And the Sea Is Never Full (48 page)

As usual, things drag. The inauguration—at the Louvre, no less—by Mitterrand takes place a few months before the legislative elections. As a result the promises and commitments made on the ministerial level are not fulfilled. The relatively modest annual budget of six million francs (around a million dollars) remains an objective, if not a dream. Nevertheless, the academy functions. Its first conference, held in the main amphitheater of the Sorbonne, deals with the problem of “intervention.” In Sienna, as guests of the municipality, academy members gather for a debate on “intolerance.” Whatever the academy does, it does well. It could do better—if it were given the means.

There is no doubt that Mitterrand could intervene to release the
funds, even during the era of
cohabitation
, especially since this is a project conceived with him. I speak to him about it several times. Each time he replies that he will mention it to the prime minister and to the minister of culture. The last time I bring up the subject, he simply says: “What can I do? I no longer have the power I used to have.” I had never found him so pathetic. That was in 1994.

Until the Bousquet affair, I believed that history would be kind to him. Since then, I no longer believe it. And I say this with sadness. From now on, whenever the name of René Bousquet is spoken, another name will instantly come to mind: that of his friend François Mitterrand.

The Bousquet affair breaks into the news in September 1994 like thunder announcing the days of awe and anguish of the Jewish High Holiday of Rosh Hashana.

I am in Paris for the publication of
Tous les Fleuves vont à la mer (All Rivers Run to the Sea)
. Invited by France-Inter radio for its 1 p.m. news program, I am waiting for my turn when I hear someone speaking about Pétain and Mitterrand. A staff member tells me the speaker’s name: Pierre Péan. The man himself seems pleasant and restrained, but what he says nevertheless upsets me. How can he pronounce the names of Mitterrand and Pétain in one breath? I listen to him unaware that he will be the tangible cause of my estrangement from Mitterrand.

Even before I have a chance to read Péan’s
Une jeunesse française
,
^*
I must endure the onslaught of the media as his revelations take on proportions reminiscent of the first stages of Watergate.

When I read the book, my first reaction is disbelief. I refuse to believe that a man like François Mitterrand could have concealed his Vichy past, formed intimate relationships with former
cagoulards
(members of La Cagoule, a clandestine right-wing organization), and become the friend of Bousquet, the French chief of police who, always surrounded by SS officers and the Gestapo, had organized the deportation of French Jewry. It couldn’t be. None of this fits in with the personality and life of the man I thought I knew so well.

True, from time to time, I had heard rumors, mostly vague. The person telling me this or that would be content to grin at me with an air of complicity or allow a sentence to go unfinished. Like everyone else
I ascribed all this gossip to right-wing propaganda. I would wonder what else they would invent to harm him. I rejected these defamatory reports; I refused to discuss them. Rabbinic law teaches that it is forbidden not only to spread calumnies but even to listen to them.

Péan’s book is something else. These are not calumnies. In light of his revelations, and those they lead to, my attitude has become untenable. How can I defend a political figure who praised Bousquet even after he had been indicted and convicted of crimes against humanity? He said he found him
“sympathique”
and saw him “with pleasure”! Was that all he could say about the former accomplice of the SS? To Nicole Leibowitz-Boulanger of
Le Nouvel Observateur
, I admit feeling pained, offended. I say the same on television, and to audiences that come to hear me in Nancy, Lille, and elsewhere. But I refuse to go any further. It is not in my nature to join a mob, especially since Mitterrand is ill, seriously ill. The public’s reaction is hostile. Here and there people tell me they cannot understand how I could be the friend of the friend of Bousquet. My answer: “The president honors me with his friendship; I owe it to him to listen to his explanations. The sooner the better.” But we are getting close to the Jewish High Holidays, and I must go home for Rosh Hashana.

