Валери Жискар д’Эстен: Президент Франции (1974–1981)

President of France from 1974 to 1981

Valéry René Marie Georges Giscard d'Estaing (/UK/,/ʒ//iː//s//k//ɑːr// //d//ɛ/'/s//t//ã/ ZHIHskar dessTÃ(N), /US//ʒ//ɪ/,/s//k//ɑːr// / zhihSKAR , valeʁi ʁəne maʁi ʒɔʁʒ ʒiskaʁ dɛstɛ̃; 2 February 19262 December 2020), also known as Giscard or VGE, was a French politician who served as President of France from 1974 to 1981. After serving as Minister of Finance under prime ministers Jacques Chaban Delmas and Pierre Messmer, Giscard d'Estaing won the presidential election of 1974 with 50.8% of the vote against François Mitterrand of the Socialist Party. His tenure was marked by a more liberal attitude on social issues—such as divorce, contraception and abortion—and by attempts to modernise the country and the office of the presidency, notably overseeing such far reaching infrastructure projects as the TGV and the turn towards reliance on nuclear power as France's main energy source. Giscard d'Estaing launched the Grande Arche, Musée d'Orsay, Arab World Institute and Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie projects in the Paris region, later included in the Grands Projets of François Mitterrand. He promoted liberalisation of trade. However, his popularity suffered from the economic downturn that followed the 1973 energy crisis, marking the end of the "Trente Glorieuses" (thirty "glorious" years of prosperity after 1945). He imposed austerity budgets, and allowed unemployment to rise in order to avoid deficits. Giscard d'Estaing in the centre faced political opposition from both sides of the spectrum: from the newly unified left under Mitterrand and a rising Jacques Chirac, who resurrected Gaullism on a right wing opposition line. In 1981, despite a high approval rating, he was defeated in a runoff against Mitterrand, with 48.2% of the vote. As president, Giscard d'Estaing promoted cooperation among the European nations, especially in tandem with West Germany. As a former president, he was a member of the Constitutional Council. He also served as president of the Regional Council of Auvergne from 1986 to 2004. Involved with the process of European integration, he notably presided over the Convention on the Future of Europe that drafted the ill fated Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. In 2003, he was elected to the Académie Française, taking the seat that his friend and former president of Senegal Léopold Sédar Senghor had held. He died at the age of 94, and is the longest lived French president in history.

Valéry René Marie Georges Giscard d'Estaing was born on 2 February 1926 in Koblenz, Germany, during the French occupation of the Rhineland. He was the elder son of Jean Edmond Lucien Giscard d'Estaing, a high ranking civil servant, and his wife, Marthe Clémence Jacqueline Marie (May) Bardoux. His mother was the daughter of senator and academic Achille Octave Marie Jacques Bardoux, and a granddaughter of minister of state education Agénor Bardoux. Giscard had an elder sister, Sylvie, and younger siblings Olivier, Isabelle, and Marie Laure. Despite the addition of "d'Estaing" to the family name by his grandfather, Giscard was not a male line descendant of the extinct aristocratic family of Vice Admiral d'Estaing. His connection to the D'Estaing family was very remote. His ancestress was Lucie Madeleine d'Estaing, Dame de Réquistat (1769–1844), who in turn was descendant of Joachim I d'Estaing, sieur de Réquistat (1610–1685), illegitimate son of Charles d'Estaing (1585–1661), sieur de Cheylade, Knight of Saint John of Jerusalem, son of Jean III d'Estaing, seigneur de Val (1540–1621) and his wife, Gilberte de La Rochefoucauld (1560–1623). Giscard studied at the Lycée Blaise Pascal in Clermont Ferrand, the École Gerson and the Lycées Janson de Sailly and Louis le Grand in Paris. He joined the French Resistance and participated in the Liberation of Paris; during the liberation, he was assigned to protecting Alexandre Parodi. He then joined the French First Army and served until the end of the war. In 1948, he spent a year in Montreal, Canada, where he worked as a teacher at Collège Stanislas. He graduated from the École Polytechnique and the École nationale d'administration (1949–1951) and chose to enter the prestigious Inspection des finances.

In 1956, he was elected to the National Assembly as a deputy for the Puy de Dôme département, in the domain of his maternal family. He joined the National Centre of Independents and Peasants (CNIP), a conservative grouping. After the proclamation of the Fifth Republic, the CNIP leader Antoine Pinay became Minister of Economy and Finance and chose him as Secretary of State for Finances from 1959 to 1962. However, in 1966, he was dismissed from the cabinet. As chairman of the National Assembly Committee on Finances, he criticised his successor in the cabinet.

In 1974, after the sudden death of President Georges Pompidou, Giscard announced his candidacy for the presidency. Jacques Chirac and other Gaullist personalities published the Appel des 43 where they explained that Giscard was the best candidate to prevent the election of Mitterrand. In the election, Giscard finished well ahead of Chaban Delmas in the first round, though coming second to Mitterrand.

