Giscard D'estaing, Valéry (b. 1926)

views updated

GISCARD D'ESTAING, VALÉRY (b. 1926)

French politician.

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing became the third president of the French Fifth Republic after Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) resigned in 1969 and Georges Pompidou (1911–1974) died in office in 1974. He was just fifty-five years old when his short but brilliant political career suddenly came to an end, when he lost reelection to a second term as president in 1981 to François Mitterrand (1916–1996).

Despite his aristocratic name (his father and uncle persuaded the authorities to add "d'Estaing" to Giscard), he in fact belonged to the upper-middle-class worlds of business, public administration, and politics, where he succeeded his paternal grandfather Jacques Bardoux (1874–1959) in 1956 in becoming the representative of Puy-de-Dôme in Auvergne.

Giscard d'Estaing was accepted into the École Polytechnique in 1946, then to the École National d'administration, from which he emerged a state finance inspector in 1954. He was not destined to spend much time in public administration and launched his political career almost immediately thereafter. He entered into his destiny when, after de Gaulle returned to power in the 1962 elections, his friends on the traditional right condemned the general's Algerian policy, whereas Giscard d'Estaing chose to remain loyal to him by forming the Groupe des Républicains Indépendants, which became the second largest pillar, although still a quite small one, in the Gaullist electoral "majority."

Financial management was to become Giscard d'Estaing's specialty. He quickly became finance minister on 19 January 1962 after having held several secretarial-level positions, where he remained until 1966 before returning in 1969 until 1974, through the successive governments of Jacques Chaban-Delmas (1915–2000) and Pierre Messmer (b. 1916). Giscard d'Estaing's ambitions were not limited to financial planning. When he was forced to resign in 1966 following the mediocre results of an economic stabilization plan, he distanced himself from de Gaulle. Giscard d'Estaing sought to differentiate himself in the legislative campaign of 1967 by accompanying his "yes" to the Gaullist Majority with a "but" designed to preserve his capacity to form independent judgments. He criticized the "lone exercise of power" after de Gaulle made his famous declarations concerning a "self-assured and dominant Israel" and "Free Quebec." He even supported the "no" vote in the 1969 referendum that led to de Gaulle's final resignation.

His objective was clearly the presidency of the Republic, which healready had in mind during the elections of 1969 when, only forty-five years old, he chose the path of self-effacement behind the candidacy of Pompidou. But ambitions, to be realized, require favorable circumstances, and a two-term Pompidou presidency threatened to leave him in office until 1983. When Pompidou contracted a rare form of leukemia that led to his death in 1974, Giscard d'Estaing decided to seize the opportunity, especially in that he considered Gaullism to be at least in part finished. The "majority" had largely lost the support of the segment of the Left that had joined forces with de Gaulle in 1958. His electoral base regrouped on the right. In the first round of voting Giscard d'Estaing distanced himself completely from the Gaullist candidate Chaban-Delmas and was elected in the second round. The results were extremely close. With the support of the fast-growing Union of the Left, François Mitterrand closed the gap to within 2 percent of total votes cast.

As president of the Republic, Giscard d'Estaing fully intended to prove that a "new era" characterized by youthfulness and change had begun—he was just fifty years old—and an entire series of reforms were indeed enacted, including the legalization of no-fault divorce and abortion, the reduction of the voting age to eighteen, changes in the national television organization, and democratization of secondary education. In certain cases the Left appreciated these reforms more than did Giscard d'Estaing's own right-wing majority. However the new president encountered at least two major obstacles: the economic recession that began in 1974 and lasted, with greater or lesser intensity, until the end of the decade, and his failure to gain the full loyalty of the Gaullist movement. Although he initially believed he would succeed by naming as prime minister a young Gaullist by the name of Jacques Chirac (b. 1932), the good relations were not to last and after two years a merciless war erupted within the confines of the majority between "Gaullistes" and "Giscardiens." A portion of the Gaullists had already refrained from voting for Giscard d'Estaing in 1974 and his contemptuous attitude toward them did little to smooth things over. At the same time left-wing forces continued to gather throughout the country. Although Giscard d'Estaing retained some small hope of winning the elections in 1981, the effects of the recession, the rise of the Left, the hostility harbored toward him by one segment of the Gaullist movement, and the "Diamond Affair" (he had been accused of receiving several diamonds as a gift from an African dictator) all combined in Mitterrand's favor, leading him to prevail over Giscard d'Estaing by 3 percent.

Although initially stunned by his defeat, Giscard d'Estaing would later seek to overcome it. However, even though he often had important political roles to play in the future, including a final act in 2002 as president of the convention to draft a new European Constitution—one that was turned down by French voters in May 2005—he never managed to regain the highest ranks. Despite his long life, his political career turned out to be short, not only because of changed circumstances but also because he never truly learned to be popular. General de Gaulle had already said it once before: "The people will be his difficulty."

See alsoEuropean Constitution 2004–2005; France.