Juvenal Habyarimana the Rwandan president whose plane was shot down in April 1994 launching the genocide was a political lightweight internationally who clung to Mobutu and to France's President François Mitterrand (AC Vol 45 No 6 Who fired the missiles...

Sankara was radical and seen as stridently independent from any international power bloc; his relations with France's President François Mitterrand soured rapidly as the country shook off some of its colonial ties...

The President made headline news with his exchanges with the students – only partly scripted – announcing that he would remove the secret classification on all documents on the murder of Thomas Sankara the man in power 31 years ago when François Mitterrand visited Burkina Faso the last French head of state to do so...

Kofi Yamgnane 67 a Togolese who thrived in French politics for many years including as a minister under the late President François Mitterrand and then as France’s first elected black mayor in Brittany (AC Vol 48 No 13 Sarko's team) returned to Togo in time to stand in the 2010 presidential election but his candidacy was disallowed...

On the election of François Mitterrand in 1981 he became an economic advisor to the presidency...

He admires the late President François Mitterrand whose closeness to Habyarimana earned him the soubriquet ‘Mitterhamwé’ in Kigali...

Jean-Christophe Mitterrand son of the late President François Mitterrand was fined 350 000 euros (US$519 330) and given a year's suspended gaol sentence; ex-Interior Minister Charles Pasqua was sentenced to three years' gaol (two suspended); and his aide Jean-Charles Marchiani got three years (21 months suspended)...

Despite the continued denials of former President Jacques Chirac and earlier François Mitterrand of involvement in Angolagate Pasqua insists they were both fully informed about the illegal arms deals and commissions earned by the French middlemen as were their Prime Ministers Alain Juppé and Edouard Balladur and finance and defence ministers...

He has handed preparations for Francophone Africa's 50th Independence anniversary in 2010 to Jacques Toubon Minister for Francophone Africa in 1993-5 under President François Mitterrand...

The French Socialist Jacques Lang Minister of Culture under the then President François Mitterrand called him a man of the Left and a 'humanist'...