Decades after his death, François Mitterrand, former president of France, still fascinates the French. Few politicians linger in a nation’s collective memory the way he does. I was reminded of this recently while reading Mitterrand: A Study in Ambiguity by Philip Short—a superb biography I can’t recommend enough. It brought back so many memories of the 1980s and 1990s, when I first became interested in politics.

The French have turned the page on many of Mitterrand’s successors—Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande—but not on him. Why? Because Mitterrand was deeply ambiguous.

He started out his political career on the right, then became the leader of the left. In fact, he took control of the Socialist Party barely a week after joining it. He once flirted with the Pétain regime in Vichy, which collaborated with Nazi Germany, and then became a leader of the French Resistance. By the time he ran for president, he was dismissed as a man of the past, only to become the longest-serving president of the Fifth Republic.

With two families in parallel, even his private life was full of contradictions. Shortly before he died, his doctor reportedly told him, “You’re part Don Corleone, part Don Juan, part Machiavelli, and part Little Prince.” What a mix.

But beyond the contradictions and intrigues, Mitterrand offers two powerful lessons for today’s politics.

First: Never give up.
Mitterrand faced several defeats and at times, he seriously considered walking away. But he didn’t. Persistence was his secret weapon and it paid off.

Second: Unify.
If you want to reach the top, you have to build coalitions and bring people together. Mitterrand mastered this art. He knew that politics wasn’t about purity, but about integration.

I think that this is what makes him so relevant today. Too many modern politicians treat politics as a zero-sum game: my way or the highway. They’d rather run through a wall than build a bridge.

Mitterrand was different. For him, everything was dialectical for as long as he embodied the synthesis.

PS: Check out my channel on YouTube where the latest video is also on this topic.