

Francois Marie Adrien Maurice Mitterrand was President of France, serving under that position from 1981 to 1995, the longest time in office in the history of France.

Francois Mitterrand served under the Vichy Regime during its earlier years.

Francois Mitterrand opposed Charles de Gaulle's establishment of the Fifth Republic.

Francois Mitterrand was re-elected in 1988 and remained in office until 1995.

Francois Mitterrand invited the Communist Party into his first government, which was a controversial decision at the time.

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Francois Mitterrand instead pushed a socially liberal agenda with reforms such as the abolition of the death penalty, and the end of a government monopoly in radio and television broadcasting.

Francois Mitterrand was the first French President to appoint a female Prime Minister, Edith Cresson, in 1991.

Francois Mitterrand was twice forced by the loss of a parliamentary majority into "cohabitation governments" with conservative cabinets led, respectively, by Jacques Chirac, and Edouard Balladur.

Beyond making the French Left electable, Francois Mitterrand presided over the rise of the Socialist Party to dominance of the left, and the decline of the once-mighty Communist Party.

Francois Marie Adrien Maurice Mitterrand was born on 26 October 1916 in Jarnac, Charente, the son of Joseph Mitterrand and Yvonne Lorrain.

Francois Mitterrand's father worked as an engineer for the Compagnie Paris Orleans railway.

Francois Mitterrand had three brothers, Robert, Jacques, and Philippe, and four sisters, Antoinette, Marie-Josephe, Colette, and Genevieve.

Francois Mitterrand had two children as results of extra-marital affairs: an acknowledged daughter, Mazarine was born on 1974, and with his mistress Anne Pingeot, and an unacknowledged son, Hravn Forsne was born on 1988, and with Swedish journalist Chris Forsne.

Francois Mitterrand's nephew Frederic Mitterrand is a journalist, Minister of Culture and Communications under Nicolas Sarkozy, and his wife's brother-in-law Roger Hanin was a well-known French actor.

Francois Mitterrand studied from 1925 to 1934 in the College Saint-Paul in Angouleme, where he became a member of the Jeunesse Etudiante Chretienne, the student organisation of Action catholique.

Francois Mitterrand took membership for about a year in the Volontaires nationaux, an organisation related to Francois de la Rocque's far-right league, the Croix de Feu; the league had just participated in the 6 February 1934 riots which led to the fall of the second Cartel des Gauches.

Francois Mitterrand participated in the demonstrations against the "invasion meteque " in February 1935 and then in those against law teacher Gaston Jeze, who had been nominated as juridical counsellor of Ethiopia's Negus, in January 1936.

Francois Mitterrand furthermore had some personal and family relations with members of the Cagoule, a far-right terrorist group in the 1930s.

Francois Mitterrand then served his conscription from 1937 to 1939 in the 23rd regiment d'infanterie coloniale.

Francois Mitterrand became engaged to Marie-Louise Terrasse in May 1940, when she was 16, but she broke it off in January 1942.

Francois Mitterrand was at the end of his national service when the war broke out.

Francois Mitterrand fought as an infantry sergeant and was injured and captured by the Germans on 14 June 1940.

Francois Mitterrand became involved in the social organisation for the POWs in the camp.

Francois Mitterrand had two failed escape attempts in March and then November 1941 before he finally escaped on 16 December 1941, returning to France on foot.

Francois Mitterrand worked from January to April 1942 for the Legion francaise des combattants et des volontaires de la revolution nationale as a civil servant on a temporary contract.

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Francois Mitterrand worked under Jean-Paul Favre de Thierrens who was a spy for the British secret service.

Francois Mitterrand then moved to the Commissariat au reclassement des prisonniers de guerre.

Francois Mitterrand left the Commissariat in January 1943, when his boss Maurice Pinot, another, was replaced by the collaborator Andre Masson, but he remained in charge of the centres d'entraides.

Socialist Resistance leader Jean Pierre-Bloch says that Francois Mitterrand was ordered to accept the medal as cover for his work in the resistance.

Francois Mitterrand added that the "criminal folly of the occupiers was seconded by the French, by the French State".

Francois Mitterrand built up a resistance network, composed mainly of former POWs.

Francois Mitterrand used Purgon, Monnier, Laroche, Captain Francois, Arnaud et Albre as cover names.

