One of 210 copies on Sirène de Sainte-Marie paper, the only paper used (no. 6).
Signed presentation inscription: “À François Mitterrand, à l'Ecrivain, en hommage d'amicale admiration. L. 26 juin 1979.”
The Éthiopiques appeared in 1956, establishing Léopold Sédar Senghor as a major poet. A minister under de Gaulle in 1958, he was elected in 1960 to lead the newly created Republic of Senegal, becoming the foremost figure of French-speaking Africa and forming a genuine friendship with Georges Pompidou, a fellow alumnus of the Lycée Henri IV and, like him, an agrégé in literature.
In 1979, when Senghor presented him with this copy of Élégies majeures, François Mitterrand was still only first secretary of the Socialist Party (since the Épinay congress of 1971). It was above all the writer whom Senghor was honoring. In 1981, when Mitterrand rose to the highest office of the French state, the poet-president had already left political life a year earlier. Elected to the Académie française on 2 June 1983, to the seat of the duc de Lévis-Mirepoix, Senghor was formally received under the Coupole on 29 March 1984, in the presence of President François Mitterrand, attending in that capacity for the first time. He would not return there until two years later, for the celebration of the Académie’s three hundred and fiftieth anniversary.