THE widow of a French president who managed to keep his mistress and illegitimate daughter secret for years said last week that the Queen envied France’s respect for the privacy of its public figures.

Danielle Mitterrand, 83, said that during a state visit to Paris in 1992 the Queen had grumbled about her children being put under the media spotlight. At that time revelations were being made about unhappiness in the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

“We were, above all, mothers and parents,” Danielle Mitterrand told The Sunday Times. “She certainly did not appreciate the private life of her children being made public.”

The French, by contrast, were kept in the dark about life behind the parapets of power: François Mitterrand was able to hide Mazarine, the daughter he had with Anne Pingeot, his mistress, until he was dying of cancer at the end of his rule in 1995. By then she was 20.

His widow, who had two sons with Mitterrand, refused to talk about the other family or the moment she found out about Mazarine, today a 32-year-old novelist.

“I demand that my private life be respected,” she said. “It angers me to be asked such questions. Do you think that the Queen was happy to see the press digging around in the private life of her family?”

Mitterrand revelled in the extraordinary privileges of the French presidency and bugged journalists’ telephones in an effort to protect Mazarine and other secrets.

An energetic seducer, he put Carole Bouquet, the former Bond girl, under surveillance simply because he wanted to know more about her. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he and his wife were understood to have led almost separate lives for most of Mitterrand’s two terms in office.

“I kept my freedom of action, which François respected,” his widow said, referring to her embrace of various left-wing causes from the Kurds to “Subcomandante Marcos”, the hooded leader of Mexico’s Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

Last week she had just returned from a book fair in Cuba, where she was disappointed not to have been granted an audience at the bedside of the ailing Fidel Castro.

“He obviously does not want to show himself in this weakened state to people he likes,” she said.

Like the Cuban despot, she believes that the world is run by an “economic dictatorship” of financial interests dominated by oil. Yet she was less harsh on President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose economic reforms are anathema to her, than she was on her own deeply divided political family.

“The Socialist leaders in France are not Socialist enough,” she complained, referring to François Hollande, the party’s secretary-general, who is famous for saying, “I don’t like the rich.”

Ségolène Royal, Hollande’s estranged companion and failed presidential candidate, “does not represent the sort of society we Socialists want”, she added.

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