Francois Mitterrand promoted his movement to the British and American Authorities, but he was sent to Algiers, where he met de Gaulle, by then the uncontested leader of the Free French.

Later Francois Mitterrand refused to merge his group with other POW movements if de Gaulle's nephew Cailliau was to be the leader.

From 27 November 1943 Francois Mitterrand worked for the Bureau central de renseignements et d'action.

In December 1943 Francois Mitterrand ordered the execution of Henri Marlin by Jacques Paris and Jean Munier, who later hid out with Francois Mitterrand's father.

Antelme was restricted to the camp to prevent the spread of disease, but Francois Mitterrand arranged for his "escape" and sent him back to France for treatment.

Francois Mitterrand held various offices in the Fourth Republic as a Deputy and as a Minister, including as a mayor of Chateau-Chinon from 1959 to 1981.

In May 1948 Francois Mitterrand participated in the Congress of The Hague, together with Konrad Adenauer, Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, Paul-Henri Spaak, Albert Coppe and Altiero Spinelli.

Francois Mitterrand connected with the left when he resigned from the cabinet after the arrest of Morocco's sultan.

In 1958, Francois Mitterrand was one of the few to object to the nomination of Charles de Gaulle as head of government, and to de Gaulle's plan for a Fifth Republic.

Francois Mitterrand justified his opposition by the circumstances of de Gaulle's comeback: the 13 May 1958 quasi-putsch and military pressure.

In September 1958, determinedly opposed to Charles de Gaulle, Francois Mitterrand made an appeal to vote "no" in the referendum over the Constitution, which was nevertheless adopted on 4 October 1958.

Indeed, in the second round of the legislative election, Francois Mitterrand was supported by the Communists but the French Section of the Workers' International refused to withdraw its candidate.

Also in that same year, on the Avenue de l'Observatoire in Paris, Francois Mitterrand claimed to have escaped an assassin's bullet by diving behind a hedge, in what became known as the Observatory Affair.

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Francois Mitterrand later said he had earlier been warned by right-wing deputy Robert Pesquet that he was the target of an Algerie francaise death squad and accused Prime Minister Michel Debre of being its instigator.

Years later in 1965, when Francois Mitterrand emerged as the challenger to de Gaulle in the second round of the presidential elections, de Gaulle was urged by an aide to use the Observatory Affair to discredit his opponent.

Francois Mitterrand visited China in 1961, during the worst of the Great Chinese Famine, but denied the existence of starvation.

Francois Mitterrand reinforced his position as a left-wing opponent to Charles de Gaulle in publishing Le Coup d'Etat permanent, which criticized de Gaulle's personal power, the weaknesses of Parliament and of the government, the President's exclusive control of foreign affairs, and defence, etc.

In 1965, Francois Mitterrand was the first left-wing politician who saw the presidential election by universal suffrage as a way to defeat the opposition leadership.

Francois Mitterrand ended the cordon sanitaire of the PCF which the party had been subject to since 1947.

Furthermore, Francois Mitterrand was a lone figure, so he did not appear as a danger to the left-wing parties' staff members.

Francois Mitterrand was supported in the second round by the left and other anti-Gaullists: centrist Jean Monnet, moderate conservative Paul Reynaud and Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, an extreme right-winger and the lawyer who had defended Raoul Salan, one of the four generals who had organized the 1961 Algiers putsch during the Algerian War.

Francois Mitterrand took the lead of a centre-left alliance: the Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left.

Francois Mitterrand was accused of being responsible for this huge legislative defeat and the FGDS split.

In June 1972, Francois Mitterrand signed the Common Programme of Government with the Communist Georges Marchais and the Left Radical Robert Fabre.

Francois Mitterrand was narrowly defeated by Giscard d'Estaing, Francois Mitterrand receiving 49.

Nevertheless, Francois Mitterrand won the vote at the Party's Metz Congress and Rocard renounced his candidacy for the 1981 presidential election.

Francois Mitterrand projected a reassuring image with the slogan "the quiet force".

Francois Mitterrand campaigned for "another politics", based on the Socialist programme 110 Propositions for France, and denounced the performance of the incumbent president.

Francois Mitterrand became the first left-wing politician elected President of France by universal suffrage.

