François Mitterrand

French politician whose career spanned half a century and culminated in the presidency of France when he replaced Valery Giscard de’Estaing in May 1981. Mitterrand’s election marked the first time in the 23-year history of the Fifth Republic that a Socialist Premier had won power from the center-right coalition.

He became the longest-serving French head of state since World War II. During his 14-year tenure as President, he was credited with being an architect of European unity. Enigmatic, paradoxical, and apparently politically flexible, Mitterand’s politics morphed from right-wing sympathizer to Resistance fighter to Socialist Party leader.

Born in the Cognac region of southwestern France, Mitterrand was one of eight children born to a railroad stationmaster and his wife. Raised in a conservative, bourgeois and Catholic household, he belonged to a far-right Catholic youth movement, took part in at least two extreme-right student demonstrations and wrote for a conservative journal.

In 1934, he arrived in Paris to study law. After he received his degree, he was drafted into the French army at the time that Europe was moving into World War II. In 1941, he escaped a German prison during WW II and became a civil servant in the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazi occupiers in France. At some point, he switched sides and became one of the greatest of the Resistance leaders. This all left him with less of a black-and-white viewpoint of the Nazi occupation.

He went on, after the war, to be a bureaucrat in postwar France. He held posts in 11 of the 23 governments of the Fourth Republic, between 1947 and 1967. He was minister of the interior in 1954, and minister of justice from 1956-1957. He was accused of leaking secrets to the Communist Party in 1954, and in Paris, in 1959, there was an attempt to kill him.

He was viewed as someone who was ready to adjust to events rather than control them.