Rascal or hero: the remarkable life of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing
The surprise for most French people upon hearing that Valéry Giscard-d’Estaing had died was that he had survived this long. At the age of 94, he hadn’t been President since the summer of 1981. His mainstream contemporaries were Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Schmidt. Leonid Brezhnev was at the time still First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Giscard outlasted them all. At least as aloof as De Gaulle, but without the general’s loyal following, he spent the 40 years of his post-presidential career dreaming that, like Merlin in Arthurian legend, he might someday be reawakened to answer his country’s call.
In 1981, he had good reason to believe that he would remain in office until 1990, in which case he would undoubtedly have claimed a large measure of the credit for the collapse of Communism. His years in the Élysée had gone well enough. Incomes rose across the board, as did pensions. France’s strict abortion laws were liberalised. On the world front, he was responsible for bringing together the West’s most powerful nations as the G6 (now the G7). Had it not been for the ongoing economic fallout from the 1973 oil crisis, he would probably have secured enough votes as the representative of the conservative centre-right to ensure a second mandate.
Instead, betrayed by his faithless number two, Jacques Chirac, who stymied his chances of victory by standing against him in the first round of the Presidentials, he found himself losing out in round two to the veteran Socialist François Mitterrand, whom he had trounced in 1974.
From then on, Giscard never entirely trusted Chirac, who, unforgivably, went on to win two terms as President. It must have been a cause of considerable satisfaction to him when his one-time protégé predeceased him last year aged just 86.
The decades that followed were filled with time-filling. For a time, he tried to get back in the game, securing election to the National Assembly before settling for an 18-year spell as head of the Regional Council of Auvergne, the main appeal of which, one suspects, was that he could still style himself as Monsieur le Président.
In 1986, he entertained the hope that he would be appointed Prime Minister by Mitterrand after parliamentary elections forced the latter to endure a Gaullist majority in the Assembly. It didn’t happen. The wily Mitterrand knew that there was room for only one monumental ego at the heart of government and chose Chirac instead.
Drat, and double-drat!
In 1982, undaunted by his “temporary” fall from power, he got together with another nearly-man, former US President Gerald Ford, to found the “World Forum” of the American Enterprise Institute, which still meets once a year in Georgia. Next up was the sonorous-sounding Trilateral Commission, bringing together leading figures from the US, Europe and Japan, on which – again as President – he collaborated closely with Henry Kissinger. In 1997, he found time to be elected President of the little-known Council of European Municipalities and Regions, with its annual budget of some two million dollars.
Giscard’s chief claim to fame, beyond his seven years in the Élysée, probably rests on his chairmanship of the Convention on the Future of Europe, a lofty, some would say airless, body that between 2001 and 2004 sought to draft a constitution for the European Union. The result, building on the idea of a tightly-run, centrally organised federation, was rejected by French voters in 2005, but Giscard was undeterred, just as he was three years later when the Dutch and Irish gave a thumbs-down to the Lisbon Treaty in 2008. As he saw it, the Europe to which he had given his lordly imprimatur, was no enemy of democracy, but rather a friend the voters hadn’t met yet.
In his old age, honours were routinely heaped on him as if those in charge had nothing better to do, which arguably they hadn’t. He was appointed to the Académie Française in 2003 and rose steadily through the ranks to become Grand Master and Grand-Croix of both the Legion d’Honneur and the Ordre National du Mérite. The City of Aachen presented him with the Charlemagne Award, while as proof of his Catholic fidelity he was installed as a Knight of the Sovereign Order of Malta. Denmark made him a knight of the Order of the Elephant; Spain honoured him as a knight of the Order of Isabella the Catholic. The list goes on. Not to be outdone, the Queen invested him as a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath.
But not everything went as ordered. There was the small matter of the blood diamonds presented to him, when President, by the self-styled Emperor Bokassa of the short-lived Central African Empire. Giscard was initially enamoured of Bokassa and provided practical help and advice to the former army colonel as he pillaged his country and murdered its citizens. In 1979, tiring of his excesses, Giscard sent in French troops to depose and replace the emperor. But it was the discovery that he had accepted two particularly fine diamonds as a personal gift that marked him for many in France as corrupt and out for himself as much as for his country.
Beyond that, there were the women – lots of them apparently; so many that he had to give his personal bodyguards the details of where he might be found on any one night or when relaxing in the afternoon between official engagements. In May of this year, just months before he died, he was accused of fondling a female German journalist’s buttocks. Needless to say, he denied the charge.
The French could forgive him his peccadillos, which at the time, if less so today, would have been regarded as one of the perks of the job. They were less forgiving of his upper-class pretensions. When he played on his aristocratic-sounding surname, d’Estaing, to buy the Chateau d’Estaing, in central France, and then passed it off as his ancestral home, the result was less positive than he might have wished. Most of the French simply shook their heads. Others laughed out loud. Descended in fact from a line of hauts fonctionnaires, he lacked all claim to D’Estaing lineage. The suffix, it turned out, had been added to the family name by his grandfather in hope of social advancement.
And yet, at the age of 94, the 6’2” former head of state was still accorded all the trappings of his rank, including membership of the Constitutional Council of the Republic. Given that, like all other members of his generation, he had been a member of the wartime Resistance and had taken part in the liberation of Paris, this was perhaps no more than his due. Covid may have claimed the life of Valéry Marie René Georges Giscard d’Estaing, third President of the Fifth Republic, but in the end, in his own mind, and in the minds of others, he died a hero.