Media : Mitterrand ‘Expose’ Irritates the French : ‘France has passed from good old Catholic indulgence to Anglo-Saxon puritanism,’ complains one editor.

For two decades, French journalists and the nation’s high and mighty kept this scandalous secret: President Francois Mitterrand, a married man, had a mistress and an illegitimate daughter.

So when Paris Match published that fact earlier this month, along with a photograph of Mitterrand and his 20-year-old daughter, the outcry was, understandably, deafening.

But it wasn’t the affair that turned out to be the scandal. No one criticized that. And few even seemed to care that Mitterrand might have used taxpayer money to support his “second family.”

What agitated many of France’s leading journalists and political figures was that Paris Match had printed the expose at all. In their view, the magazine had violated the heretofore sanctified realm of a politician’s private life, breaking an unwritten journalistic code. Their biggest fear was that the French press was becoming too much like the American and English press.

“For years, France has remained an island of wisdom in an ocean of revelations that pollute the newspapers of America, Britain, Italy and Germany,” wrote Franz-Olivier Giesbert, editor of Le Figaro, Paris’ largest-circulation daily newspaper. “In the space of a few hours, France has passed from good old Catholic indulgence to Anglo-Saxon puritanism.”

Lost in the debate was the story itself, the details of which were enough to make Fleet Street drool. In the mid-1960s, when he was 50 years old, Mitterrand began a long affair with Anne Pingeot, a 30-year-old campaign volunteer. In 1974, she gave birth to their daughter, Mazarine.

Mazarine is the third child of Mitterrand, 78, who also has two grown sons by Danielle Mitterrand, his wife of the last 50 years.

The public revelation came in the final months of Mitterrand’s 14-year presidency and, perhaps, his life. He has prostate cancer and has himself raised the possibility that he may not survive until May, when his term expires.

The Paris Match photos and articles, which boosted circulation of that popular weekly from 800,000 to 1.2 million, uncorked a host of troubling questions for editors faced with dwindling readership, journalists protecting other secrets and politicians worried about their private lives.

By keeping Mitterrand’s daughter out of the papers, had journalists contributed to the aura of monarchy that surrounds his presidency? Did Mitterrand himself, by taking his daughter to public restaurants and inviting her to state dinners, not open the door? And if taxpayer money was used to support Mitterrand’s mistress and offspring, should not the citizenry have been told sooner?

But the overriding question was: Where is the line between a politician’s public and private lives?

The debate has put the French press, as well as some basic tenets of French life, under the microscope. It also mirrors the American debate over what the public has a right to know--and, in this case, whether breaking one’s marriage vows consistently over a period of decades casts doubt on a politician’s character or his or her fitness for public office.

In the United States, the sexual misconduct of public figures “has more to do with the fact of lying,” said Christine Ockrent, one of France’s most respected journalists and editor of the weekly newsmagazine L’Express. “But in France there is a certain politeness, where things relating to sex are not discussed.

“We never talk about sex, you know, we talk about love,” she added. “It’s cultural. And I feel in our part of the world it is important to maintain the dividing line between what people do in bed and what they do in government.”

The Paris Match article stemmed from “Plaidoyer Impossible” (Impossible Defense), a book by Philippe Alexandre, a French journalist and political analyst. The existence of Mitterrand’s daughter had been revealed before, but only in books and articles written by right-wing critics of the Socialist president. It had never been exposed in a mainstream publication.

Defending their decision to publish, Paris Match and Alexandre argued that Mitterrand had effectively revealed his daughter’s existence himself by appearing in public with her. And Alexandre said the likelihood that Mazarine and her mother were supported by the state makes it a public matter.

“The French aren’t very curious about love affairs,” Alexandre said in an interview. “If I learn that a public figure has a mistress and spends the weekend with her, that doesn’t interest the French. They think that is nearly normal.

“But money does interest us,” he added. “And that is my justification--not that Francois Mitterrand had a liaison that lasted 30 years, but that he used public money for it.”

Serge July, editor of the left-leaning Liberation newspaper, said “everyone knew” about Mitterrand and his daughter. July himself had run into the pair twice at restaurants. But he never published it because the relationship had not influenced public policy, and Mitterrand had never made his own morality a political issue.

“The only other question for me was: Is this second family supported by government money?” July said. “And that remains to be investigated.”

Giesbert, whose newspaper, Le Figaro, has opposed Mitterrand, called Alexandre “a very courageous journalist.” But, he added, “I just don’t agree with him.

“Look, I don’t think it’s OK to use public money to support a mistress,” Giesbert said in an interview. “But it’s not the scandal of the year. I don’t think it is. I’m sorry. I don’t think it’s a story.”

Like many editors in France, Giesbert believes that the public’s right to know stops at the doors of a politician’s home.

In the debate here, even Alexandre’s critics acknowledge that many journalists in France are timid, and especially too reverential and too respectful of political power. And the most powerful man in politics for nearly 14 years has been Mitterrand.

For years, journalists knew that Mitterrand had mistresses and that he and his wife, Danielle, led largely separate lives.

Danielle Mitterrand is said to have first met her husband’s mistress last year in the hospital, when the president was recovering from a cancer operation.

In the 1960s and 1970s, journalists say, Mitterrand often brought Pingeot to Socialist Party meetings. And Pingeot and her daughter reportedly lived in a state-owned apartment, under police guard.

Mitterrand has never denied Mazarine’s existence. In 1984, four years into his first term as president, a group of top political reporters asked Mitterrand if he had a “natural daughter.” He responded: “Yes. So what?” And no one wrote a word about it.

Paris Match contends that Mitterrand knew of its intention to publish and did not object.

In the fuzzy long-lens photograph published in Paris Match, Mitterrand is resting his arm protectively on the dark-haired young woman’s shoulders as they emerge from a Paris restaurant.