For the last tribute to Frédéric Mitterrand this Tuesday, March 26 at the Saint-Thomas d'Aquin church in Paris, noble families, political representatives, cultural and anonymous personalities made the trip.
In the front rows, the family of the former minister was there: his brothers Olivier and Jean-Gabriel, his three children Mathieu, Saïd and Jihed, who came with his decorations and his academic sword, as well as his cousin Mazarine Pingeot, daughter long hidden from François Mitterrand.
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“We were experiencing your wounds, your sorrows, this sadness of being misunderstood and this feeling of being a
has-been
which was unbearable for you,” declared his three children, moved, reports Le
Figaro
.
“We would have still had so much to tell you!”
Homosexual and single father
Openly homosexual, Frédéric Mitterrand had a natural son in 1981, Mathieu, whom he raised as a single father.
“I raised him alone, from the age of 4, because his mother took drugs,” revealed the former director of the French Academy in Rome at
Gala
in 2017, eight years after coming out in his autobiographical novel. entitled
The Bad Life
.
"I did my best.
He suffered though, I'm afraid.
When he was 10, I lived with a friend, and I felt that it could be a complicated situation for him.
For this reason, I stopped living together with a man.”
Mathieu Mitterrand at the funeral of his father, Frédéric Mitterrand.
(Paris, March 26, 2024.) Berzane Nasser/ABACA
Subsequently, François Mitterrand's nephew adopted two sons in Hammamet, Tunisia, Jihed and Saïd.
From their father, the two boys inherited the name “Mitterrand”, even if they kept their first family name: Kasmi for Saïd, and Gasmi for Jihed, we learn again in the columns of
Gala
.
Still, Mathieu, Jihed and Saïd were able to pay a final tribute to their famous father this Tuesday, alongside figures from the Parisian elite.
A group of former Ministers of Culture - Jack Lang, Jacques Toubon, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, Franck Riester, Roselyne Bachelot and Rima Abdul Malak - rubbed shoulders with the last in title, Rachida Dati, and the former President of the Republic Nicolas Sarkozy, who appointed Frédéric Mitterrand to rue de Valois.
On the other hand, few actresses, whom he was so fond of, had made the trip, apart from Arielle Dombasle.
The audience also included Maria Pia of Savoy, Princess of Bourbon-Parma, Emmanuel-Philibert of Savoy, Prince Laurent of Belgium and Chantal d'Orléans.
A funeral that couldn't be more mundane.