Mitterrand: A Study in Ambiguity. By Philip Short. The Bodley Head; 688 pages; £30. To be published in America in April as "A Taste for Intrigue: The Multiple Lives of François Mitterrand" by Henry Holt; $38. ON THE night of François Mitterrand's death in 1996, his successor as French president, Jacques Chirac, summed up the wily Socialist leader as the "reflection of his century." The son of a stationmaster from Angoulême, who was taken prisoner by the Germans during the second world war, Mitterrand rose to become a cabinet minister at the age of 30, and in 1981 the Fifth Republic's first Socialist president. He embodied many of the 20th century's struggles and contradictions. Mitterrand worked for the Vichy administration during the second world war, and the resistance. He flirted with the political right, before embracing socialism with zeal, and then austerity and liberalisation with reluctance. He denounced the all-powerful presidency created by Charles de Gaulle, only to exercise power himself in the manner of a republican monarch. How did Mitterrand navigate such a brilliant, exasperating, snakelike path to the presidency, and re-election in 1988? In this thoroughly researched biography, Philip Short, a former Paris correspondent for the BBC, shows the answer to be a mix of breathless cunning and ruthless artistry. Mitterrand was certainly dogged: as a student, he became infatuated with a teenaged Parisienne to whom he wrote 2,000 love letters. He was uncompromising too. As president, he would "never accept," he snapped, the idea of apologising for Vichy's crimes. The French were appalled to discover his lifelong friendship with René Bousquet, head of the Vichy police, exposed by Pierre Péan, a French investigative journalist. His 1994 landmark biography, "A French Youth," covered the period 1934 to 1947. Each year, Mr Péan went on to reveal, the Socialist president sent an official wreath to be laid at the tomb of the Vichy leader, Marshall Pétain. Mitterrand was also deeply cynical, turning to socialism "less from conviction than from a process of elimination," writes Mr Short. His searing experience in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany reawakened a sense of injustice at the arbitrary social hierarchies that had dominated his childhood in rural Catholic France. But the aspirant politician equivocated. "Politically, I'm really hesitating," he wrote to a friend in 1945: "I'd be quite willing to join the Socialists, but they are such old clots. The Communists are a pain and the others are all varlets and knaves. Mitterrand was cultured and bookish, with a bewitching ability to charm; "he could have seduced a stone," wrote one French female journalist. But the president was also devious, intimidating, secretive and darkly manipulative, ever ready to break a pact and betray a confidence in pursuit of power and the exercise of it. His decision to appoint an ambitious Gaullist politician, Jacques Chirac, as prime minister in 1986, for instance, after being forced into cohabitation with the political right, was an attempt to "fatally weaken [Chirac], just as he had done earlier to the Communist Party." Much of the political intrigue and scandal of this scholarly book will be familiar to students of the "Sphinx." Yet Mr Short has also delved into the state archives, as well as extracted confidences from Mitterrand's wife, Danielle, who died in 2011, and Anne Pingeot, his mistress, to produce some gems. In the corridors during a European summit, for instance, at which Helmut Kohl agreed to monetary union if Britain and France would accept German reunification, Mitterrand displays an obsessional fear about a unified Germany, telling Margaret Thatcher that it was like Munich in 1938. Ambiguity reached deep into his private as well as political life. In the 1970s the Mitterrand couple lived together with their younger son and Danielle's lover, Jean Balenci, who would go out to fetch croissants in the morning for them all. "To outsiders," reports Mr Short, "he was introduced as a distant cousin." As president, Mitterrand would return after work at the Elysée Palace to Ms Pingeot and their daughter, Mazarine, whom he hid, like his cancer, from the general public and kept at the taxpayer's expense. "We did not set out to have separate lives," Danielle tells Mr Short: "Things happened." Mitterrand's personal behaviour, the author concludes, "was supremely egoistic." The man who emerges from these pages is both brilliant and flawed. He utterly misread Mikhail Gorbachev and the end of the cold war and he was on the wrong side of history during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. He procrastinated to excess. He was above all a master of the art of political secrecy and survival, in an era when ambiguity was not subject to the sort of scrutiny that would expose it far more brutally today.