It [opposing the return of De Gaulle] was typical of him. He always hung on to a position far longer than was reasonable and then made a sudden, bold, reckless leap into the unknown. ... At Vichy, he hesitated, equivocated and agonised for more than a year before committing himself to the Resistance with an excessive, defiant act of bravado at Salle Wagram in Paris.
P. Short, Mitterrand: a study in ambiguity (2013), 197
Mitterrand was more than difficult as a husband: he was often impossible. He demanded absolute freedom and found the slightest constraint impossible. Not long after the wedding, [Danielle] asked him brightly, when he came home one evening, 'How did your day go, darling?' The reply drew blood: 'I did not marry you under the regime of the Inquisition.'
P. Short, Mitterrand: a study in ambiguity (2013), 115
His brothers recalled a different Francois [Mitterrand], who slid down banisters; fidgeted so much in church that he caused a scandal by falling off his chair; and stubbornly held his finger a millimetre away from an object he had been forbidden to touch, insisting he was not disobedient and was doing nothing wrong.
P. Short, Mitterrand: a study in ambiguity (2013), 18
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.
...
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
