Was President Francois Mitt errand an anti-Semite? France's Socialist Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, and Mitterrand's illegitimate daughter, Ms Mazarine Pingeot, are among those who have rushed to defend the dead statesman's reputation in an emotional debate that started when compromising words attributed to Mitterrand were published this week.
On May 17th, 1995, hours before he was to hand the presidency over to Mr Jacques Chirac, the terminally ill Mitterrand shared breakfast in the Elysee Palace with the French writer, Jean d'Ormesson, who is a member of the Academie Francaise and a columnist for the right-wing Figaro newspaper.
Over tea and toast, Mr d'Ormesson dared to ask about Mr Mitterrand's long friendship with Rene Bousquet, who led the collaborationist French police during the second World War German occupation. Mitterrand is widely believed to have impeded efforts to try Bousquet for war crimes.
In his soon-to-be-released book, The Gabriel Report, excerpts of which were published this week by Le Nouvel Observateur magazine, Mr d'Ormesson recounts the president's response. "Francois Mitt errand listens to me without showing any irritation," the French academician writes. "And he looks at me. `What you are seeing,' he tells me, `is the powerful and harmful influence of the Jewish lobby in France.' There is a long silence."
Yesterday's Le Monde published the enraged response of Mitterrand's daughter. Her father had inspired "so many passions that the desire for revenge was inevitable, especially in a milieu [the press] that he was contemptuous of and which he used", she said.
"Must I be subjected . . . to defamation and hatred?" Ms Pingeot wrote. "Must I suffer them in place of a dead man? A man who raised me in tolerance and freedom?" She demanded proof that her father had said such a thing, and asked why Mr d'Ormesson had not revealed the conversation before Mitterrand's death in January 1996. Her father's dignity was being attacked, and her grief was intolerable. "Did he ever, even once, betray his commitments to the Jewish community . . .?" she asked.
Mr Jospin defended the man who chose him to lead the socialist party by issuing a terse communique. "I shared the political commitment of Francois Mitt errand for a long time," Mr Jospin said. "I had numerous, in-depth exchanges with him on questions concerning the French Jewish community or the fate of Jews in certain countries of the world . . . anti-Semitism was alien to Francois Mitterrand."
One former Mitterrand aide, quoted anonymously by Liberation, said that rather than being anti-Semitic, the late president was "too philo-Semitic".
France has the largest Jewish community in western Europe, estimated at 600,000. The country's second World War record of rounding up and deporting tens of thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps is a continuing source of shame and makes comments regarding Jews highly sensitive.
Anyone who criticises Israeli actions risks being accused of anti-Semitism. The words "Jewish lobby" are politically incorrect, and French newspapers invariably print them in quotation marks. Even Mr d'Ormesson says he does not believe the French president was anti-Semitic. Mitt errand's biographer, Mr Jean Lacouture, claims his flawed character embodied the contradictions of all French people. Like France itself, Mitterrand both collaborated with and resisted the German occupation.
"Everything that reminded him of the Vichy period got on his nerves," Mr Theo Klein, a former president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France said.
