Mazarine Pingeot

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Mazarine Pingeot at a commemoration of her father's death, January 2006

Mazarine Marie Pingeot (born December 18, 1974), who changed her name to Mazarine Marie Pingeot-Mitterrand in 2005, is a writer and the daughter of former French president François Mitterrand and his mistress Anne Pingeot. She is said to be named after the Bibliothèque Mazarine, the oldest library in France, because of her parents' love for books.

The existence of this daughter of president Mitterrand was long hidden from the press. Ensuring confidentiality about it was one of the motivations behind some of the illegal wiretapping that Mitterrand ordered under the guise of fighting terrorism.

She was a student first at the elite lycée Henri-IV in Paris and then at the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud (now named the École Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines), a highly prestigious school. In 1997 she passed the agrégation de philosophie, and then started to write her Ph.D. thesis on the philosopher Spinoza, working as an assistant at the Université de Provence Aix-Marseille I^[1].

In 1998, she published her first novel, titled Premier Roman ("First Novel"), which was not highly praised by critics but was translated in many languages, including English. In 2000 she published Zeyn or the Reconquest, for which Charles Bremner of The Times wrote "If there was a prize for braving the ridicule of critics, it would go to Mazarine Pingeot" (May 8, 2000). In 2003, she published a series of literary comments, "They told me who I was" ("they" being the books). In February 2005, she published her fourth book, Not a Word, a diary about her childhood life as a national secret. In 2007 she published her fifth book, Le Cimetière des poupées (The Cemetery of the Dolls), a novel about a woman who kills her baby and put it in a freezer.

She is also a journalist (writing for ELLE magazine between 1999 and 2001) and a television anchor (on a French cable television, Paris Première).

A son Ascot was born on July 11, 2005 to Mazarine Pingeot and her companion, film producer Mohamed Ulad-Mohand. Their second child, a daughter Tara was born on October 5, 2007.