A provincial boy (from the Charentes), a Catholic, not necessarily Action Française, but certainly on the extreme, or at any rate hard right, ambitious, intelligent, fond of disguises, fully determined from the start to work for the greater glory of François Mitterrand. But with one 'gap', as it were, through which the wind from the left could come gusting in, that same left which in his young days our hero had so vigorously rejected. This boy from the South-West, educated in private schools and later a student in Paris, became enamoured - and why blame him? - of a social Christianity, an ideology that could if need be turn into Christian socialism and then into socialism pure and simple. Though not without faintly cynical, often inelegant motives on the part of the (future) leader of the Socialists. But let me not anticipate.

LRB 9 March 1995 | PDF Download