François Mitterrand became president of France in 1981, and was re-elected to a second seven-year term in 1988. He was the first socialist to hold the presidency in the Fifth Republic. Born in 1916, Mitterrand was captured during the early stages of the Second World War, but escaped and returned to France where he worked in the resistance and prisoner of war movements, for which he was later decorated. He served in various junior ministerial posts during some of the Fourth Republic governments, but the creation of the Fifth Republic, initially under the firm control of the Gaullists, removed him from office for many years. Mitterrand spent this time working to overcome the main barrier to political success for the left in France, which was its fragmentation. The Parti Communiste Français (PCF) was bitterly opposed to the non-communist left, and was generally the most Stalinist of the Western European communist parties, and the non-communist left was itself divided into a set of rival groups. Mitterrand’s major achievement was welding these groups into one social democratic party, the Parti Socialiste (PS) in 1971, though he had earlier been the candidate for the presidency of an all-party left-wing coalition.
After that he pioneered an alliance with the PCF, in which the PS rapidly became the dominant member, leading to their success in the legislative elections following his election to the presidency in 1981. For a long time Mitterrand had been dismissed as a permanent loser, partly because of his association with the Fourth Republic, but he was eventually able to frame the French left in at least a semi-permanent way. As president he, inevitably, disappointed much of the left, being at most a reformer rather than a radical or revolutionary, and because he, unlike many socialists, did not want to reduce the power of the presidency as an office. In foreign policy he largely continued the Gaullist policy of French autonomy, and the effort to be the dominant power in the European Union. In economic policy the world recessions of the 1980s forced France, as much as any country, into the economic orthodoxy of the period—monetarism. Constitutionally Mitterrand succumbed to the attractions of a powerful office, and has ended up being seen as just as autocratic as his predecessors. Nevertheless, he did break the right-wing hold on effective power in France that had lasted, with few exceptions, for most of the Third and Fourth Republics and all of the Fifth Republic. It maybe that the office of the French Presidency forces on its incumbents certain characteristics, because Mitterrand’s successor, Jacques Chirac, though from a right-wing party, has been criticized in much the same way as both Mitterrand and his predecessor Giscard d’Estaing.
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