François Mitterrand

Biography

François Mitterrand was born in 1916 in Jarnac in western France into a Catholic, conservative family. He studied at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris from 1934 to 1937 and was briefly involved with the nationalist right. Captured in 1940, he escaped from a German prison camp, worked for the Vichy regime, and then joined the Resistance.

In the Fourth Republic he was a deputy for the Nièvre and a member of the small centrist UDSR, which he later led. He held a series of ministerial posts, among them veterans' affairs, overseas France, the interior during the start of the Algerian War, and justice. He opposed de Gaulle's Fifth Republic, and in 1959 his reputation suffered from the Observatory affair, a supposed attempt on his life. He was mayor of Château-Chinon from 1959 to 1981.

As the single candidate of the left he forced de Gaulle into a run-off in 1965 and narrowly lost to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in 1974. In 1971 he took over the new Socialist Party, which became the leading party of the left. In 1981 he defeated Giscard to become the Fifth Republic's first left-wing president. His first government nationalised major firms and abolished the death penalty, but soon turned to austerity. In 1985 French agents sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior on his orders.

Re-elected in 1988, he twice governed alongside conservative prime ministers, and with Helmut Kohl he pushed European integration through the Maastricht Treaty. He left office in 1995 after two full terms and died in January 1996 of prostate cancer, which he had hidden for most of his presidency.