The Socialists' first government after 23 years in opposition included four Communist ministers: an alliance reflected in the government commitments to expanded state control of industry, reduction of the hours in the working week, high taxation for the rich, support for liberation struggles around the world, and a public spending programme to raise the living standards of the least well-off. By 1984, however, the government had done a complete volte-face, with Laurent Fabius presiding over a cabinet of centrist to conservative "Socialist" ministers, clinging desperately to power.

 

The government's commitments had come to little. Attempts to bring private education under state control were defeated by mass protests in the streets; ministers were implicated in cover-ups and corruption; and unemployment continued to rise. Any idea of peaceful and pro-ecological intent was dashed, as far as international opinion was concerned, by the French Secret Service's murder of a Greenpeace photographer on the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand.

There were sporadic achievements - in labour laws and women's rights, notably - but no cohesive and consistent Socialist line. The Socialists' 1986 election slogan was "Help - the Right is coming back", a bizarrely self-fulfilling tactic. The right-wing Jacques Chirac became prime minister (and continued as Mayor of Paris).

Throughout 1987, the chances of François Mitterrand winning the presidential election in 1988 seemed very slim. But Chirac's economic policies of privatization and monetary control failed to deliver the goods. Millions of first-time investors in "popular capitalism" lost all their money on Black Monday. Terrorists planted bombs in Paris and took French hostages in Lebanon. Unemployment steadily rose and Chirac made the fatal mistake of flirting with the extreme Right, particularly Le Pen. Mitterrand , the grand old man of politics, with decades of experience, played off all the groupings of the Right in an all-but-flawless campaign, and won a second mandate.

His party, however, failed to win an absolute majority in the parliamentary elections soon afterwards. The austerity measures of Mitterrand's new prime minister, Michel Rocard , upset traditional Socialist supporters in the public-service sector, with nurses, civil servants, teachers and the like quick to take industrial action. Though Chirac's programmes were halted, they were not reversed.

In 1991, Mitterrand sacked Michel Rocard and appointed Édith Cresson as prime minister. Initially the French were happy to have their first woman prime minister, but she soon began to turn a few heads with her comments about special charters for illegal immigrants, her dismissal ofthe stock exchange as a waste of time, and attacks on her own ministers, not to mention her description of the Japanese as yellow ants and British males as homosexual.

Cresson's worst move was to propose a tax on everyone's insurance contributions to pay for compensation to haemophiliacs infected with HIV. The knowing use of infected blood in transfusions in 1985 became one of the biggest scandals of the Socialist regime.

Pierre Bérégovoy succeeded Cresson in 1992. Universally known as Béré, and mocked for his bumbling persona, he survived strikes by farmers, dockers, car workers and nurses, various scandals involving the Socialists, and the Maastricht referendum. But then a private loan was revealed from one Roger-Patrice Pelat, a friend of Mitterrand's, accused of insider dealing. Mitterrand distanced himself from his prime minister, who then shot himself, on May 1, two months after losing the elections, leaving no note of explanation.

The new prime minister, Edouard Balladur , a fresh and fatherly face from the Right, started off with a lot of popular support. But a series of U-turns after demonstrations by Air France workers, teachers, farmers, fishermen and school pupils, and the state's rescue of the Crédit Lyonnais bank after spectacular losses, wiped away his successes.

Meanwhile Mitterrand tottered on to the end of his presidential term, looking less and less like the nation's favourite uncle. Two months after Bérégovoy's suicide, Réné Bousquet, who was head of police in the Vichy government and due to stand trial for supervising the rounding up of Jews in 1942, was murdered. He was a friend of Mitterrand's and thought to have known shady secrets about the president.

François Mitterrand's presidency came to an end in April 1995 when he died following a battle with cancer. The last years of his presidency saw him becoming ill and aged, his reputation tarnished and his party's popularity reduced to an all-time low. But on his death in January 1996, despite everything, Mitterrand was genuinely mourned as a man of culture and vision, a supreme political operator, with unwavering commitment to the European Union, and for the mark he made on the city with his "grands projets": Parc de la Villette (inherited from Giscard), the Louvre Pyramid, the Grande Arche de la Défense, the Institut du Monde Arabe, the Opéra Bastille and the new Bibliothèque Nationale building