In 1974, Giscard was elected President of France, defeating Socialist candidate François Mitterrand by 425,000 votes. At 48, he was the third youngest president in French history at the time, after Louis Napoléon Bonaparte and Jean Casimir Perier.

On taking office Giscard was quick to initiate reforms; they included increasing the minimum wage as well as family allowances and old age pensions. He extended the right to political asylum, expanded health insurance to cover all Frenchmen, lowered the voting age to 18, and modernised the divorce law. On 25 September 1974, Giscard summed up his goals:

He pushed for the development of the TGV high speed train network and the Minitel telephone upgrade, a precursor of the Internet. He promoted nuclear power, as a way to assert French independence. Economically, Giscard's presidency saw a steady rise in personal incomes, with the purchasing power of workers going up by 29% and that of old age pensioners by 65%. The great crisis that overwhelmed his term was a worldwide economic crisis based on rapidly rising oil prices. He turned to Prime Minister Raymond Barre in 1976, who advocated numerous complex, strict policies ("Barre Plans"). The first Barre plan emerged on 22 September 1976, with a priority to stop inflation. It included a 3 month price freeze; a reduction in the value added tax; wage controls; salary controls; a reduction of the growth in the money supply; and increases in the income tax, automobile taxes, luxury taxes and bank rates. There were measures to restore the trade balance, and support the growth of the economy and employment. Oil imports, whose price had shot up, were limited. There was special aid to exports, and an action fund was set up to aid industries. There was increased financial aid to farmers, who were suffering from a drought, and for social security. The package was not very popular, but was pursued with vigor. Giscard initially tried to project a less monarchical image than had been the case for past French presidents. However, when he learned that most Frenchmen were somewhat cool to this display of informality, Giscard became so aloof and distant that his opponents frequently attacked him as being too far removed from ordinary citizens. In domestic policy, Giscard's reforms worried the conservative electorate and the Gaullist party, especially the law by Simone Veil legalising abortion. Although he said he had "deep aversion against capital punishment", Giscard claimed in his 1974 campaign that he would apply the death penalty to people committing the most heinous crimes. He did not commute three of the death sentences that he had to decide upon during his presidency. France under his administration was thus the last country in the European Community to apply the death penalty, and until the resumption of executions in the United States in 1977, the only in the Western world. The last death sentence, bearing Giscard's signature, was executed in September 1977, the last ratified by the Court of Cassation in March 1981, but rescinded by presidential pardon after Giscard's defeat in the presidential election in May. Raymond Barre, called the "best economist in France" at the time, succeeded him. They induced the Soviet Union to establish a degree of liberalisation through the Helsinki Accords. He promoted the creation of the European Council at the Paris Summit in December 1974. In 1975 he invited the heads of government from West Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States to a summit in Rambouillet, to form the Group of Six major economic powers (now the G7, including Canada and the European Union). In 1975 Giscard pressured the future King of Spain Juan Carlos I to leave Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet out of his coronation by stating that if Pinochet attended he would not. Giscard d'Estaing sought to improve Franco Romanian ties and in 1979 visited Bucharest. In 1980 he received Romanian president Nicolae Ceaucescu as a guest in Paris.

Giscard continued de Gaulle's African policy, and sought to maintain good relations with Middle East Muslim countries so that they would continue delivering oil to France. Senegal, Ivory Coast, Gabon, and Cameroon were the largest and most reliable African allies, and received most of the investments. In 1977, in Opération Lamantin, he ordered fighter jets to deploy in Mauritania and suppress the Polisario guerrillas fighting against Mauritania. Most controversial was his involvement with the regime of Jean Bédel Bokassa in the Central African Republic. Giscard was initially a friend of Bokassa, and supplied the regime. This action was also controversial, particularly given that Dacko was Bokassa's cousin and had appointed Bokassa as head of the military; and unrest continued in the Central African Republic, leading to Dacko being overthrown in another coup in 1981. The saga contributed to Giscard losing his 1981 reelection bid.

Giscard d'Estaing fancied himself a peace maker with the Soviet Union and their embroilment in Afghanistan. At their summit in May 1980, he proposed an arrangement that would see Leonid Brezhnev partially withdraw his forces and thought the latter had agreed once month later only to be humiliated in front of his G7 partners when Brezhnev fooled him with a lie. His Socialist rival, François Mitterrand, acidly observed in the Assemblée Nationale that he was the "petit télégraphiste de Varsovie" ("little telegraph operator from Warsaw").

