Les Racines du ciel

African policy was at that time at the heart of the French political landscape, in which François Mitterrand was already a major figure: in 1947 he became the youngest serving minister in a century, first as Minister for War Veterans, then Minister of the Interior, then Minister for Overseas France. “[Black Africa] was, at the time, in the aftermath of the war, very remote from us. I first went there in 1947. I was thirty, with a certain freshness of impression. I entered a world that seduced me and held me forever. A very diverse world. And in that huge continent which seemed to be asleep, I believe I perceived the signs of an awakening.”

A young deputy for Nièvre, elected in 1946, one of his first votes was in favor of abolishing forced labor in the overseas territories, and the subject came to fascinate him, so much so that “when François Mitterrand entered, in July 1950, the government formed by René Pleven — General de Gaulle’s former Colonial Commissioner and organizer of the Brazzaville conference — Mitterrand, to general surprise, asked to be given the Ministry of Overseas France, when he had been offered National Education. The choice seemed suicidal. Though very risky, it was nonetheless deliberate” (in Paul Bodier, Face à l’administration coloniale, Institut François Mitterrand, 2005).

At a time when the governments of the Fourth Republic were, one after another, becoming bogged down in the problems of decolonization, Mitterrand took hold of the colonial question, which he considered “the major experience of [his] political life.” Given responsibility for the Tunisian file in 1956, he, by then a Minister of State, spoke out in favor of that country’s accession to greater autonomy and opposed the military’s deposition of the Sultan of Morocco. As the repression in Algeria stirred growing unrest in the press, to the point of being compared to Gestapo methods, Mitterrand called, in the Council of Ministers in November 1956, for a cease-fire and negotiations. In vain. He left the government a few months later. “With regard to Morocco, Tunisia, Black Africa or Indochina, he stood in the liberal camp, in favor of decolonization, in the tradition of Pierre Mendès France,” notes Benjamin Stora. “I had believed that colonial society could be transformed other than through violence. Through experience, I came to understand that it was, in itself, violence, that violence governed it, that violence answered it, and that to escape the circle of violence one had to leave colonial society altogether, that there was no middle solution. Having understood this, it took me time to admit it,” accepting, for instance, capital executions in 1955 and 1956 without flinching. On these colonial questions, Mitterrand published two books: Aux Frontières de l’Union française, in 1953, and Présence française et abandon, in 1957. Little inclined to self-criticism, he confessed late in life to his biographer Jean Lacouture: “I committed at least one fault in my life, that one” — for his support of the guillotine had ultimately proved a dead end, one that risked tarnishing his great historic gesture: the abolition of the death penalty.

None of this mattered to Gary, who expressed here a certain admiration for the statesman. Consistent in his views, he later openly declared his support for Mitterrand in an op-ed in Le Monde, before the 1974 presidential election: “Mr. Jean Foyer has declared that voting for Mr. Mitterrand constitutes a ‘betrayal’; as a Companion of the Liberation, I hasten to agree with him: I disown Mr. Foyer and I am going to vote for Mr. Mitterrand. […] I saw then on which side the daggers and the Florentine poison vials, so readily attributed to Mr. Mitterrand, truly lay. For a Companion of the Liberation, this spectacle was abject, and history will remember it. […] I supported Mr. Chaban-Delmas; I am therefore going to vote for Mr. Mitterrand.”

This copy is inscribed on an edition printed two months after the award of the Prix Goncourt (won on 3 December 1956). Romain Gary had, since February, been the new French Consul General in Los Angeles. From the first days of January 1957, the Battle of Algiers pitted the French Army against the National Liberation Front; terrorist attacks multiplied while French troops resorted to torture. The American press, not subject to censorship, ran headlines on the atrocities committed by French forces. On 4 January, Gary gave an interview to Jean Daniel: “The fundamental premise of my book is what I call the human margin… I am, a priori, against all those who believe they are absolutely right. The phrase is Albert Camus’s. I am against all political systems that believe they hold a monopoly on truth. I am against all ideological monopolies… In my book, I chose elephants, because these gigantic beasts perfectly embodied those awkward and hard-to-protect values at the heart of the modern ideological fray: freedom of thought, human rights, tolerance, respect for the human person, and a certain inviolability of the human…” In this context, a few months later Gary asked to leave Los Angeles and, more broadly, sought to withdraw from his diplomatic duties (letter to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, 31 December 1957, Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 4/826, cited by Kerwin Spire in Romain Gary, franc-tireur du gaullisme, Littératures, 70 | 2014, pp. 65–77).