It is when I come back to New York that I pick up the echoes of Mitterrand’s television interview with Jean-Pierre Elkabbach. I experience the same shock and outrage that is expressed by the French press. Some of the comments are offensive, but they come from precisely those who until recently showed him nothing but loyalty and affection. I hear disillusioned remarks from all sides. How is it possible that a man so intelligent, knowledgeable, and informed could not have been aware of the anti-Jewish laws of Vichy? The plundering, the persecutions, the arrests, the roundups—how could he have failed to know about them? And the “Vél d’Hiv”—he claims not to have known about that either, he who always wants to know everything? And if he knew, is it conceivable that he remained indifferent, which would be a thousand times worse? I find it difficult to cope with this affair, which gets more poisonous by the day. Abandoned by many of his political allies and personal friends, Mitterrand balks instead of confronting the problem. Or so I am told by a close female aide who when she dared to suggest to him that a new course of action was necessary, drew his wrath. That same day she handed him her resignation—which the president refused. Will he ever understand what is happening to him?

I call Anne Lauvergeon, who has succeeded Attali as the president’s right hand. Anne is discreet, superbly intelligent, and highly effective. She knows the depth of my dismay and appreciates my restraint. An appointment is made with the president for the week of Sukkot.

The welcome is friendly as always. The president’s face is marked by his illness, his gaze crossed by somber shadows. His voice is tense, broken. He is tired and speaks to me of the treatment he is undergoing. I wonder how I shall bring myself to ask him the questions that are sure to pain him. But I have no choice. As an opening, I quote to him a saying of Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav, already reported in the first volume of my memoirs: “The world is mistaken about two things. First, it is wrong in thinking that a great man is incapable of making mistakes; it is also mistaken in thinking that once the mistake has been made, the great man ceases being great.” I feel that I have offered him a good way out, but he refuses to take it.

He tells me squarely that he has made no mistake. None? None. Hence no remorse, no regrets. The anti-Jewish laws of Vichy? Never knew about them. But as a civil servant of Vichy, had he not been asked to fill out a questionnaire in which he was required to declare that he was not a Jew? No, he was not a civil servant; he had a contract. And what was the difference? Precisely that he was not required to fill out that questionnaire. In short, he had done nothing wrong. But what about Bousquet? How could he have maintained friendly relations with this high Vichy official, an associate of the SS chiefs Heydrich and Oberg, who had organized the deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz? He shrugs his shoulders and replies that when he made his acquaintance, Bousquet had already been rehabilitated by the courts and was being received by the cream of financial society. In fact, there were in his entourage several very well known and respected Jews. How then could he, Mitterrand, have doubted his innocence? Moreover, they were not friends. They had seen each other only a dozen times and had never addressed each other by the intimate
tu
. As I insist on the strangeness of their relationship, he finally concedes that perhaps he should have shown himself “more vigilant.” I suggest to him that he take advantage of a future television interview to make a statement: “I was young and inexperienced; when one is young, one does things that are sometimes foolish; but after all, since then I’ve done other things.” I tell him that if he says that, the public will turn the page. He refuses. I say to him: “Even God admits
to having made a mistake; read Genesis. But you have never made a mistake?” Then I suggest to him that we meet once more to record a conversation that would get to the bottom of the matter. I explain to him that I must understand. It is indispensable for me to understand. We shall then publish it somewhere. Mitterrand agrees but asks me to address my questions to him in writing beforehand.

After another hour and a half of discussion he accompanies me to the door, more cordial than ever. Did he know that we would not see each other again? With a heavy heart I linger in Anne Lauvergeon’s office before leaving for the airport. I tell her how unhappy I am with the conversation. Why had I not been able to pierce the shadows in which the president has wrapped his past? I tell Anne of my certainty that this affair will leave a black stain on Mitterrand’s passage through history; his tendency toward equivocation is doing him harm. I tell her of my suggestion for a recorded interview.

My questions—on Vichy and Pétain, the wreath and Bousquet, his writings for an anti-Semitic magazine, and the Francisque medal (Vichy’s highest decoration)—I fax to Anne for transmittal to the president. Did he read them? Certainly. His reaction is negative. Is he annoyed that I am not ready to be his defender? I am sure of it. In any case, he does not think he has to justify himself. In other words, he will not respond to my fax. There will be no further interview. No further dialogue.