Francois Mitterrand named Pierre Mauroy as Prime Minister and organised a new legislative election.

Francois Mitterrand continued to promote the new technologies initiated by his predecessor Valery Giscard d'Estaing: the TGV high speed train and the Minitel, a pre-World Wide Web interactive network similar to the web.

Francois Mitterrand passed the first decentralization laws, the Defferre Act.

Francois Mitterrand abolished the death penalty as soon as he took office, as well as the "anti-casseurs Act" which instituted collective responsibility for acts of violence during demonstrations.

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Francois Mitterrand dissolved the Cour de surete, a special high court, and enacted a massive regularization of illegal immigrants.

In terms of foreign policy, Francois Mitterrand did not significantly deviate from his predecessors and he continued nuclear weapons testing in the South Pacific in spite of protests from various peace and environmentalist organizations.

Francois Mitterrand thus named the RPR leader Jacques Chirac as Prime Minister.

Chirac mostly handled domestic policy while Francois Mitterrand concentrated on his "reserved domain" of foreign affairs and defence.

In one example, Francois Mitterrand refused to sign executive decrees of liberalisation, obliging Chirac to pass the measures through parliament instead.

Francois Mitterrand reportedly gave covert support to some social movements, notably the student revolt against the university reform.

Francois Mitterrand thus became the first President to be elected twice by universal suffrage.

On 16 February 1993, President Francois Mitterrand inaugurated in Frejus a memorial to the wars in Indochina.

Francois Mitterrand named the former RPR Finance Minister Edouard Balladur as Prime Minister.

Francois Mitterrand sharply criticized the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan as well as the country's nuclear weapons buildup.

When Francois Mitterrand visited the USSR in November 1988, the Soviet media claimed to be 'leaving aside the virtually wasted decade and the loss of the Soviet-French 'special relationship' of the Gaullist era'.

Nevertheless, Francois Mitterrand was worried by the rapidity of the Eastern bloc's collapse.

Francois Mitterrand was opposed to German reunification but came to see it as unavoidable.

Francois Mitterrand was opposed to the swift recognition of Croatia and Slovenia, which he thought would lead to the violent implosion of Yugoslavia.

Francois Mitterrand initially opposed further membership, fearing the Community was not ready and it would water it down to a free trade area.

Francois Mitterrand supported the enlargement of the Community to include Spain and Portugal.

Francois Mitterrand worked well with his friend Helmut Kohl and improved Franco-German relations significantly.

When Helmut Kohl, then German Chancellor, asked Francois Mitterrand to agree to reunification, Francois Mitterrand told Kohl he accepted it only in the event Germany would abandon the Deutsche Mark and adopt the Euro.

Francois Mitterrand criticized interventionism in sovereign matters, which was according to him only another form of "colonialism".

However, according to Francois Mitterrand, this did not imply lessened concern on the part of Paris for its former colonies.

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Francois Mitterrand thus continued with the African policy of de Gaulle inaugurated in 1960, which followed the relative failure of the 1958 creation of the French Community.

The controversy was eventually settled by an agreement between President Ronald Reagan and Francois Mitterrand which gave equal credit to both men and their teams.

In October 1985, to commemorate the tricentenary of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Francois Mitterrand gave a formal apology to the descendants of Huguenots around the world.

Francois Mitterrand died in Paris on 8 January 1996 at the age of 79 from prostate cancer, a condition he and his doctors had concealed for most of his presidency.

In 1990 Francois Mitterrand declared an amnesty for those under investigation, thus ending the affair.

From 1982 to 1986, Francois Mitterrand established an "anti-terror cell" installed as a service of the President of the Republic.

Court's judgement revealed that Francois Mitterrand was motivated by keeping elements of his private life secret from the general public, such as the existence of his illegitimate daughter Mazarine Pingeot, his cancer which had been diagnosed in 1981, and the elements of his past in the Vichy Regime which were not already public knowledge.

The court declared "Les faits avaient ete commis sur ordre soit du president de la Republique, soit des ministres de la Defense successifs qui ont mis a la disposition de tous les moyens de l'Etat afin de les executer" The court stated that Francois Mitterrand was the principal instigator of the wire taps and that he had ordered some of the taps and turned a blind eye to others and that none of the 3000 wiretaps carried out by the cell were legally obtained.