It was a life spent entirely in a ferocious battle for power, and which ended up achieving very little with that power. Former president Jacques Chirac, who died aged 86 on Thursday, 12 years after quitting the Élysée, leaves behind him 40 years of public life, and a very modest political legacy. Unless it can be considered worthwhile to pass on a certain style of conducting politics which he represented throughout those years, which ended with two presidential terms, between 1995 and 2007.
“I am in fact the last of the great presidents,” his predecessor François Mitterrand (in office 1981-1995) was fond of saying. He may not have been wrong. Like him, Jacques Chirac also won two presidential terms, but the first term, from 1995 to 2002, was shattered initially by his prime minister, Alain Juppé, who was deaf to social protests in the streets. And then by a government of political “cohabitation” in which, after a misjudged call for early Parliamentary elections in 1997 which saw a socialist majority returned, conservative Chirac remained president but with a government led by socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, leaving Chirac a little like the emperor with no clothes.
As for his second term, won after the presidential election of 2002 when many on the Left voted for Chirac in the final round to keep the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen out of the Élysée, it was the period of the “roi fainéant” (“lazy king”) as his former minister, rival and successor Nicolas Sarkozy cuttingly described the president. The lost opportunity of that presidency was symbolised by the choice of an insignificant figure, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, as prime minister.
Jacques Chirac's entire political career, from his first term as a Member of Parliament (MP) in 1967, to leaving the Élysée in 2007, was spent at the heart of the Fifth Republic, the system of government created in 1958 in a constitution by Charles de Gaulle. It was a career that consisted solely of a succession of incessant fights inside the parties of de Gaulle's supporters (Gaullists), firstly the UDR, and its successor, the RPR. Within the Gaullist movement, political struggles were based on the one simple principle that winning was all about eliminating your rivals, and this at any cost and by any means. The principal names on Chirac's political casualty list were former prime ministers Jacques Chaban-Delmas and Édouard Balladur, and former president Valerie Giscard d’Estaing, but Michel Debré, Charles Pasqua, Philippe Séguin and many others also fell victim to a system in which personal ambition was placed at the centre of a political project, a system glorified for so long in French politics.
In that sense Jacques Chirac was the sophisticated product of the fusion of the institutional monarchism of the Fifth Republic, and limitless ambition and impunity opens up all forms of alliances and counter-alliances, political controversies, scandals, U-turns and opportunism. It creates interminable political careers, specific to France among major democracies, and it constantly undermines the link between citizens and public life, sapping the strength of an already weakened democracy.
French politicians have been lining up to pay lofty homage to the former head of state – with President Emmanuel Macron first in line – and nostalgia for Chirac has been dominating the media, obscuring the fact that such mammoths of French political life, some of whom have been a regular presence for people since the cradle, are directly responsible for an unprecedented collapse of democracy and the current crisis in representative politics.
There are, however, three notable exceptions to the black hole that almost a half-century of 'Chiraquism' represents. They are three powerful political acts which enhanced France and offered a glimpse of the grandeur of politics.
The first was his "Vél d'Hiv' speech" during commemorations of the July 1942 round-up of Jews in Paris who were taken to the city's winter velodrome, the 'Vélodrome d'Hiver' before their deporation to German death camps. On July 16th 1995, soon after his election, Jacques Chirac gave what is widely regarded as a magnificent speech in which, finally, he gave official acknowledgement of France's responsibility in the deportation of Jews during the WWII occupation of France by Nazi Germany. “France, home of the Enlightenment and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, land of welcome and asylum, that day France committed the irreparable,” Chirac said. It was a seminal speech after years of stubborn refusal by predecessor François Mitterrand to do the same, and it was also a speech of freedom, as it brought the nation together around a clear-eyed examination of its past and its collective memory.
Watch Jacques Chirac give the speech here.
The second exception was Jacques Chirac's visit to Jerusalem in October 1996. As the number of incidents involving the Israeli security services increased during his visit to the old part of the city, the French president finally lost his temper and threatened to cancel the trip and return to France. “What do you want? Me to go back to my plane, and go back to France ? Is that what you want ?” he asked in English to an Israeli officer. All that remains of the visit are a few images and an apology by Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But it reaffirmed Jacques Chirac's constant and determined commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state and of a two-state solution to the conflict.
The third occasion was in 2003 when Chirac chose to oppose the war in Iraq launched by the US and supported by many European countries, and to use all the resources of international diplomacy to state France's case. In doing so Jacques Chirac was not simply reviving the old Gaullist policies towards the Arab world, nor reasserting a certain form of French independence. He was making a long-term strategic choice as to the relationships he wanted to build with an Arab-Muslim world which has today become the world's powder keg through successive wars conducted by the West.
This legacy, symbolised by the speech given by the then foreign minister Dominique de Villepin at the United Nations Security Council in February 2003, has since been squandered both by President Nicolas Sarkozy (with the war in Libya) and President François Hollande.
