ABSTRACT
Francois Mitterrand’s youthful background left little to presage that he would be elected as the first left-wing president of the Fifth Republic. He was born in 1916 in west central France in the small village of Jarnac, near Cognac in the Charente department. This region of France was in many senses representative of the country as a whole during the early twentieth century: rural, Catholic, bourgeois and conservative. Mitterrand was twenty-two when the Second World War broke out in September 1939, engaged in his compulsory military service. If consider his wartime record, three salient themes emerge: courage, captivity and ambiguity. Francois Mitterrand earned his political spurs as a non-Socialist, neo-Radical minister during the Fourth Republic. From 1947 to 1958, he served in a total of 11 governments, occupying the most important Ministries of State: the Interior Ministry under Mendes-France from 1954–55, and the Justice Ministry during the Socialist administration of Guy Mollet from 1956–57.