I am disappointed. Sometimes I tell myself the word is not strong enough. For suddenly I understand that there’s a coherence and a logic in Mitterrand’s political course. His refusal to investigate the Nazi past of certain Frenchmen and to bring them to justice, his annual custom of secretly arranging to place a wreath on Pétain’s tomb, his links to former members of La Cagoule and other Nazi collaborators, his determination to suppress that part of his life, his habit of surrounding himself with Jews—all this must have an explanation.

I cannot believe that he wanted to deceive me, that I had been both dupe and victim of his genius for manipulation. I want to believe that there must be some other explanation. Would he give it to me, if only to complete our book of conversations that the publisher Odile Jacob is dying to publish? It is a project conceived long ago and that in the end becomes grafted onto the Vichy-Pétain-Bousquet affair, adding a new unpleasant angle.

•   •   •

Jack Lang had had the idea for the book since 1985, and the president liked and accepted it. Lang used the preparation for the Nobel laureates’ conference two years later to broach it again even more forcefully. Were there some ulterior motives connected with the presidential elections in May? Perhaps—but I don’t see how a book like that could have been of use to the Socialist candidate. The Jewish vote? It was his to start with. And then a book, especially a book with two authors, isn’t written in three months. And Jack knew of my reluctance to intervene in French internal affairs. Anyway, the project didn’t tempt me, as though I had a foreboding that, for me, it would become a source of great disappointment. As for the president, he procrastinated. Months went by. He was not in a hurry. Nor was I.

But Jack Lang was impatient: “These dialogues, they must be done; this has been drawn out far too long.” In the end, he got his way. In the excitement of the conference that took place in January 1988, I settled down to the task. The idea was to have a dialogue between two men linked by friendship but seemingly separated by everything else: ethnic origin, social position, religious education. It was to be a book of open-ended conversations, discussions on general, timeless themes. After considering the matter for several weeks I drew up a table of contents: power, friendship, war, childhood, death, God, the Bible, Israel, faith, writing. Attali thought it was fine, and the president approved. Our first subject: childhood, of course; comparing his with mine. The childhood of a leader who has reached the summit of power and that of a Jewish writer who will never succeed in tearing himself away from his yeshiva.

Two sound engineers busied themselves behind a screen. And suddenly the tape recorder refused to cooperate. As it happened, Jacques Attali was present—a fact that later on, in 1993, will cause me much sadness and a huge headache. But during this first session for the book I was pleased that he was there, for he made himself useful: It was decided he would take notes on the president’s remarks, but not on mine. Anyway, my memory is good. And for our subsequent talks, the tape recorder was repaired.

Our conversations, each from one hour to an hour and a half long, are carried on in an atmosphere of friendship. I ask questions and Mitterrand responds. Only rarely does he ask me questions. I don’t feel at ease in my role of interviewer; I gave that up a long time ago.

To be sure, I could be more confrontational, but that’s not in my nature. And then, too, I am respectful of the man sitting across from me. I don’t dare push him on the points he seeks to avoid. I steer clear of minefields. I don’t touch upon embarrassing subjects. Not yet. I tell myself that, in any event, this is just a draft. I’ll have a chance to rework it, as he will, too. That will be the time to urge him to review his positions. There’s no hurry. His mandate has just been renewed. Seven years is a long time.

In his replies, Mitterrand is open. I like what he says about his childhood: “I had no friends my own age.” About his adolescence: “I went from wonder to wonder.” About his parents: “They were very available. They hardly spoke. My father would say you don’t learn anything from words, only from deeds.” About his mother, traveling in a train with people making anti-Dreyfus, anti-Semitic remarks: “My mother’s eyes opened wider and wider with surprise.” About his discovery of the stranger, who is “welcomed into a closed circle like a thief.” He is severe with De Gaulle, skeptical about Mendès-France. His favorite writers: Barrès, Chardonne.

He has a talent for quickly finding answers that suit him. Sometimes he asks me to repeat my questions, saying that he doesn’t understand. Then, rather than launch into explanations, I change the subject. The major problem is time—his own, of course, but also mine, since I live in New York and teach in Boston. Months go by between appointments and more than once I consider abandoning the project. But we go back to it again and again. Seven topics have been dealt with; there are three left. Then we’ll review the entire text. We have time.