François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand

There will be no return to the old personal networks entrusted to presidential Africa advisors such as Gaullists Jacques Foccart and Fernand Wibaux or President François Mitterrand's son Jean-Christophe (dubbed Papa m'a dit - 'Daddy told me')...

They have made impressive progress in developing accountable pluralist institutions since the 1990 Franco-African summit at La Baule France when French President François Mitterrand famously told his mainly autocratic audience that democracy could be their 'friend'...

Paul Aussaresses confirms the old belief that governments in Paris (in which future President François Mitterrand served as a minister) approved widespread torture and murder...

Those present were Monsieur with an associate named Jean-Claude Uthurry-Borde; Pierre-Yves Gilleron former head of the French counter-espionnage outfit the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire and active in President François Mitterrand's Africa Section at the Elysée Palace; and Yves-Michel Deloche founder of Jet Finances Consultants a Swiss firm that rented out aircraft to among others Elf...

His closeness to and acceptance of a gift of diamonds from the late Central African Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa helped to lose him the presidency to François Mitterrand in 1981...

On 1 December they searched the records of two official witnesses in the money-laundering affair the late President François Mitterrand's son Jean-Christophe (widely known as 'Papa m'a dit') and Jacques Attali a big spending former President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development...

France's Parti Socialiste was always wary of African politics and is more so since the debacles in François Mitterrand's era...

His personal surgeon is still Bernard Debré who was Cooperation Minister under the late President François Mitterrand and whose father Michel Debré held senior posts in the 1960s...

He lacks the verve of his more cerebral predecessor François Mitterrand who had set much store by his own pro-democracy pronouncements at the La Baule Francophone summit in 1991...

Africanist academics such as Jean Copans and director of the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales Jean-François Bayart and heavyweights from Bordeaux’s Centre d’Etude d’Afrique Noire were scathing about Africa policy under late President François Mitterrand and remain suspicious of Jacques Chirac’s Gaullist line...