On March 24, 1993, French President François Mitterrand presided over the last Council of Ministers of the Socialist legislature, a few days before the second round of France's parliamentary elections. The fate of his majority was sealed, and a cohabitation with the right was on the horizon. "On Monday, an enormous weight will fall on all of you, a great mourning, one from which we believe we will never recover, but the forces of life are always stronger," he said to his distraught ministers in the Elysée.
"To stay or to go?" asked the old president, whom the press imagined as Louis XVI fleeing to Varennes. "I have no intention of escaping," he insisted, despite conservative leader Jacques Chirac's pressing requests for his resignation. Then, he said: "One may fear isolation, but, in reality, one is never really alone, except in the face of death. Keep up the fight. I'll do it my way. The strangulation will not take place in silence or in the shadows." That same evening, Mitterrand instructed his prime minister, Pierre Bérégovoy, and his foreign minister, Roland Dumas, to remind Chirac of how the system works.
A faded portrait of Mitterrand, exhumed in 2017 from behind a cupboard, is now in the office of the current president's adviser on historical issues, Bruno Roger-Petit, a fervent supporter of the dissolution, which was enacted on June 9. But Dumas is no more. He died on Wednesday, July 3, aged 101, precisely on the day when Macron chaired the last Council of Ministers before the second round of parliamentary elections where his majority has no chance of being reconducted.
In the Salon des Ambassadeurs, the president repeated that the objective was to prevent the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) from having an absolute majority, while making it clear that there was "no question" of "governing tomorrow" with the radical left La France Insoumise (LFI) party, despite the mutual withdrawals between the candidates of the ex-majority and those of the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) left-wing alliance to block the RN. The ministers, who did not all agree on these arrangements, remained silent, faces closed. The meeting lasted less than three-quarters of an hour. There were drinks at the end. "I'm going to shake hands with all of you," Mitterrand said 30 years ago.
No specific instructions
Just before, the members of the government had to wait an hour in an adjoining lounge, waiting for Macron. Fadila Khattabi and Patricia Miralles, who both had to withdraw from their constituencies, were talking to each other in a corner. "I had to withdraw in favor of an NFP member who isn't even guaranteed to win," said Miralles, the junior minister for veterans, saying her constituency was being eaten away by the RN. For both ministers, it's the end of an adventure. "I hope the French will remember the good things we've done," said Khattabi, minister for people with disabilities, and whose parents arrived in France from Algeria in the 1950s. Three days earlier, at a meeting at the Elysée, she wept with emotion at the thought of the far right approaching power.
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