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Overview
In this illuminating portrait of Europe's perhaps most skillful tactician, Northcutt examines Francois Mitterrand's long and fascinating political career and chronicles his two-term presidency in detail, focusing on the day-to-day challenges he has faced in domestic and foreign affairs. When the socialist Mitterrand was elected President of France, with the aid of an electoral alliance with the French Communist Party, many assumed that unsettling change and political instability would result. But by the end of his first term in office, Mitterrand had led the transformation of his Socialist Party from what had been a minority opposition into a consensus government dedicated to modernization, pluralism, power sharing, and liberal reform. At the time of his re-election in 1988, Mitterrand had fashioned a stable centrist republic - situated between the Gaullists on the right and the communists on the left - and in so doing revitalized French politics and the French Left. Yet, for many, Mitterrand has remained an elusive figure: enigmatic personality, intellectual humanist, shrewd pragmatist, strong-willed and skillful politician. Mitterrand: A Political Biography succeeds in providing an informed and revealing closeup of this complex man from the vantage point of the Elysee Palace as it lays bare the intricate dynamics of socialist government in France.Editorials
Library Journal
Recently, this reviewer read Marshall Frady's political biography of Jesse Jackson as excerpted in The New Yorker . In tracing Jackson's continuing political and personal development, Frady's sympathetic but not uncritical portrait helps the reader both to understand Jackson's politics and style and to see his place in some of the major social upheavals of the last 30 years of American history. In contrast, Northcutt's political biography of French President Francois Mitterand is a disappointment. Northcutt successfully avoids partisanship, but his carefully balanced survey of Mitterand's career offers little to hold the interest of a casual reader and promises no revelations for the specialist. The volume of facts in the book may make it a useful reference work, given the lack of alternatives in English, but the eyes glaze over at the strictly chronological accretion of unmodulated detail. This is not recommended.-- Timothy Christenfeld, Columbia Univ.Book Details
Published
December 1, 1991
Publisher
New York : Holmes & Meier, 1992.
Pages
416
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780841912953