Volume 43, Number 3 · February 15, 1996
On the Death of Mitterrand
By William Pfaff
François Mitterrand was a provincial conservative and Catholic whose prewar political initiation was in rightist student circles, demonstrating in the Paris streets to mock democracy and attack the Popular Front. He flirted with fascism when that seemed first a choice, then a necessity, for France. His service to the wartime Pétainist government in Vichy evolved into a commitment to the Resistance, but this seems, in retrospect, less a decision of principle than an act of realism.
Feature, 733 words
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