A more colorful portrait of Mitterand.

Editorializing on foreign events simply to provide your readers with information your news department has missed is hardly frivolous, especially when you dress up the information with a little commentary or insights of your own.

For instance, even though The Atlanta Constitution ran a reasonably extensive obituary of Francois Mitterrand, some found it as dry as dust - emphasizing his accomplishments in politics and statecraft to the exclusion of aspects of his past that made him a source of endless fascination to the French.

The following was an effort at remedying that lapse.

Francois Mitterrand, dead at age 79, had a finely tuned sense of the momentous. He cared deeply that future chroniclers would refer to his tenure as France's longest-serving 20th century leader with respect.

There's no denying Mitterrand's profound and positive influence inside France and beyond. He led unruly leftists to their first taste of power in 1981, domesticated them, and made them respectable. He rejuvenated Paris with a burst of grand public works. He was an invaluable U.S. ally during the Euromissile crisis of the early 1980s and the Gulf War. Always a booster for France, he still saw its future linked inextricably to the rest of Europe, and he forged a strong bond with a reunited Germany to that end.

These are the accomplishments of a major world statesman pretty much standard fare for historians. What should add spice to their work are Mitterrand's paradoxes. Few modern leaders can boast more.

In theory, he considered socialism fair and humane. As president, though, he soon scrapped his party's nationalization plans in favor of free enterprise.

A critic of the broad authority of the French presidency, he still embraced its powers upon taking office. Asked about them, he remarked, "Before me, they were dangerous, and after me they shall become so again."

Raised a Catholic, he died an agnostic, but one who was intrigued by the Bible. He spoke highly of Catholic morality, though he admitted a year ago he had kept a mistress for 20 years and had a daughter by her. A tender photo published recently of Mitterrand and his daughter, plus his valiant struggle against cancer, humanized him for a French public that had sometimes thought of him as cerebral and aloof.

The most puzzling aspect of his life dates to World War II. He was a French prisoner of war held by the Germans, then a decorated official in the Vichy regime allied with the Nazis, then a member of the French Resistance, and finally a trusted lieutenant in Charles de Gaulle's postwar government. Mitterrand kept up friendships with some of Vichy's Nazi lackeys, even protecting one from prosecution for rounding up the Jews of Paris for transferral to the death camps.

This from a man who improved France's once-cold relations with Israel and counted the celebrated death-camp survivor Elie Wiesel as a dear friend. Until historians can sort out these contradictions, it seems an inexplicable moral blind spot in an otherwise admirable figure.