Danielle Mitterrand, Former First Lady of France, Is Dead at 87
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Danielle Mitterrand, the widow of former President François Mitterrand of France, who pushed beyond stereotypical notions of a first lady to champion leftist causes, once kissing Fidel Castro on the steps of the Élysée Palace, died on Tuesday in Paris. She was 87.
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France announced the death. Mrs. Mitterrand entered a hospital on Friday with respiratory problems and was put in an induced coma on Sunday, French news reports said.
When Mr. Mitterrand, a Socialist, became president in 1981, Mrs. Mitterrand made it clear that she had no enthusiasm for the traditional first-lady roles of hostess, decorator and good-will ambassador. During her husband's 14-year incumbency, the longest of any French president, Mrs. Mitterrand spoke up for ethnic Kurds, criticized President Ronald Reagan's Central American policies and started a foundation to promote human rights.
After his presidency she continued to press her concerns, including drinking-water shortages in developing countries.
"I have no power," she said in an interview with The Washington Post in 1989. "I have only my power of indignation, my power of conviction."
She also had the ear of the most powerful politician in France. "François would tell the complainers: 'Her causes are just, I can't stop defending them,' " she told Le Journal du Dimanche, a French weekly newspaper, in October.
Mrs. Mitterrand was regarded as more leftist than her husband, who was elected leader of the Socialist Party in 1971 and invited Communists into his government in 1981. Catherine Nay, in her 1984 biography, "The Black and the Red: François Mitterrand, the Story of an Ambition," quoted him as saying in 1972, "She considers me much too moderate in my political life."
It was she who invited Mr. Castro to Paris in 1995; her husband's government emphasized that it was not a state visit.
Mrs. Mitterrand made a large international impression at her husband's funeral in 1996. At the grave site, along with two of her sons with Mr. Mitterrand, she stood near his longtime mistress, Anne Pingeot, a museum curator, and his long-secret daughter with Ms. Pingeot, Mazarine Pingeot. She was photographed consoling the daughter. "It was instinct," Mrs. Mitterrand said.
First Published November 23, 2011 12:01 am
