Nine items were auctioned in Paris for €80,200 (£56,000), including a chaise longue designed by Le Corbusier, the renowned architect, and a white marble dining table at which M Mitterand chatted with Mikhail Gorbachev, his Soviet counterpart.

Other pieces on sale were a reading chair by Poul Kjaerholm, the Danish designer, which fetched €8,000 and a bed designed by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, the German architect.

Experts said that the collection was unexceptional. “It is common and outdated,” one told Le Parisien. “But they are good bourgeois pieces of furniture that will always have a certain value.”

The former President’s reputation helped to push many items above their estimated price. Thierry Meresse, a health service manager, bought three lamps for €3,000 saying: “Mitterrand lit up my youth. I voted for him the first time in 1981.”

A leather-bound armchair and matching footrest by Charles and Ray Eames, the American designers, which were expected to fetch €1,500, were sold for €10,000. Le Corbusier’s chaise longue went for €6,500 and the marble table for €9,000.

The auction house said that Mme Mitterrand, 79, had organised the sale — held on the 88th anniversary of her husband’s birth — “because she wanted to change her furniture”. However, her friends said that she needed the money to help her son, Jean- Christophe, 58, who has become known as “the French Mark Thatcher”. Once employed as his father’s African adviser, M Mitterrand is now impoverished, unwell and threatened with a prison sentence. He is facing three separate criminal inquiries, his bank accounts have been blocked and he has been treated in hospital for depression.

Next week, M Mitterrand, who denies all the charges, will be tried for tax evasion for allegedly concealing revenue of €500,000 from the French authorities. Prosecutors claim that he received the funds for his role in the illegal sale of weapons to Angola in the 1990s, for which he has also been charged with “complicity in arms-dealing”. He faces a maximum five-year jail term and €75,000 fine if found guilty. He is also being investigated in connection with money-laundering allegations involving a Mauritanian fish factory.

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