Gérard Miller on Histoire TV: “For Mitterrand, friendship was not built on political affinities”

In François Mitterrand, the man who did not want to break up, the most famous psychoanalyst of the PAF offers a beautiful portrait of the former president seen through the prism of friendship. A documentary in which testify Mazarine Pingeot and Gilbert Mitterrand as well as

many relatives of a statesman full of mysteries.

LE FIGARO. – Why did you choose to make a film on François Mitterrand with your daughter Coralie and why from this angle of friendship?

Gérard MILLER. – I remember taking to the streets on May 10, 1981 with the one who shared my life at the time. She was pregnant with our daughter, Coralie. So it was with a baby Mitterrand, if I may say so, that I celebrated the victory of the left and it is true that it amused me, forty years later, that the father and the daughter meet for evoke Mitterrand. Then, having written a lot about him myself, I looked for an axis, not new but not so often covered and which seemed to me to say a lot about the character. I had always heard it said of Mitterrand that he had kept friends, let us say unexpected, throughout his life. Some were known to me, others not, for example, Jean Munier, whom he met in captivity and who helped him to escape.

You show how much Mitterrand forged very different friendships very early on …

Yes, when, as a provincial student from a right-wing background, he landed in Paris, one of his first friends was Pierre de Bénouville. The young Mitterrand already knew him from having attended the same Saint-Jean college in Angoulême, in boarding school. When he finds him in the capital, Bénouville is a young man of the extreme right, a hood, a future engaged on the side of the Francoists in the Spanish revolution. And almost at the same time, François Mitterrand befriended Georges Dayan, a socialist Jew from Algeria. It is still singular, especially when we know that the decisive friend in the turn to the left that he will then take will be a Communist, namely Roger-Patrice Pelat.

How do you explain the unwavering link between Mitterrand and Bénouville?

This loyalty to Pierre de Bénouville who, let us remember, was also a very great resistance, was total until the end. I even discovered that every Friday at 11 a.m., whatever happened, Mitterrand saw him at the Élysée. This shows that friendship, for this man, was not built on political affinities. It was love at first sight. So obviously, when he really got into a career after the war, his new friends were more or less tied to politics. But whether or not they were left engaged with him or not, he remained loyal to his friends. Some did politics with him for a while, like Jean Védrine, the great friend of the Resistance. Jean Munier has never done one.

In the film, you say that friendship has kept him human …

Absolutely, and I think he meant it himself. I think he had the idea that friendship saved him from what is terrifying about ambition and political struggle. This did not prevent him from reaching supreme power by upsetting a large number of people, but his common thread was friendship. I also believe that while a number of his friends, not all of them, were helpful to him, he still did not have a utilitarian conception of friendship.

Was there nothing for him above friendship?

No, nothing, I think so. I even evoke a kind of transcendence. At the end of his life, Mitterrand no longer knew whether he believed in God or not. There remained in him a part of the little parishioner of Jarnac, but he was in doubt. However, friendship made him feel that there was perhaps something that was beyond him. He has, I believe, thanks to his friends, touched something of a different order than what one experiences with pleasures or power. That’s what saves great men from their crazy ambition: when they think there is something bigger than themselves.

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