The Cost of Courage (27 page)

These were remarkable achievements, especially because there had never been any warmth between him and François Mitterrand, the leader of the Socialist Party. Boulloche had been much closer to Mitterrand’s earthier predecessor, Gaston Defferre, the celebrated mayor of Marseille. Raymond Forni, a young friend and colleague in the National Assembly, remembered his mentor’s attitude toward Mitterrand this way: “Boulloche was certain that he was working for France — and Mitterrand was working for himself.” But despite the coolness between them, Mitterrand recognized that Boulloche was a man to be reckoned with. By 1978, André had become his party’s chief spokesman on economic affairs, and most people expected Mitterrand to make him the first Socialist finance minister since the war, if Mitterrand was elected president in 1981.

But a fateful plane trip during the 1978 parliamentary campaign changed all that.

FRANÇOIS MITTERRAND
was invited to participate in a debate at Saint-Dié-des-Vosges by Christian Pierret, a thirty-two-year-old Socialist candidate for the National Assembly there.
^ǁ
Pierret’s district adjoined André’s. When the party leader was too busy to participate in the debate, André Boulloche stepped in for him at the midday gathering in the provincial city in the Vosges Mountains.

André’s noontime appointment was less than a hundred miles from his own city of Montbéliard. But if he took a regularly scheduled airline, he wouldn’t be able to get back in time for his own campaign meeting that evening. So he asked his secretary to arrange another way to get there. Christian Pierret offered him an air taxi. “I don’t like to take those little planes,” André told his secretary. “But if I have to, I will.”

The weather was calm, with ten miles of visibility, when André took off at two thirty in the afternoon of March 16 from the airstrip outside Saint-Dié-des-Vosges. He was alone with the twenty-three-year-old pilot, Renaud Mary, who was the son of the president of the commuter line they were traveling on.
^a
Now André was returning to his own adopted city of Montbéliard, which was only a half an hour away by plane. He expected to address a thousand constituents at his own political meeting that night.

As he had all his life, the sixty-two-year-old politician was pushing himself as hard as he could. The first round of the election had gone badly for the Socialists, and this was no time to let up. The second, decisive round of the election was only four days away.

Montbéliard was the city that Boulloche had “parachuted” into in 1962 to create a new political base for himself. He had chosen it partly because it was a region of liberal Catholics and devout Protestants. Boulloche was a very liberal Catholic himself (none of his
children had even been baptized) and his new constituents quickly embraced him. Three years after his arrival in Montbéliard, he was elected mayor.

His political accomplishments were the result of pure determination. A technocrat who had been an engineer of bridges and highways before the war, Boulloche didn’t start out with any aptitude for politics. He certainly didn’t fit the profile of a typical politician: One reporter wrote that the man with the gray crew cut and a somber countenance looked like a “secular monk.” He once described politics as “an infernal life.” But this was also someone who brought an unbreakable will to bear on everything he did.

“Are you ever discouraged?” a radio reporter asked him in 1976.

“Yes, but not very often.”

“What do you do when that happens?”

“I wait for it to pass.”

When he first arrived in Montbéliard, Boulloche had bonded with the workers of Peugeot, whose factories employed thirty-seven thousand workers in the region. His constituents recognized him as a gifted administrator. After thirteen years at City Hall, his adopted city boasted an improved public transportation system, a bustling cultural life, a new sanitation system, and a rebuilt city center.

After his first decade as mayor, André declared, “I think I can say without exaggeration that my team has completely transformed the place. People who come back after being away for fifteen years don’t even recognize it.” Now, whenever there was an election, the popular Socialist had the luxury of being able to spend much of his time assisting the campaigns of his less-well-established friends and allies.

AS THE LITTLE AIRPLANE
headed south, it followed a flight path parallel with the Rhine. Suddenly, Boulloche’s preoccupation with the election was replaced by a more palpable danger. Half an hour into the flight, cruising at 150 miles an hour, the small aircraft started
bouncing in high winds. Without warning, they were at the center of a violent winter storm. As they approached Montbéliard, snow and sleet blanketed the windscreen and hail rattled the cockpit, cutting their visibility to less than three hundred yards. The provincial airstrip at Montbéliard had no radar, and it waved them away. A policeman on the ground spotted them circling overhead; later he remembered that it had looked as if they were searching for the proper path.

From there they headed for Belfort-Fontaine, which was ten miles away. Raymond Forni, who represented a neighboring constituency, spotted the red-and-white plane when it was trying to land at the second airport. But the storm was fierce there too, so they decided to make for Basel-Mulhouse, an international airport equipped with radar for all-weather landings. It serves Basel, Switzerland, and Mulhouse, France. By now they had been flying for nearly two hours. Boulloche had been trained as a pilot in Morocco after the war, but he never got to fly because of a shortage of planes. Now he climbed into the copilot’s seat to try to help guide the plane to safety.

It was four twenty-three in the afternoon. The weather had cleared up at Montbéliard, but the pilot and his passenger didn’t know that, and the storm had followed them to Basel-Mulhouse.

“I can’t come down — I’ll manage by myself.”

Those were the last words the tower at Basel-Mulhouse heard from the plane’s young pilot. As he headed east toward Frankfurt, air traffic controllers watched the plane disappear from their radar screens. The Piper started losing altitude because of the weight of the ice on its wings. At the same moment, its radio stopped working, because the antenna had been torn off by the storm.

A MOMENT LATER
, buffeted by severe winds, or disoriented by the storm, the pilot changed direction by forty-five degrees — and slammed into the side of the Hochblauen, twenty-three hundred feet up the side of the thirty-eight-hundred-foot mountain.

This unconquerable man — the one who had survived three German concentration camps — had crashed in the Black Forest of Germany.

