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“... published an exposé accusing Kouchner of various intellectual, political and financial misdeeds. Pierre Péan is best known for having revealed that the dictator Jean-Bédel Bokassa, of the Central African Republic, had given diamonds worth millions of francs to Giscard d’Estaing, and for uncovering the extent of Mitterrand’s work for the Vichy ...”

“... he doesn’t appear to have objected to the idea of co-operating in this with the government of Pierre Laval, himself one of the most hardline figures in the Marshal’s four-year reign. Indeed, the idea seems at times to have aroused his enthusiasm, to judge by the private letters that he wrote in that year. (The refusal of the Mitterrandistes to allow ...”

“... française, the first to examine François Mitterrand’s past as a young Vichy functionary, Pierre Péan also dug into the 1940-45 period of Duras’s life. Adler goes a step further to reconstruct the shadiest aspects of her character. Three interconnected episodes had been skirted around before Péan and ...”

“... shouldn’t waste time settling old scores. In Une Jeunesse française, published in 1994, Pierre Péan revealed that Mitterrand had worked for Vichy before joining the Resistance, and, sensationally, that he had been on friendly terms with Bousquet well into the 1980s. Mitterrand repeatedly refused to apologise for the behaviour of the French ...”

“... what they called the ‘invasion métèque’, the foreign invasion. In 1994, the journalist Pierre Péan brought much of this to light in Une Jeunesse française: François Mitterrand, 1934-47. The president claimed that his early association with the nationalist right was the result of his upbringing in the Charente. In 1939 Mitterrand joined the ...”

“... microphones which the Elysée might have placed there.) But Foccart kept his secret and even when Pierre Péan brought out his L’Homme de l’ombre in 1990 (subtitled ‘Jacques Foccart: l’homme le plus mystérieux et le plus puissant de la Ve République’), he made no reply – which is why his decision to go public at last is such a coup ...”

“... and soon outpaced, by a partner in the liberal centre. Le Débat, launched in a sleeker format by Pierre Nora under the auspices of Gallimard, had a more ambitious agenda. Nora opened the journal with a programme for intellectual reform. In the past, French culture, steeped in humanist traditions, had been dominated by an ideal of rhetoric that had led from ...”