Financial scandal? Eavesdropping? Oh! glorify French Socialists at the grave of former President Mitterrand to stylite the party. The Celebrities of the Socialists want to distinguish themselves as the legitimate successor to the legendary head of state. The pilgrimage has high symbolic value, the participants are recruited from the elite of the Socialist Party (PS) and the ceremony leaves little room for a critical historical assessment: France's Socialist leadership will meet on Saturday the 15th The death of François Mitterrand in his hometown Jarnac.In this case, are members of the family, such as former ministers Jack Lang and Roland Dumas, the mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoe and especially Party leader Martine Aubry, as well as former presidential candidate Segolene Royal, Acting Chief of the Poitou-Charente. PS The two women were at the time Mitterrand - Aubry as Minister of Labour, Royal was temporarily in charge of files such as family, youth and social affairs.
The commemoration at the grave is not only a tribute to the great statesman, as of the socialist was paid by the media of his death described. The competitors who are candidates for the internal party primary elections in the fall for the candidacy to the Elysée race of 2012 seek, then, at the grave Mitterrand presented as true heir and legitimate successor.
Other contenders for this same heritage and the PS nomination stayed away from the socialist skating exhibition, such as former party leader (and ex-husband Royals), François Hollande, or Dominique Strauss-Kahn, director of the International Monetary Fund, currently in surveys as the leading challenger to President Nicolas Sarkozy cuts.
The ceremony in the provincial town of the Charente comes with the usual offerings - wreaths, visiting the house where the fourth President of the Republic on 26 GEBN was October 1916 and a lunch with about 450 invited guests. The bourgeois house of the parents is, together with the local cultural center and the Crypt, to settle the few stations left pilgrims who worship here, the party's history.
For was Mitterrand, a politician who is stylized in its lifetime a legend: As appointed conservatives to Charles de Gaulle, the general who represents the resistance, the foundation and the values of the Republic, embodies his long-time opponent to the left counter-proposal, society - even if the socialist habit during his two-fold office from 1981 to 1995 a style of government that characterized at least in the later years more by habit than by a monarchical indigenous contact with the working class.
No criticism of myth Mitterrand stay commemoration such considerations certainly relieved, as well as biographical contradictions, political, pirouetting, ideological U-turns or the authoritarian leadership of the President: The details of the legal circles in his youth who work during the Nazi occupation of the Vichy regime and admiration for the collaborationist Marshal Pétain General - displaced.
You prefer to remember the soldiers Mitterrand, who escaped from German captivity or resistance fighters. This fits better than the fact that Mitterrand or as president maintains relationships with people like the former Vichy police chief René Bousquet - during the occupation responsible for the deportation of thousands of French Jews.
But for the PS, the pillars of their saints - particularly in view of the 2012 presidential elections - will not damage, it goes to this 8 January is not a reappraisal of the mistakes Mitterrand, who signed during the Algerian War, 1956 / 7 as minister of justice, the death sentences for 45 Algerian prisoners, who was involved in a financial scandal of his party and listen to illegally as president journalists or political opponents did.
The attack on the Greenpeace vessel "Rainbow Warrior" in 1985 - apparently sanctioned by Mitterrand - seems just as forgotten as the support for questionable African despots. Socialists celebrate Mitterrand for minimum wage and retirement at age 60 is where the myth Landscaped Mitterrand: The man who abolished the death penalty, the retirement age lowered to 60 years and introduced the minimum wage.
Note belongs to the discourse of the European Mitterrand, to the treaties of Schengen and Maastricht, the "friend" by Helmut Kohl and the alleged help of the French at the reunification of Germany. And in being and consciousness remain - sometimes unwieldy - architectural legacy with which aimed at getting the ruler Mitterrand a place in history: The herkuleanischen "great work" like the "Arche de la Défense, the Bastille Opera and National Library and the renovation of the Louvre - with its glass pyramid.
It is these actions that shape the image under the socialist head of state. Even among supporters of the Conservatives Mitterrand appears in retrospect as a historical figure of intellectual focus and personality, who represented France with verve and dignity to the inside and outside. And the fact that the president led a double life and family entertained his beloved illegitimate daughter Mazarine, including at government expense? Oh, a trifle, which passes more than charming misstep.
Mazarine is also present at the death in Jarnac, just like the other children Mitterrand. The recognized 36 year old author describes, in which the public and bipartisan admiration for the late President, there is still ". My father was a humanist vision of politics, which was fed from the culture This gave him a certain amount of vision," says the learned philosopher and regrets that "these are missing today." And the jab is the current occupants of the Élysée as unmistakable as applicable: "My father had in his hand which means he controlled his tongue and he controlled his thoughts.."
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