82 The EconomistOctober 5th 2019
F
ans praisedhis wit and tactile warmth (unlike most French
politicians, he enjoyed hobnobbing with the voters, preferably
over a beer or slice of saucisson in an unpretentious zinc-clad bar).
Jacques Chirac was successful, too: mayor of Paris, twice prime
minister and twice president, from 1995 to 2007. He may have
bought a chateau in la France profonde, but it was a “little one”,
sniffed a snobbish predecessor, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. For the
French, his love of France and its people made him sympa. Yet cyni-
cism was also his hallmark.
Abroad, he seemed to favour dictators over democrats. He told
African strongmen not to worry about elections. He sold a nuclear
reactor to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. A Russian-speaker (as a student,
he translated Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin”), he counted Vladimir
Putin as a personal friend and loathed the “badly brought up” east
Europeans with their high-minded talk and Atlanticist outlook.
Where others had principles, he had prickles. A proud defender
of the French language, he stormed out of a summit meeting when
a French businessman dared to use English (he also said, only half-
jokingly, that Britain’s deplorable cuisine made it inherently un-
trustworthy). Despite a happy student summer at Harvard, he bri-
dled at America’s overweening ways, arguing for a “multi-polar
world” as a way to counter its post-war dominance. Equally, he set
up France 24 to rival the “Anglo-Saxon imperialism” of the bbcand
cnn. He was contrarian too, resuming nuclear testing in the Pacif-
ic to international dismay.
At home, he was better at campaigning than governing. The
candidate who had vowed to mend the “social fracture” be-
queathed worse public finances and deeper social divisions. His
disillusioned people lost faith both in the European ideal (voting
against a draft constitution in 2005) and largely in their own go-
verning class—not least, in him. He won a second presidential
term by a fluke landslide: a first-round upset meant that his oppo-nent was a far-right extremist, Jean-Marie Le Pen. His one-time re-
formist zeal mutated into a fear of upsetting the status quo. By the
end of his ill-starred second term, Mr Chirac was the Fifth Repub-
lic’s most unpopular president (though François Hollande later
beat that dismal record).
It was easy to see why. The country was suffering from what he
himself admitted was a “profound malaise”, playing a humiliating
second fiddle to a resurgent Germany in European politics. His na-
dir came when he lay low for a week while rioting engulfed the big
cities in 2005. He was prone to petulance and rudeness in official
meetings, bore mammoth grudges, and took some spectacularly
bad gambles, notably calling a parliamentary election in 1997
which the opposition Socialists won easily.
Much of his energy was devoted to dodging impertinent ques-
tions, of which there were many. In his 18-year stint running Paris
he bloated the city payroll (particularly with jobs for party work-
ers). He threw huge, lavish parties for his supporters, while cultur-
al notables and other influential friends gained chic municipal
apartments. Hence the caustic slogan from the 2002 election,
“Vote for the crook, not the fascist”.
The stink rose with him. Even the most world-weary could not
shrug away the stories of bundles of cash, foreign bank accounts
and murky quid pro quos. One puzzle was Japan. A keen Japano-
phile, even to the point of wondering whether he might become a
sumo wrestler (it had taught him all he needed to know about life,
he said), Mr Chirac made dozens of private trips there. Nobody
knew why. A son? A mistress? Perhaps both? Or several? Pre-#Me-
Too, the indiscretions were scandalous. His chauffeur wrote a sca-
brously detailed book about the president’s energetic private life,
for which he was dubbed: “trois minutes, douche comprise” (three
minutes, shower included).
He was shamelessly unbothered about it. A favourite toast was
“Allons boire à nos femmes, à nos chevaux et à ceux qui les mon-
tent” (“Let us drink to our women, our horses and those who
mount them”). For most of his misdeeds, loyal lieutenants took the
rap. Prosecutors landed only one belated blow: in 2011 he was con-
victed of misconduct in office, with a suspended two-year sen-
tence (he declined to give evidence, pleading ill health).
Yet no sooner had he left power than the French began to miss
him. He had aroused American fury by threatening to use the
French veto in the unSecurity Council to block a resolution autho-
rising the use of force in Iraq. That split the eu and damaged the
West. But it looked brave and prescient later. So did his appeal
against climate change—“our house is burning and we are looking
elsewhere”—in 2002. A product of France’s elite schools, including
ena, he was better linked in the public mind with his love of rural
Corrèze, where his grandfathers came from: its paysans, its cattle,
its cheeses. Compared with his brash successor, Nicolas Sarkozy,
he seemed a model of understatement, one of the last French pres-
idents who seemed to embody the nation. By 2010 he was France’s
most admired political figure.A la recherche du temps perdu
His ineffectual latter years belied formidable willpower and politi-
cal talent, which earned him the nickname, as Prime Minister
Georges Pompidou’s troubleshooter in the 1960s, of “the bulldoz-
er”. He could charm, too. In 1968 he negotiated a truce with the
leaders of protests that had taken France to the brink of chaos. Un-
like previous generations of public figures, he was personally un-
touched by the controversies of the second world war. Perhaps
thanks to that, he lanced a historical boil. In a speech in 1995, just
two months after taking office, he ended decades of blame-dodg-
ing by accepting that France—not just the Vichy regime—bore
moral responsibility for the Nazi deportation of 76,000 Jews, most
of whom perished. In remarks that seem unremarkable now, he
said the “homeland of the Enlightenment...committed the irrepa-
rable”. He left France with many burdens. But not that one. 7Jacques Chirac, twice president of France, died on September
26th, aged 86Le Bulldozer
Obituary Jacques Chirac