A WAVE of nostalgia is washing over France this weekend as the Left marks the tenth anniversary of the death of François Mitterrand, the man the country sees as its greatest modern President.

The celebration is less about the late Machiavellian leader than France’s yearning for a golden age before the grey era of la chiraquie, which ends in May next year. For most, President Chirac cuts a feeble figure beside the grandeur of Mitterrand, according to opinion polls this week that ranked the present leader far behind the late Socialist monarch and Charles de Gaulle as head of state. Mitterrand treated M Chir ac, who served two years as his Prime Minister, as a lightweight.

Mitterrand-mania, which overlooks the scandals of his presidency and the high unemployment that was his legacy, culminates tomorrow in Jarnac, the town where he spent his childhood and was buried. La Mitterrandie — his old clan, including his prime ministers, wife, chief mistress, legitimate and illegitimate children — will attend ceremonies at the cemetery and the inauguration of a museum in his family home.

The reign of a political virtuoso who stirred loathing and love is the subject of 20 books, as well as films and endless media coverage. Today in Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, the Socialist Mayor, is to inaugurate a walk that takes in Mitterrand’s favourite spots, including the Bastille Opera, the Great Arch of La Défense and the national library that bears his name.

The oddest piece of memorabilia was a 1980s home movie broadcast this week in which he is seen playing J. R. Ewing of Dallas in a skit with Mazarine Pingeot, his illegitimate daughter. Mme Pingeot, 32, who has emerged to become guardian of the Mitterrand temple, included the shots in a documentary.

France is celebrating the man who, having been the chief opponent of de Gaulle, won power in 1981 with a pledge to transform what was a very conservative nation into a neo-Marxist utopia. The experiment, begun as Margaret Thatcher and President Reagan set off in the opposite direction, lasted two disastrous years before Mitterrand was forced back towards the market economy.

Mitterrand led France into the modern age, showing that the Left could come to power without violence. His dark side seems to have been forgotten. though. This included his wartime service for the collaborationist Vichy regime, a faked assassination attempt against himself while he was in Opposition, and the scandals of his late presidency, including the suicides of two aides. Jacques Attali, an adviser and author of a Mitterrand bestseller, explained the mania: “People are longing for a time when France was more powerful, when it felt better about itself. Mitterrand was the last king of France.”

M Chirac’s party, the Union for a Popular Movement, has said that “many of the problems of today’s society are linked to choices made in the 1980s — bad choices that contradicted economic common sense”.

Some are recalling the cynical side of a president who cultivated mystery and kept friendships with those who had collaborated with the Nazis. Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, owes his breakthrough to a campaign by Mitterrand to promote him so as to foil M Chirac’s movement.

Last year a dozen one-time aides and police officers were convicted for spying on the President’s adversaries in the 1980s. The aftershocks continue from vast financial abuses at the former Elf oil giant and the Crédit Lyonnais bank.

Fascination with Mitterrand, who died at 79 after 15 years of prostate cancer, is strongest among those who were children during his presidency. Despite their more mixed memories, older Socialists see him as a god compared with the squabbling politicians vying for his mantle before the 2007 elections.

Max Gallo, an historian and MEP who was Mitterrand’s spokesman, said: “Today’s politicians seem obsessed with their petite cuisine, pushing their little interests . . . Mitterrand transcended and embodied the whole spectrum of French passions.”