Explain the Mitterand snubbing of Rene Levesque, please.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

I just came across this in Wikipedia:

@Wikipedia article on the Quebec sovereignty movement

like President François Mitterrand, who was distrustful of nationalism and notoriously snubbed[citation needed] Lévesque at their first meeting in the 1970s

A quick googling reveals nothing, so can anyone tell me what that was all about? How did the snubbing occur? What happened?

[Arnold_Winkelried]

Sorry, don’t know. But this webpage describing a book written on France/Québec relations has the following quote:

Bastien writes that Mitterrand detested Premier René Lévesque, and dismissed him as a classless bumpkin when the diminutive Québec leader once used his teacup saucer as an ashtray during a visit to Paris.

and, in another paragraph, says in French (translation by yours truly)

François Mitterrand despised René Lévesque, whom he once described as a «country bumpkin from Périgord», et got along very well with Pierre Trudeau.

[Hypnagogic_Jerk]

Sorry for getting to this thread extra, extra late. When I first read it I didn’t know the answer, but it just hit me that I could find the answer in any good biography of Lévesque. So here’s the scoop, according to Pierre Godin’s biography of René Lévesque, notably volume two (Héros malgré lui, 1960-1976) and volume three (L’espoir et le chagrin, 1976-1980). I just hope that Spectre still cares about the answer.

Basically, what happened is that Lévesque met Mitterrand in June 1972 in a small town named Mézidon where Mitterrand’s Socialist Party was holding a party. Mitterrand arrived late, coldly shook Lévesque’s hand and basically didn’t speak to him the whole night.

Both Mitterrand and Lévesque didn’t like each other. Among French politicians, it was the Gaullists on the right that were the warmest to Quebec nationalism. Remember Charles de Gaulle shouting “Vive le Québec libre!” during a speech from Montreal’s city hall in 1967. Socialists such as Mitterrand preferred Pierre Trudeau’s ideology, both because they were opposed to Gaullists and because they were distrustful of nationalism and considered that it was incompatible with left-wing ideas. Lévesque also disliked Mitterrand: first because of this snub – he strongly criticized Mitterrand for it, both to colleagues and in his column in Le Journal de Montréal – and also, according to Godin, because Mitterrand was much too left-wing for Lévesque. I find this surprising: Lévesque was in fact politically left-wing, but Godin says that he always was a liberal rather than a socialist, he was a free-market enthusiast, and always resisted the attempts of more leftist elements in the Parti québécois to have the party join the Socialist International.

This said, the relations between Mitterrand and the Parti québécois later improved, basically because of political expediency: Mitterrand wanted a contingency plan for the case where the PQ actually succeeded in realizing Quebec independence.