Former French interior minister Charles Pasqua, a hardline politician who was a close ally of former president Jacques Chirac, died Monday aged 88, political sources said, reports Yahoo! News.
Pasqua, a veteran of the Gaullist movement, spent more than half a century at the heart of French politics in a career punctuated by no-nonsense policies targeting terrorism but overshadowed by funding scandals.
He died in a hospital in the Paris suburbs.
Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, to whom Pasqua was a mentor in his earlier years, paid homage to "one of France's greatest servants."
"It is with very great sadness and with huge emotion that I learned of the passing of Charles Pasqua," Sarkozy said in a statement.
Pasqua first served as interior minister under Chirac's prime ministership from 1986 to 1988, and then again under Edouard Balladur from 1993 to 1995.
During his political career he earned a reputation as a no-nonsense operator, and orator.
Among his well-known quotes were "you have to terrorise terrorists" and "democracy stops where the state's interest starts."
He also served in the European parliament and was in 2004 re-elected to the French Senate, where he served until 2011.
Pasqua faced judicial investigations in France for several affairs, and in 2009 a court confirmed a guilty verdict for the illegal funding of his 1999 EU parliament campaign.