His political odyssey had been strange. He was born in the Charente. His bourgeois family were Catholic with royalist leanings. (A great-uncle had been a minister during the July monarchy.) As a student in Paris before the war he was on the fringe at least of extreme rightwing groups, the notorious Cagoule and the Camelots du Roi. Several of his friends belonged to the Cagoule, a violent organisation not averse to murder and terrorism. (Later there were Cagoulards in Vichy, also with de Gaulle in London; relations between the two were never broken.)

Mitterrand was wounded and taken prisoner on June 18, 1940, the day of de Gaulle’s first broadcast from London. He escaped, made his way to Vichy, where he found patrons and employment, and wrote two articles for a magazine, France, revue de l’Etat Nouveau, both appearing after the Germans moved into the unoccupied zone. He received the Pétainist decoration, “la Francisque”, but had already moved into the Resistance, and it is generally agreed that friends obtained the Francisque for him as a cover. In the Resistance, he was a Giraudist rather than a Gaullist, a meeting with de Gaulle in Algiers being fruitless. Nevertheless he was made a junior minister in the General’s provisional government in 1944. Elected to the National Assembly, he became the leader of a small right-of-centre party. Throughout his life he maintained contact with friends from Vichy days, and in old age expressed a nostalgia for Vichy.

His movement to the Left was gradual. Some would say he never arrived there.

De Gaulle had created a necessary myth: that Free France was the true France, that Vichy was an aberration to be swept out of sight. Mitterand knew that this was a distortion of history. At the end of his life he was prepared not only to confront his own chequered history but to invite the French to confront theirs, and, in doing so, to discard the Gaullist myth and to deny de Gaulle’s 1958 claim of “the legitimacy which I have incarnated for 20 years”. “Do you think that’s a republican sentiment, a democratic one?” he asked. “Legitimacy, that’s elections, not the 18th of June.”