b i o g r a p h y abolition of the death penalty. For two spells, after the socialists lost their parliamentary majority, he worked well enough with governments of the Right – those of Jacques Chirac and Edouard Balladur – in what has been called the ‘Republic of the Centre’. Short is less interested in this than in Mitterrand’s foreign policy forays: bringing the USA back from the brink of nuclear war in the early 1980s, containing a reunified Germany within a stronger European Union and flying to besieged Sarajevo in 1992 to open the way for UN peacekeeping.
But whether Mitterrand was a statesman or just a politician remains unclear. One of Short’s most tantalising quotations is from Jacques Chirac on the evening of Mitterrand’s death in January 1996, when he said that Mitterrand was the ‘reflection of his century’. He might have developed the point to argue, perhaps, that while de Gaulle was a visionary who made France, Mitterrand only mirrored it. De Gaulle dragged France from the jaws of defeat in 1940; Mitterrand presided over the decline of a middle-sized power. Mitterrand held on to the French empire in Algeria well past its sell-by date; de Gaulle jettisoned it in favour of Europe and economic modernisation. De Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic as a regime with a strong executive; Mitterrand criticised it before discovering that it fitted him like a glove.
The great asset of this book is the combination of the political and the personal. Giscard d’Estaing taunted Mitterrand in a televised debate in 1974 that he did not have ‘a monopoly of the heart’. Short shows us what sort of heart that was. Three women dominated his life: 17-year-old Marie-Louise, whom he met when he was a student and to whom he was engaged for 18 months; Danielle, who was 19 when he married her in 1944 aged 28; and Anne Pingeot, who was 20 when he began a love affair with her at the age of 47 and who bore him a daughter, Mazarine. Philip Short shows that Mitterrand’s love for Anne also fired his conversion to socialism, though he never left the long-suffering Danielle. To be a Machiavelli with a secret passion was perhaps the supreme ambiguity. To order this book for £24, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 10
l i n da p ort e r
Tending the White Rose
Elizabeth of York: The First Tudor Queen
By Alison Weir ( Jonathan Cape 556pp £20)
Elizabeth of York was the first Tudor queen consort and played a crucial role in establishing the new dynasty, but she has been strangely overlooked by historians until now. The general impression has always been of a passive beauty who grew plump with child-bearing, was completely dominated by her overbearing mother-in-law, Margaret Beaufort, and was perhaps not entirely trusted by her husband, Henry VII, who had married her to bolster his hold on the throne of England. She was, after all, the eldest daughter of Edward IV; the hopes of the Yorkists rested with her after the disappearance of her two brothers (the Princes in the Tower) and the death of her uncle Richard III at Bosworth in 1485. But she has not been seriously considered as a player in her own right. Now Alison Weir has brought Elizabeth out of the shadows to reveal her as an intriguing figure in the politics of late-15th-century England, a woman who knew great privilege and great pain but never lost sight of her overriding ambition, which was to become a queen.
Weir is a fine writer, with a wonderful gift for description. With Elizabeth set in the wider context, we can more easily picture the experience of her childhood.The splendours of Edward IV’s court and its rituals give the rich texture of the young princess’s life and are sharply contrasted with the restrictions of her two periods in sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. She was the eldest of a large family and her mother’s clan, the Wydevilles, was even larger, so her strong sense of loyalty to kin is not surprising. Weir is right to emphasise this as a key component of her character and an explanation for her behaviour, some of which otherwise appears enigmatic.
Elizabeth had been promised in marriage to the French dauphin as a child and the memory of the status this afforded her, as ‘Madame la Dauphine’, left a powerful impression. But Louis XI of France was a shrewd manipulator of his allies and Edward IV, though he emerged even stronger after the bloody events of 1470, when the Earl of Warwick rebelled against him, was never as
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