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“... A news​ broadcast from 17 November 1986 shows François Mitterrand and Thomas Sankara at an official dinner in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. Sankara had taken power in a military coup three years before. In the clip he is on his feet delivering a speech and Mitterrand is seated ...”

“... than the careful prose of Giscard d’Estaing. Like Georges Pompidou, anthologist of poetry, Mitterrand was nurtured on the French classics. Brought up near Cognac in a Catholic family, he was always bookish, and thought of being a priest; later, although a man of action, a Resistance fighter, and a student of Marxism, he seems always to have valued his ...”

“... Did France need François Mitterrand? I hope not: the man was so vain, so shallow, so duplicitous, so amoral. It wasn’t just that you couldn’t believe anything he said: you couldn’t even consistently believe its opposite. In fact, you couldn’t listen to him without feeling you had somehow been deceived ...”

“... intelligent, fond of disguises, fully determined from the start to work for the greater glory of François Mitterrand. But with one ‘gap’, as it were, through which the wind from the left could come gusting in, that same left which in his young days our hero had so vigorously rejected. This boy from the South-West, educated in private schools and ...”

“... AT 8 p.m.​ on 10 May 1981 François Mitterrand made history. On Antenne 2 – a state-run television channel – his face was broadcast to millions of French households. It took three seconds for the image to appear clearly, but it felt like an eternity. First, a bald head (which, at this stage, could have been mistaken for that of the incumbent, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, also bald), then the eyes and the mouth and, finally, the full portrait ...”

“... in the last century is embodied in the strange trinity of Philippe Pétain, Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand. Pétain, born in 1856, was old enough to remember the humiliation of France at the hands of Prussia in 1870, and like other French officers of his period, spent his entire military career in anticipation of what he believed would be the ...”

“... up by Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda. Ten years later he became an adviser at the Elysée to François Mitterrand, his country’s only postwar socialist president. He is a revolutionary Third Worldist turned revisionist, turned Gaullist – his Gaullism a lament for the absence of credible leaders anywhere on the European horizon. He is, above ...”

“... In April 1984 President Mitterrand gave a press conference unlike any that had previously been held under the Fifth Republic. He did not sit at a sombre bureau Louis XV decorated with red, white and blue flowers. He was not playing the part of the professor from the Sorbonne, as de Gaulle had so often done, lecturing his audience on the history of France ...”

“... government and its police force, headed by René Bousquet, in the deportation of French Jews. François Mitterrand, president from 1981 to 1995, made clear his distaste for pursuing Vichy officials: France, he insisted, shouldn’t waste time settling old scores. In Une Jeunesse française, published in 1994, Pierre Péan revealed that ...”

“... all the same, and when, a little over three years later, Jack Lang invited Barthes to lunch with François Mitterrand, Barthes worried that accepting would be viewed as a craven attempt to make amends. Mitterrand enjoyed chatting with people like Barthes, but the lunch also appeared to be aimed at brushing some ...”

“... last prime minister, wrote and published poetry in his spare time, and as recently as 1981 François Mitterrand posed for his official photograph glancing up from a copy of Montaigne’s Essays. Seen from France in 2009, this image might as well be the Arnolfinis’ wedding portrait. Sarkozy, who admits to finding the Comédie-Française ...”

“... own parliamentary naivety, he recruited the most brilliant young man in the Assembly to help him, François Mitterrand, whom Lacouture describes as ‘a parliamentary zoologist of incomparable skill’. ‘No one,’ Lacouture says, ‘was more knowledgeable about the deputies, their talents and their weaknesses, their past performances, their secret ...”

“... seven days. No need, therefore, to express astonishment at the fact that Quimper voted solidly for Mitterrand and elected a Socialist deputy. Similarly, in Normandy in 1950 one out of every two members of the active population was engaged in agriculture. Now nine out of ten people work in industry or in the service sectors. It is only natural therefore that a ...”

“... Biafra. At times a complete rupture in diplomatic relations seemed possible. When Chad’s ruler, François Tombalbaye, allowed Continental Oil (a US company) access to Chad’s oil, Paris arranged for him to be overthrown. In Madagascar there was a pantomime of coups and counter-coups organised by the French and the CIA against one another. Underlying ...”

“... however: once again, the circumflex found intelligent defenders, among them the then President, François Mitterrand, who quashed the proposal and was able afterwards to claim: ‘I have saved a few accents.’ Cerquiglini is on the conservative side, almost lyrically so at moments, as when he describes his favourite accent as a ‘graphic sign that ...”