Sixty-year-old twig, supercharged tone and turquoise ring, Anne Lauvergeon, former boss of Areva, then world number one in civil nuclear power, puts down her notebook, shifts it a little. There were the initialers, there the fossilized sea urchin, its hands protruding from a ruffled blouse recompose the topography of François Mitterrand’s office. She corrects, straightens. Here we are. The sheet was placed exactly at this distance, and the President of the Republic, for months, worked, telephoned, thought, his gaze magnetized by this piece of paper, ultramarine blue ink, on which he had written these pronounced sentences, face frozen, on May 4, 1993 in Nevers, during the funeral of Pierre Bérégovoy, his former Prime Minister who committed suicide three days earlier: “All the explanations in the world will not justify that we could have given the honor of a man.”
A year after this drama of his second seven-year term, one day in June 1994, he took this sheet. “If I gave it to you, would you take it?” “I hid it like a squirrel,” she marvels, so much so that she can no longer find it. Somewhere in his Parisian apartment, in a book perhaps, one of the many that the president gave him, the sheet sleeps. “Landfill,” she suggests, nuclear vocabulary. Her eyes widen under her bangs when we venture to suggest a psychological reading of this untraceable hiding place. Why give her, at the time a young married childless woman, these violent words meaning that politics kills and the press shreds? Shoulders raised. Why she ?
Elder admired, loved
Also this summer of 1994, a few moments before a dinner with Bill Clinton, walking in the gardens, François Mitterrand asks him to choose his tie. First floor, that of his apartments, “I would like you to make me a promise, that of one day writing about these years, our exchanges, our conversations”. Red tie, promise given. In 2015, she got started, contract signed. She skates, hesitates – past tense or imperfect? Nine years later, the click, present of narration. Here is The promise (Grasset), the story of five years of complicity which she would especially like to portray as a portrait of a president “geyser of life”, “lover of his own freedom”, elder admired, loved, who she misses.
He speaks to her informally, addresses her in turn, calls her “young miss”, “madam the sherpa”, “miss the scientist”, consoles her for a romantic sorrow, tests her. The list of the emperors of Germany, that of the kings of France, the antipopes of Avignon and then does she know how to recognize trees? “I wasn’t bad and not great, it was perfect.” She kindly says today that she too – X-Mines, normal student, physics graduate – could have told him about it. He wanted her to be Nivernais, like him. In an elevator at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, could she describe to him the route to get from Cuzy to Donzy? Later, quite unexpectedly, another international summit, when suddenly: “Did you have an attic as a child?”
1990, at the age of 31, she was appointed project manager for the international economy and foreign trade. She writes notes, which come back initialed with an approving “FM”. He appreciates it, lets it be known. The corridors rustle, jealous. She doesn’t care, she’s competitive and strong-headed. Nine months pass, he informs her that she will now be both his sherpa and deputy general secretary. “I replaced two men,” she smiles. He wants her by his side, enough to take the office adjoining his – no more hiding place on the second floor. For five years, they worked separated by a double door, glued together. She sees each visitor enter and leave. Leaving the president, they tell her about the summit meeting. She knows everything, says nothing. She laughs at the memory of the visit of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing who leaves by slipping into the lounges on the ground floor, where he meets the French tennis team whom he greets with grandeur, giving one the impression that he would still be the king of this palace.
Often, it is François Mitterrand who sits opposite her, questions her or remains silent. They will learn to share silences. He questions her about her links with her father, how her filial love was shaped, a curiosity such that he declines a lunch at the town hall of Orléans on the grounds that he would like to sit at her parents’ house. He takes him to wake up his wife Danièle, him sitting on the quilt, his wife in pajamas under the blanket, he seats him in the center of lunches with his siblings, a right-wing bourgeois Catholic clan, invites him to dinners on rue de Bièvre on Sunday evening, official family, she still in the sheepfold at Latché, she around the round table in the apartments of the Elysée, she climbing into the official car to go and enjoy an omelette at Mont-Saint-Michel, she observing the writer Régine Desforges embroider on board the presidential plane, she still walking alongside him, impassioned, in the Tuileries garden, while the ultimatum issued to Saddam Hussein to withdraw his troops from Kuwait lasts for a few more hours .
In these laudatory memoirs, some saliences
Story of a bygone, antediluvian political power, a time when the conduct of the State and that of some world affairs could still be conceived by controlling, enslaving and suspending time. July 1991, the head of state arrived late for a G7 dinner in London. He chose to cross Green Park with her on foot, the trees there were so beautiful. “Apart from life, time is his favorite subject,” she writes. He does not own a watch, on his desk he placed the one that the explorer Jean-Louis Etienne wore to the North Pole, it is stopped. He can have lunch until 5:30 p.m. with the Goncourt jury, recite Lamartine, play golf, stroll around, no wave of scandalized tweets will hold it against him.
She defends everything about him, praising at the time of the post-Soviet thaw his demand for “a clear definition of borders and the rights of minorities”, admiring him “for having cushioned as much as he could the brutality of globalization” as having worked vigorously for rapprochement with Germany and the construction of Europe. She quickly mentions Rwanda and the genocide of the Tutsis in 1994, regretting not having thought sooner that a visit from the pope would have calmed the minds of the two enemy ethnic groups, both Catholics, and in these laudatory memoirs, some remarks. June 1990, Mauritius, breakfast at the Royal Palm, Roland Dumas, Minister of Foreign Affairs, slips that Michel Rocard is preparing a presidential campaign, and “that a certain Cahuzac is smuggling money from the laboratories to Switzerland”. François Hollande’s Budget Minister, convicted of tax fraud in 2016, will say it in these terms during his first trial.
An anthology scene like that of Edouard Balladur, May 1993, Prime Minister of cohabitation, looking for different pieces of furniture, including a Louis XV chest of drawers, which he no longer sees in their usual place, the one he knew under Pompidou, curiosity thanks to which she understands that he has already seen himself elected in the 1995 presidential election. And these visits from François de Grossouvre, a distant and bitter advisor, who burst into his office ordering him to flee as quickly as possible, “my little Anne , terrible things are happening here.”
April 1994, a friend of the presidential hunting advisor, Doctor Soubielle, warned his cousin, press advisor to the presidency, of the hunter’s suicidal and disjointed comments. The president, alerted, receives him, asks the Elysée doctor to come as quickly as possible, immediate hospitalization of Grossouvre is mentioned. Who at the same moment, a few meters away, commits suicide. The president’s doctors also nourish the most incredible pages of this document, as the war they are waging is described there, fueled by the playful silences of a François Mitterrand convinced that the spectacular remission of his first cancer in 1981 gave, at the cost of pain, full powers over evil. The day before his death, the president asked Anne Lauvergeon to come to his bedside. She says she will come the next day. Too late. “I miss him”, the last sentence of the tribute she promised him.
“La Promesse”, by Anne Lauvergeon, Editions Grasset, 384 p., 23 euros.
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