The little Piper was demolished, its shattered shell suspended upside down from the branches of a tree. Boulloche and the pilot were ejected from the plane at the moment of impact. They tumbled out of the cockpit into a foot-deep cushion of snow. The pilot’s face was smashed in, and André had a punctured lung. They were dazed and bleeding and suffering enormous pain. And yet, somehow, they were still alive.

When they realized they were able to walk, they began to limp down a path leading into the valley. They were assaulted by sheets of wet, white snow dropping out of the black sky. After struggling toward the valley a few hundred yards, they reached a shed built of logs, which had been erected to shelter summer tourists.

There they stopped to rest. Two miles away in the distance, they could hear a faint church bell, chiming five o’clock in a nearby village.

BACK IN PARIS
, it was Boulloche’s secretary, Andrée Vauban, who was the first to raise the alarm. André had told her that he would be back in his office in Montbéliard by four thirty in the afternoon, and he would call her when he arrived. When she hadn’t heard from him by five o’clock, she called Montbéliard to check up on him.

“The plane must have left late,” Boulloche’s aide in Montbéliard told her. The aide seemed unperturbed, but Vauban was immediately suspicious. Her next call was to Christian Pierret, the candidate in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges for whom Boulloche had been campaigning earlier that afternoon. Pierret told her that Boulloche had taken off on time. Then his secretary made another call to Montbéliard to inquire about the weather there.

“Snow! Terrible wind! Hail!”

Andrée Vauban immediately sensed that her boss was in danger.
Something is happening,
she said to herself.
He should have arrived by now.
Her next call was to the Ministry of the Interior. Then she contacted Odile. Mme. Boulloche rushed off to Le Bourget to catch the last plane of the night to Belfort-Fontaine, one of the airports where André’s plane had been unable to land a few hours earlier. As soon as she arrived, this formidable spouse started phoning civil and military officials to get them to expand the search.

André’s younger son, Jacques, was now a twenty-four-year-old medical student in Paris. He was driving across the city when he heard a radio report that his father’s airplane had disappeared. His first thought was that his father might have been the victim of some kind of attack.

When André’s sister Christiane returned home to her Paris apartment on square Alboni, in the 16th arrondissement, it was her husband, Jean, who greeted her with the disquieting news: “André’s plane hasn’t arrived back in Montbéliard.”

That was all they knew.

That night, François Mitterrand, the leader of the Socialist Party, issued a statement:

German and French helicopters swarmed above the Black Forest in search of the plane on Thursday night, but darkness and the snowstorm prevented them from finding anything. It was the following afternoon when a search party found the bodies of André and Renaud Mary, a hundred yards apart, down the hill from their
fallen plane. Apparently the young pilot had kept searching for help after André could go no farther.

Their bodies were found by French troops of the 12th Regiment stationed in Mulheim, Germany. Years later, Jacqueline’s daughter, Claudine Lefer, had a clear memory of her mother’s reaction to the news: “And on top of everything else, the plane crashed in Germany.”

FOUR DAYS AFER HIS DEATH
, André’s body lay in state in the Montbéliard City Hall, surrounded by a silent honor guard of local council members and city officials. “Men and women of every class and every age passed his coffin, sometimes depositing a small bouquet of flowers,” the local newspaper,
L’Est Républicain
, reported. “One had the impression of the entire city parading by, like a river flowing slowly and majestically. There was an extraordinary impression of grave sadness, but above all, of dignity, which was symbolic of the particular influence of André Boulloche, who had attracted such affection and respect.” Seven special airplanes were flying dignitaries in for the funeral on March 21, plus an eighth for François Mitterrand.

At 9 o’clock in the morning, André’s wooden coffin was taken from City Hall by six white-gloved firemen, followed by an army officer holding a pillow displaying the dead man’s four most important decorations — Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur, Compagnon de la Libération, Croix de Guerre, and Médaille de la Résistance. Outside, the firemen wrapped the coffin in the French Tricolor, then placed it in the center of a fire truck and covered it with a glass enclosure. As rain began to drench the slow procession, umbrellas of every color bobbed up and down above the huge crowd that followed the peculiar red funeral coach. The mourners included four delegations of deportees who had survived the German camps.

The funeral itself took place at the Fairgrounds Hall of Montbéliard. Because it could accommodate only three thousand people, an outdoor sound system was installed for thousands more who wanted to listen outside.

There were half a dozen speakers, including Mitterrand, André Postel-Vinay and, remarkably, two Germans: Volker Hauff, a prominent Social Democrat who was minister of science and technology, and Otfried Ulshöfer, the mayor of Ludwigsburg, the German twin city of Montbéliard.

Every speaker described the main postwar preoccupation of this survivor of three German concentration camps: André’s unstinting efforts to foster friendship and reconciliation between France and Germany. In a remarkable act of intellectual jiu-jitsu, André took all of the ghastly energy from his wartime incarceration and turned it around to make sure that nothing like what had happened to him would ever happen to another Frenchman or German again.

In his funeral oration, Mitterrand, the future president of France, declared that André had wanted to “sublimate his sufferings, to give them meaning beyond this moment in history. It was as if he had found the capacity within Europe to construct peace and harmony among all peoples … He considered reconciliation with Germany a necessity. When he turned toward the Germans, he was the first among us who knew how to say, ‘My friends.’ ”

Otfried Ulshöfer quoted André’s speech from three years earlier, when the two mayors had celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the twinning of their two cities. “Today the two of us maintain the flame of friendship between us. Tomorrow, others will have this duty, and I am convinced that they shall not fail.”

Then the German mayor spoke for himself: “Today we consider that sentence as the duty he has left us. Now we must endeavor to carry it out.”