In November 1994, the fourth president of the Fifth Republic saw his world crumble with the discovery of his greatest secret: the revelation to the eyes of the world of the existence of his hidden daughter, Mazarine Pingeot. Light on an earthquake at the top of the State.
This is one of the best kept secrets in the history of the Fifth Republic. For more than thirty years, François Mitterrand, successor to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing at the Élysée, led a double life. In the eyes of the world, the head of state has been married to Danielle Mitterrand since 1944, the mother of three of his children, Gilbert, Pascal and Jean-Christophe. But there is still someone missing from this family portrait: his adulterine daughter, Mazarine Pingeot, born in 1974 from her shadow relationship with the art historian Anne Pingeot. In 1984, François Mitterrand nevertheless took the decision to recognize your child before a notary, without revealing its existence in the public sphere. A dramatic turn of events, a few months before the end of his mandate, in November 1994, the magazine Paris Match decided to untie the tongues in pictures…
Mazarine Pingeot, then 19 years old, will “be born” a second time in the press with this news which has made the rounds of France. On the picture which had the effect of a bomb, the young woman was thus immortalized in a famous restaurant in the City of Light with his father, his mother and his companion at the time, the columnist Ali Baddou. A most banal scene of life which nevertheless propelled the president’s daughter from shadow to light brutally: “It was horrible: the world was falling apart“, had indicated the latter in an interview granted to The Obs in 2021. And to add: “My whole reason for being, which was the secret, what made up my identity, was collapsing. We had to carry on as if nothing had happened, but in reality, I no longer had any bearings. It took me a long time to live with that.”
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François Mitterrand: his astonishing reaction
Faced with this media earthquake François Mitterrand could have lost his means, but it never happened, as if sooner or later, family omerta had to be broken. In the book The Paparazzi of the Republic, published on March 3, 2022 by First editions, journalist Renaud Revel handed the microphone to Roland Dumas, then President of the Constitutional Council and friend of the Head of State. The latter thus remembered the astonishing reaction of his relative to the sight of those famous pictures: “It will be like a psychoanalysis”, would have declared François Mitterrand. And to continue, more nuanced: “I like her very much, she is very nice to me. But it’s very boring, I don’t want this post to disturb her while she is taking her exams.”