De Gaulle represented 'mastery over oneself, which meant mastery over history'

 To Mitterrand, de Gaulle represented 'mastery over oneself, which meant mastery over history'. After the General's death, he compared him to Henri IV, the great sixteenth-century King who ended the Wars of Religion, and Cardinal Richelieu, Chief Minister to his son Louis XIII, who laid the foundations of modern Western statecraft.

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The French stateman Mitterrand most admired was the seventeenth-century Cardinal Mazarin, preceptor and First Minister of Louis XIV, after whom he named his daughter, Mazarine.

P. Short, Mitterrand: a study in ambiguity (2013), 10 and 12