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In September 1994, President François Mitterrand, who was having to deal with an increasingly tense cohabitation with Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, came under attack from all sides, including his own camp, following the publication of Pierre Péan's book Une jeunesse française (A French Youth), which recounted his career under Vichy. Initially refusing to justify himself, François Mitterrand gathered his memories, from his escape from the stalag to his meeting with Danielle, his future wife, and then his entry into the Resistance, before agreeing to respond live to the French people, despite his uncertain physical condition.

On November 3, 1994, François Mitterrand saw the existence of his second family made public by Paris Match at the very moment when he was embroiled in the Élysée wiretapping scandal. The president saw these new attacks as another episode in the war he had been waging against the right since the bitter humiliation of the real-fake attack on the Observatory in 1959. It was through his memories of meeting Anne Pingeot, who saved him from depression at a time when he had lost his parliamentary immunity, that the president found the strength to fight back.

Hurt by the official recognition of Mazarine's existence, and that of her mother, Danielle Mitterrand runs away, tired of her husband's unspoken words and secrets. At the highest level of government, there was turmoil. Returned to his cult of freedom and the ambiguities he brought to his two great love stories, François Mitterrand revisited his 1970s, when he was buried as a man of the past, and each time he was able to reinvent himself, both politically and romantically.

The illness is weakening the president to such an extent that it is worrying those around him, as he is due to travel to Strasbourg for the start of the French presidency of the European Union. Determined not to give up, he looks back on the key moments of his political commitment to linking France's destiny to that of Europe, particularly at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR. While illness and suffering plague him, he finds the strength to see through the path he has set for himself: to pass on what he has to say to future generations and to prepare for the reconciliation of his two families around his coffin.