Mitterrand: A Study in Ambiguity
Philip Short
Bodley Head, 704 pages
(Disponible à la Bibliothèque de Westmount)
L’auteur est un ancien journaliste de la BBC en poste à Paris, Pékin et Tokyo
Of all modern European leaders, François Mitterrand was the one most clearly born into the wrong century. He would have made a superb Renaissance cardinal, presiding over mass with great pomp before retreating to a sumptuous apartment to engage in a little discreet selling of holy offices, before dinner with his mistress. He would have been a brilliant patron of the arts, a peerless schemer in the Curia, a deadly enemy even for a Borgia. A modern democracy was the wrong place for his talents. He succeeded in his greatest ambition, to rule France, but in the end he accomplished relatively little in the role.
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