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Mitterrand : a study in ambiguity / Philip Short.

by Short, Philip.

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The Bodley Head, 2013.

Mitterrand, François, 1916-1996.

Presidents -- France -- Biography.

France -- Politics and government -- 1958-

9781847920065 (hc.)

1847920063 (hc.)

xi, 692 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates ; 24 cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Family Apart -- Captive -- Schisms of War -- Loose Ends, New Beginnings -- Staircase of Power -- Requiem for Empire -- Crossing the Desert -- De Gaulle Again -- Union of the Left -- Politics is War -- Novitiate -- Sphinx -- Florentine -- Monarch -- Survivalist -- Testament.

"President of France from 1981 until 1995, and one of the twentieth century's most glamorous, complicated political figures. As a politician and as a man, from the 1930s until his death in 1996, François Mitterrand was the incarnation of the mercurial, contrarian France which Britain and America find so perennially frustrating to deal with. A prisoner of war and an escapee, he was subsequently both decorated for his service to the Vichy government and a servant of the Resistance; he was a right-wing firebrand in the 1940s, a centrist in the 50s and 60s, before devoting the rest of his career to the left. He was accused of leaking secrets to Moscow, of faking an assassination attempt against himself, of countless other intrigues. And yet he possessed a quality of greatness and a charisma which left his opponents in the shade. To understand Mitterrand is to understand France in all its ambiguities and contradictions, its cowardice and glory, its turpitudes and tragedies. Mitterrand was a man of great gifts and infinite shades of deviousness, an aesthete and intellectual, a sensualist, a crook. And what Philip Short gives us is a human as much as a political biography -- the life of an exceptionally talented and exceptionally flawed man who made his career in politics by chance and went on to become France's longest-serving head of state in a century. Philip Short is tha author of biographies of Pol Pott and Mao Zedong. He worked for ten years as the BBC's Paris correspondent and lives in France"--Provided by publisher.

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