LAffaire, I'Affaire

Since the days of the Dreyfus case, one of the perennial features of French government has been l'affaire--that unique combination of intrigue, scandal and politics that seems to come along at times of great political unrest and to suggest the existence of deep, deadly and corrupt forces at work in the body politic. Last week, faithful to this national tradition, President Charles de Gaulle's fledgling Fifth Republic uneasily probed its third*and most fascinating political scandal--I'affaire Mitterrand.

It broke at a moment when France's rightists bitterly challenged De Gaulle's offer to negotiate a cease-fire with the Algerian rebels, and when one member of the French Assembly dramatically announced that assassins had crossed the Pyrenees, eager to put a few holes in Frenchmen who were considered soft on Algeria. So many French politicians had received assassination threats that there was joking about a "Condemned-to-Death Club." One of its charter members would undoubtedly be left-wing Senator Franc,ois Mitterrand, 43, a fervid anti-Gaullist and outspoken proponent of a negotiated peace in Algeria.

In the Geraniums. Shortly before 1 a.m. on Oct. 16, Mitterrand left the Brasserie Lipp, favorite haunt of Parisian journalists and politicians, and headed in his blue Peugeot 403 for his apartment on the fashionable Rue Guynemer.

Mitterrand had gone only a few blocks when he noticed that he was being followed by another car. As he later told the story, Onetime Resistance Leader Mitterrand did not panic; instead, he pulled his car to a stop, piled out. leaped over an iron fence into the adjacent Luxembourg Gardens and took cover in a bed of geraniums. Seconds later a burst of submachine-gun fire riddled his empty Peugeot.

Next morning every front page in Paris headlined Mitterrand's escape, and most praised his coolness. A longtime ally of ex-Premier Mendes-France and ten times a Cabinet minister under the Fourth Republic, brilliant Franc, Mitterrand was regarded by many of his colleagues as overambitious and opportunistic, but few doubted his basic honesty. Yet why attack Mitterrand? As a member of the ineffectual left-wing opposition, he had had no voice in shaping De Gaulle's Algerian policy. The attacks suggested that France's frustrated rightists were capable of anything. The government offered ois bodyguards to all prominent citizens who wanted them, including the bitterly anti-Gaullist Pierre Mendes-France.

Confession. In this jittery atmosphere, the ultra-right-wing weekly Rivarol appeared with a mocking, triumphant story. A onetime Deputy of the crackpot Poujadist right wing, one Robert Pesquet, 42, charged that he had faked the attempt on Mitterrand's life, and he had done it in connivance with Mitterrand himself. Leftist Mitterrand, said Pesquet, had conceived the scheme as a means of provoking a police crackdown on the rightists, had worked out the details in a series of three rendezvous with Pesquet. The only hitch, according to Pesquet, had come after Mitterrand had jumped the fence into the gardens; Pesquet and his driver had been obliged to hold their fire until a cruising taxicab and a pair of lovers got out of the way. The delay, Pesquet recalled, had prompted Mitterrand to call out impatiently from his geranium bed: "All right, get going!"

Morocco-born Pesquet, an unstable and bizarre fellow, was hardly a man whose word was to be preferred to Mitterrand's, except for one fact: nine hours before the attack, he said, he had written a letter describing exactly what was going to happen, and had posted it to himself, care of general delivery. When police collected the letter from the post office, they found that it did indeed describe the attack correctly, even pinpointed the spot at which Mitterrand had abandoned his car after the shooting.

A Matter of Teleguidance. Challenged to explain Pesquet's letter, Mitterrand began to hedge. He had, he admitted, met Pesquet twice in the days immediately preceding the attack, but the shooting itself, he insisted, was no fake. According to Mitterrand's new version, Pesquet had appeared one afternoon with the story that he had been assigned by a rightist underground organization to murder Mitterrand, but did not have the heart to do it; instead, Pesquet proposed that "for safety's sake" Mitterrand start using the roundabout route home that he had followed on the night of the shooting. "I am the victim of a classic provocation," cried Mitterrand. "Either I was killed and couldn't talk, or I escaped them and fell into these machinations."

How then had Pesquet known exactly where Mitterrand would stop his car? And why had not Mitterrand, onetime Minister of Interior and known to every police prefect in France, insisted from the very beginning upon special police protection? To this, the usually incisive Mitterrand offered a variety of answers: there was not time; he did not propose to be an informer; he was afraid for the safety of his sons. "Now that I look back," he summed up cryptically, "I reckon that I must have been teleguided and intoxicated."

The Dust Gatherers. It strained credulity that Pesquet, a political nobody, had succeeded in "teleguiding" so experienced a lawyer and cold-blooded an operator as null Mitterrand. Pesquet's peculiar personal history suggested another explanation. A man who maintains two homes on no visible income, Pesquet has eight times been accused of offenses ranging from fraud to seduction, but each time the proceedings have been suspended. To practiced students of French affaires, such a record argued that Pesquet had made himself useful to the police--and thus perhaps had come to Mitterrand's notice when he was Minister of the Interior.

This kind of past double relationship might explain why Leftist Mitterrand and avowed Rightist Pesquet got together again. But for what purpose? Neither man's explanation entirely satisfied. Without offering any proof, Parisian newsmen contrived a more devious explanation: that Leftist Mitterrand and Rightist Pesquet. equally eager to discredit the regime of Gaullist Premier Michel Debre, could have collaborated in the mutual hope of toppling Debre and with the common intention of doublecrossing each other after the deed was done.

All this was pretty fanciful. But whatever the truth, Pesquet had clearly outmaneuvered Mitterrand. As France's rightists gloated over the left's discomfiture, Mitterrand struck back in L'Express. Faced with government action to strip him of his parliamentary immunity to prosecution, Mitterrand charged that the plot against him was the work of five right-wing "assassins"--Deputies Jean-Baptiste Biaggi, Pascal Arrighi and Jean-Marie Le Pen, former Police Inspector Jean Dides and ex-Deputy Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour. Their motive, according to Mitterrand: the fact that as a Cabinet minister he had prosecuted l'affaire des fuites security leaks) and l'affaire de bazooka (the attempted assassination of former Algerian Commander General Raoul Salan), in which all five rightists had played some role.

Mitterrand's riposte was a shrewd one; it left Biaggi & Co. little choice but to sue him for defamation. And this, in turn, would mean the reopening of the still unresolved l'affaire des fuites and l'affaire de-bazooka, which might prove embarrassing for men still prominent in French public life. Cynical Parisians observe that at a certain crucial moment in every affaire, after all the headlines, things mysteriously close over again. An unimportant figure or two may be convicted of something; the rest is silence, and huge dossiers gathering dust in police files.

*No. 1: l'affaire Lacaze (TIME, Feb. 2), in which a neo-Gaullist Resistance veteran alleges that he was offered $31,000 to murder the adopted son of one of the richest women in France. This scandal reflected on the new Fifth Republic, and was immediately countered by Scandal No. 2, l'affaire des ballets roses, which reflected on the previous Fourth Republic. In this, charges that obscene parties of nymphets from the Paris Opera had been staged at his official residence resulted in the indictment of a former Speaker of the French Assembly.

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