In the 1981 presidential election, Giscard took a severe blow to his support when Chirac ran against him in the first round. and blamed Chirac for his defeat thereafter. In later years, it was widely said that Giscard loathed Chirac; certainly on many occasions Giscard criticised Chirac's policies despite supporting Chirac's governing coalition. and won the presidency of the regional council of Auvergne. In 1982, along with his friend Gerald Ford, he co founded the annual AEI World Forum. He has also served on the Trilateral Commission after being president, writing papers with Henry Kissinger. He hoped to become prime minister during the first "cohabitation" (1986–1988) or after the re election of Mitterrand with the theme of "France united", but he was not chosen for this position. Most of the UDF politicians supported the candidacy of the RPR Prime Minister Édouard Balladur at the 1995 presidential election, but Giscard supported his old rival Jacques Chirac, who won the election. That same year Giscard suffered a setback when he lost a close election for the mayoralty of Clermont Ferrand. In 2000, he made a parliamentary proposal to reduce the length of a presidential term from seven to five years, a proposal that eventually won its referendum proposal by President Chirac. Following his retirement from the National Assembly his son Louis Giscard d'Estaing was elected in his former constituency. Following his narrow defeat in the regional elections of March 2004, marked by the victory of the left wing in 21 of 22 regions, he decided to leave partisan politics and to take his seat on the Constitutional Council as a former president of the country. Some of his actions there, such as his campaign in favour of the treaty establishing the European Constitution, were criticised as unbecoming to a member of this council, which should embody nonpartisanship and should not appear to favour one political option over the other. Indeed, the question of the membership of former presidents in the council was raised at this point, with some suggesting that it should be replaced by a life membership in the Senate. On 19 April 2007, he endorsed Nicolas Sarkozy for the presidential election. He supported the creation of the centrist Union of Democrats and Independents in 2012 and the introduction of same sex marriage in France in 2013. A 2014 poll suggested that 64% of the French thought he had been a good president. On 21 January 2017, with a lifespan of 33,226 days, he surpassed Émile Loubet (1838–1929) in terms of longevity, and became the oldest former president in French history. From 1989 to 1993, Giscard served as a member of the European Parliament. From 2001 to 2004 he served as president of the Convention on the Future of Europe. On 29 October 2004, the heads of government of the European Union gathered in Rome, approved and signed the European Constitution based on a draft strongly influenced by Giscard's work at the convention. Although the Constitution was rejected by French voters in May 2005, Giscard continued to actively lobby for its passage in other EU states. In an article for Le Monde in June 2007, published in English translation by The Irish Times, he said that a "divide and ratify" approach, whereby "public opinion would be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals we dare not present to them directly", would be unworthy and would reinforce the idea that the construction of Europe was being organised behind the public's backs by lawyers and diplomats; the quotation was taken out of context by prominent supporters of a "no" vote and distorted to give the impression that Giscard was advocating such a deception, instead of repudiating it. In 2008 he became the honorary president of the Atomium EISMD Atomium European Institute for Science. On 27 November 2009, Giscard publicly launched the Permanent Platform of Atomium Culture during its first conference, held at the European Parliament, declaring: "European intelligence could be at the very root of the identity of the European people." A few days before he had signed, together with the President of Atomium Culture Michelangelo Baracchi Bonvicini, the European Manifesto of Atomium Culture.

Giscard's name was often shortened to "VGE" by the French media. On 17 December 1952, Giscard married Anne Aymone Sauvage de Brantes. The couple had four children. In 1974, Le Monde reported that he used to leave a sealed letter stating his whereabouts in case of emergency. In May 2020, Giscard was accused of groping a German journalist's buttocks during an interview in 2018. He denied the accusation. The brothers never used the castle as a residence but for its symbolic value, and they explained the purchase, supported by the local municipality, as an act of patronage.

Giscard wrote his second romantic novel, published on 1 October 2009 in France, entitled The Princess and the President. He later stressed that the story was entirely made up and no such affair had actually occurred.

On 14 September 2020, Giscard d'Estaing was hospitalised for care for breathing complications at the Hôpital Européen Georges Pompidou in Paris. He was later diagnosed with a lung infection. He was hospitalised again on 15 November, but was discharged on 20 November. Giscard d'Estaing died from complications attributed to COVID 19 on 2 December 2020, at the age of 94. His family said that his funeral would be held in "strict intimacy". President Emmanuel Macron released a statement describing Giscard d'Estaing as a "servant of the state, a politician of progress and freedom"; Former presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, 2017 presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, and European Union leaders Charles Michel, David Sassoli, and Ursula von der Leyen all issued statements praising Giscard's efforts in modernising France and strengthening relations with the European Union.

Giscard d'Estaing was seen as the pioneer in modernising France and strengthening the European Union. In December 2022, Anne Aymone Giscard d'Estaing put up some of her late husband's art and furniture for sale at Hotel Drouot: the collection included a Rodin bust of Mahler.

Giscard d'Estaing was granted a coat of arms by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark upon his appointment to the Order of the Elephant. He was also granted a coat of arms by King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden, for his induction as a Knight of the Seraphim.