>> Nicolas Sarkozy’s former Minister of Culture, Frédéric Mitterrand died this Thursday at the age of 76, his family announced. A man of letters, but also a television producer and host, Frédéric Mitterrand was also the nephew of François Mitterrand, the fourth president of the Fifth Republic. A relationship which was not easy between the socialist and the man who was then “a little child from the 16th arrondissement” of the capital. Guest of Isabelle Morizet in There is not only one life in life in November 2020, Frédéric Mitterrand returned to the relationship he had with his uncle.
Relations between the two men have never been simple. Nephew of the former President of the Republic François Mitterrand, the writer Frédéric Mitterrand once confided in the show The sofa, on France 3, that his uncle had “not loved him enough”. Guest on SundayThere is not only one life in lifeNicolas Sarkozy’s former Minister of Culture returned in November 2020 to this special link with his father’s brother Robert.
All his life, François Mitterrand occupied a central place within the family, recalled Frédéric Mitterrand, particularly with his father. “It was his great love,” he said. “From his youth, François Mitterrand exercised an extraordinarily strong influence on everyone around him, on his parents and on his brothers and sisters.”
And if the fourth elected president of the Fifth Republic had a very intimate relationship with his daughter Mazarine, “the great love of his life”, he had “a fairly distant relationship with the children”, confided Frédéric Mitterrand. Me, “I was a little boy from the 16th arrondissement, while he was officially left bank and socialist. I didn’t interest him much.”
“You’d better do literary shows”
And the growing popularity of Frédéric Mitterrand, particularly in the 1980s on television, will not interest the “Sphynx” any more. “He would have preferred not to hear about me,” confided the guest from Europe 1. No doubt François Mitterrand disapproved of the career pursued by his nephew, who, eligible for the ENA, had never applied oral exam at the prestigious school.
“One of the reasons for the somewhat complicated relations that I had with François Mitterrand is that I was not reassuring,” analyzed a posteriori Frédéric Mitterrand. “Moreover, he was an extraordinary intellectual, a man who placed considerable emphasis on the mind,” he said. “So I think he recognized certain qualities in me, and that he criticized me for not using them enough. When I did variety shows, which I loved doing, it annoyed him a lot. He said to me: ‘ You’d better do literary shows.’