Mitterrand’s red scarf, symbol of a government left of controlled origin
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VSt is a memory of the distant time when the Socialist Party (PS) was a rising political force and engulfed the imagination of the left through a single character. To remember François Mitterrand is to summon a whole gallery of gray-grays, including this bright red scarf which he only parted with in summer.
Associated with a wide-brimmed hat, this neckerchief, which underlines the Mitterrand silhouette, has been the object of a sort of cult, as if it had the power to cure the scrofula of a left condemned to ‘opposition. The scarf appears at the time of the conquest of the PS, during the congress of Epinay, in 1971. Some time after this event, on the occasion of a gathering in Jouy-en-Josas (Yvelines), where lived and is buried the man who embodied the Popular Front, Pierre Mauroy remembers having thought he saw the ghost of Léon Blum advancing in the distance. It was Mitterrand, wearing the hat and wrapped in the scarf.
Procession of clones
Displaying such a filiation makes it possible to play on several registers. On the left, in the 1970s, the Popular Front remains the great historical reference of the Socialists, at the antipodes of the government of Guy Mollet, formed in 1956 and associated with the agony of the IVe Republic. For François Mitterrand, who came from the right and who hardly shone with his anti-colonialist commitment when he was Minister of the Interior, it was a question of making an act of allegiance to the ” break with capitalism “. It is also the signal that the left, lacking a major leader, has a leader in the making. And then, targeting the succession of Léon Blum, who fought from the Congress of Tours (1920) against Communist hegemony, sends another message: the desire to put an end to the historic leadership of the French Communist Party.
The cashmere scarf will accompany François Mitterrand in power and halo him during his two seven years. During his funeral in 1996, clones thronged the procession wearing hats and red neckerchiefs, which then became a sign of belonging to a left-wing government with a controlled designation of origin. Ten years later, during the commemoration of the disappearance of “Tonton”, Laurent Fabius, then candidate for the socialist presidential primaries, will make an appearance wearing these accessories. Which will hardly work for him. As for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he will also sometimes try to follow in the footsteps of ” Old “ by adopting the Mitterrand “total look”.
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