Life and Times of Francois Mitterand‪.‬

THE devout provincial Catholic boy, who had considered becoming a priest, became instead a student activist on the extreme nationalist right; the decorated Petainist became a decorated member of the Resistance; the precocious Fourth Republic minister fighting decolonization became the reconstructor of the French Socialist Party; the leader of the anti-clerical party became a closet mystic; the very rooted Frenchman became champion of Europe, of the Third World, and of French-German friendship; the consummate politician became a literary man at heart; the power-broker became fascinated by the world of books and ideas; the provincial transformed the face of Paris with his monuments; the family man became a legendary womanizer - who nonetheless claimed he would prefer to live his next life in an austere monastery in the Sinai. Mitterrand moved from one "world" to the other with remarkable facility - and without his countrymen even seeming to want to know about glaring contradictions between the public and private personage. During the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989, at the height of his powers and prestige, Mitterrand deftly blurred the antagonisms, the wounding struggles, which had made France's history so colourful - and strife-ridden. Historian Francois Furet announced that after two hundred years, with the demise of the world communist movement, "the French Revolution is over." And, in fact, no one was better prepared to bring people together for a post-revolutionary commemoration of the Revolution than this Socialist president who had been both a mystical Catholic and a right-wing street demonstrator, and apparently had moved so smoothly and uneventfully from one political camp to the other.