Death of a socialist King

(foto: Med Kohl, et bevæget øjeblik i Verdun, 1984)


N.Y.T anmeldelse af ny film om Francois Mitterand. Sandt er det at der ikke helt har været samme grandeur over småforbryderen Chirac. Vichy er Mitterands skygge, Spreckelsens "Grande Arche" et af højdepunkterne:
- "The movie does not let Mitterrand off lightly. While he claims to have joined the Resistance in 1942, Moreau finds evidence suggesting the break with Vichy came a year later. Still murkier is Mitterrand's long friendship with René Bousquet, the Vichy police chief who in 1942 sent thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps. While angrily denying that he was anti-Semitic, Mitterrand remained loyal to Bousquet even after he was murdered in 1993.
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Still, in the end, proud to have outwitted his enemies, Mitterrand seems confident of his place in history. "You know, Antoine, and I say this without being presumptuous," he remarks after they visit the royal crypt at the Basilica of Saint-Denis, "I'm the last of the great presidents. I mean, the last in a line from de Gaulle. Because of Europe, globalization, nothing will be as before. It's sad but it's the truth."
And as death approaches, like Don Juan, he feels he must mock it. "Journalists haven't much vocabulary or imagination," he says on his last day in the Élysée Palace. "They're so conventional: I'm a 'Machiavellian' and my end is 'Shakespearean.' That's all they know what to write. I prefer the last words of Proust who ordered Champagne and was himself surprised at the incredible frivolity of the dying."
http://upl.silentwhisper.net/uplfolders/upload6/socialistking.doc