Francois Mitterrand’s illegitimate daughter spills her revised secrets

The tale of Mazarine Pingeot, the illegitimate daughter of the late Francois Mitterrand and Anne Pingeot, a state art curator, was first hidden then sanitised. Now she gives the real truth

Mazarine Pingeot changed her name to add Mitterrand when she was 19 years old

For seven years, a high-powered French couple kept their secret daughter in semi-seclusion in a Paris apartment, forcing her to lead a double life and lie about her identity to schoolmates.

The tale of Mazarine Pingeot, the illegitimate daughter of the late Francois Mitterrand and Anne Pingeot, a state art curator, first became public in 1994, a year before the end of his 14-year presidency of France.

In a book published in 2005, she described Mitterrand – a wily operator now seen as a great statesman – as a doting father.

Now approaching her 50th birthday in December, Pingeot has delivered a bleaker version of her baroque upbringing in a book in which she claims she was robbed of a normal childhood.

Pingeot, the author of several novels and other works, said she did not blame her parents. “I think they did what they could, without bad intentions. I could have held it against them ... but they were trapped, even if they trapped themselves,” she said last week.

In an account of a 24-hour return visit to her childhood home, a “gloomy” apartment in the Alma, a state-owned mansion in Quai Branly on the Left Bank, she reveals the harm that her ghost-like existence there inflicted on her.

She came to hate the flat, which she calls a “tomb”, coming to feel she had no existence there. Mitterrand installed her there with her mother when she was nine, under 24-hour guard by a team of secret police, until she fled after a nervous breakdown at 16.

Though Mitterrand, who lived with his official family on a nearby street on the Seine, came in the evenings, no visitors or parties were allowed.

Revisiting the flat – with President Emmanuel Macron’s permission – helped her to recover memories she said she had suppressed. “I have amnesia to a terrifying degree,” she told Le Figaro. There were no family photos or memories she could discuss with friends. “Without that, (memories) disappear. In our home, a lot was never said. That’s tied to the question of a name. You have to be named to exist.”

Mitterrand signed documents confirming his paternity in 1984 and in 2016 Pingeot added Mitterrand to her legal name.

The double life was hard. “I never told my parents anything, not to hide things but because the silence imposed on me made me lose the habit,” she said. “School was another world ... Conversely, I talked about nothing at home in the outside world ... We lived in a bubble, outside society. None of my memories is attached to any big collective or public event.”

Pingeot, who inherited her father’s love of literature and holds a doctorate and teaches at universities, was forced to tell school friends that her father was a lawyer. That was his profession before decades in politics, becoming a minister in the 1950s and then the Socialist Party leader from the 1970s. He died in 1996, the year after his presidency ended. Danielle, the official first lady, and their two sons survived him.

By the age of 15, Pingeot could not stand living in what she called her “black hole”.

“I left because I felt I was going to die ... I was empty. The emotional tie with things was cut. I had a childhood but no adolescence.”

The 1994 exposure by Paris Match magazine of her existence, when she was 19, had been a shock. The photograph of Anne Pingeot and her daughter was rumoured at the time to have been authorised by Mitterrand.

“Suddenly I felt they had stuck a ‘wanted’ notice on me,” she told Match last week. “Everything that defined me no longer existed.”

Psychiatrists helped her learn to cope and “feel less guilty”, she said, but her depression returned in later life, especially when she broke up with Mohamed Ulad-Mohand, a film-maker who is the father of her three children. Claustrophobia has left her frightened to enter lifts or the Metro underground.

Pingeot said she remained close to her 81-year-old mother who, in 2016, published Mitterrand’s prolific and literary love letters to her.

Revisiting the apartment had felt dangerous and at times frightening but it had helped her confront the past, she said.

She also revealed that she had recently been given the chance to return there to live when Didier Le Bret, a senior diplomat whom she married in 2017, was offered a flat in the sprawling government building. The couple did not accept the offer.

The Times