February 26, 2019
We have been having brilliant weather in France for several days. So my wife and I spent a glorious Saturday walking along the Seine. We stopped for a drink on a cafe built on a peniche (riverboat) along the Pont Alexandre III. Our conversation turned on the Jussie Smollett hate hoax. She is a very well informed French journalist but had never heard of him nor his shenanigans in Chicago. After I made a brief description of his hoax she replied “C’est comme l’affaire de l’observatoire.”
François Mitterand, a future president of France, was in opposition to the nomination of Charles de Gaulle to come to power as the first president of the Fifth Republic in the fall of 1959. It was an especially tense period due to the continuing war in Algeria, at that time a part of France. Mitterand had a history as the interior minister (the head of the police) of aggressive action against the Algerian independence movement. In Paris, on the night of October 15 to 16, Mitterand left the famous Brasserie Lipp on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. He was being driven in his Peugeot 403 on the Avenue de l’Observatoire where he claimed his car was strafed by bullets. This brought sympathy to Mitterand and his political position. But about one week later the actual gunman or at least the organizer of the attack, Robert Pesquet, (a former right-wing member of the Assembly) accused François Mitterrand of having ordered the attack to publicize himself. Hence the recognition by my wife of this affair with Mr. Smollett. Pesquet had proof that he had met on more than one occasion with Mitterand. Mitterand later responded that he had been…