Jacques Chirac had the power to impose his convictions. However, he did so only on exceptional occasions as he was primarily obsessed with the pursuit of power and political survival, and preoccupied by run-of-the-mill manoeuvres or scandals that allowed him to achieve this. This was carried out with total opportunism and by endless changes of position.
The following are the 12 major examples of this.
From racism to universal empathy
In the autumn of 1968, when the president of France's Senate, Gaston Monnerville, was getting ready to deliver his final speech in France's upper chamber of Parliament, the government's representative there, Jacques Chirac, the junior minister for the economy and finance, pointedly got up out of his seat and left the building, the Palais du Luxembourg. It was the final insult towards Monnerville who as president of the Senate was number two in the hierarchy of the state.
Monnerville, who was black, had been born in Cayenne in Guiana and was a radical socialist Senator from the Lot département (county) in south-west France. Since 1962, however, he had been brutally sidelined politically by the Gaullist government of the day for having had the temerity to criticise a reform involving the election of the president by universal suffrage. Monnerville had described then prime minister Georges Pompidou's actions as an “abuse of power”.
As a result President Charles de Gaulle forbade his ministers from going to the Senate, unless Gaston Monnerville was not presiding over a sitting. Monnerville was not invited to official ceremonies either. There were even plans to amend the constitution so that the president of the Senate could not take over in the interim if for any reason the president was incapacitated. And the zealous Jacques Chirac played his part to the bitter end in the brutal sidelining of this de-legitimised “Negro” of the Fifth Republic, a republic which aspired to be white to erase the insult of its lost colonial wars.
Jacques Chirac was later to assert this “whiteness” in the crudest of fashions. His speech on June 19th 1991 in front of 1,300 members of the Gaullist RPR party at Orléans, in north-central France, was one of the most unworthy speeches of his life, and has gone down in French political history as the “noise and smell” speech. In it he spoke of the supposedly disagreeable behaviour of some immigrants in France, and the disagreeable smells emanating from their cooking. The speech even became the subject of a song by the group Zebda.
Less well-known today are his words as prime minister back in 1976 when he said: “France shouldn't have so many unemployed, as it has more than a million immigrants.” Yet as Chirac once let slip in a political adage that served him well: “The electoral memory of the French people lasts six months.”
The Kanaks, the indigenous people of the French territory of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, are unlikely to forget, however, the tragedy in the commune of Ouvéa when a military assault was ordered by the authorities between the two rounds of the 1988 presidential election. The assault, which took place against militant separatists from the FLNKS who had taken hostages, led to the death of 19 of the militants including some after they were captured. Before the assault Jacques Chirac, who was prime minister (and unsuccessful presidential candidate), spoke of the FLNKS actions and referred to “the barbarity of these men, if one can call them that”.
Today, the Musée des Arts Premiers (museum of primitive arts) on the Quai Branley in central Paris has become the Musée Jacques-Chirac. In 2016 it held an exhibition to the glory and honour of a man in love with 'otherness', a friend of those who are different, a supporter of the Earth's most wretched, a champion of respect for all minorities in danger. The press pack proclaiming this pleasant fable, a fawning reconstruction and an official masquerade – the exhibition's official curator was the former minister of culture and devoted Chirac supporter Jean-Jacques Aillagon – is in the form of an homage that bears comparison with the eulogies to Kim Jong-un in North Korea.
Enlargement : Illustration 5
The Roman emperor Augustus is supposed to have said 'Acta fabula est', or “The play is over”, on his deathbed. This was after having his hair smoothed down and his beard shaved, and having looked in a mirror and declaring to himself: “I've played my part well”. Now, with the demise of the former president, everyone is asked to gravely nod their head while reading and listening to the inevitable poppycock about the supposedly unbreakable links between Jacques Chirac and – depending on one's choice – the poet Aimé Césaire, statesman Kofi Annan or Nelson Mandela. All that is missing from this tally of the deceased's great admirers (of colour) is the name of Gaston Monnerville.
From servant of France to profiteer – and back again
In an interview given to Le Figaro in 2011, Jacques Chirac revealed that, “after 40 years of service to the French people, after 12 years as the [French] Republic's president, it is difficult to invent a new life for oneself”. Yet the former president did indeed manage to invent a new life for himself in Paris in a large apartment of 180m2 with a view over the Seine and the Louvre, which the Lebanese billionaire Rafic Hariri kindly lent him until 2015. The Chiracs - Jacques Chirac and his wife Bernadette - had promised to stay in the accommodation “on a very temporary basis”, but ended up staying eight years.
When they did leave, the Chiracs went to live in a nearby private mansion in the 6th arrondissement, or district, in central Paris. This was owned by another of their wealthy friends, the businessman François Pinault, who also put his aeroplane at the disposal of the former head of state for foreign trips. During summer holidays at Agadir in Morocco the couple stayed in a sumptuous residence provided by the North African country's ruler, King Mohammed VI, where there were “numerous and attentive personnel”, according to Le Parisien newspaper.
While he spoke about having spent his life “in the service of the French people”, Jacques Chirac never mentioned those people who had spent their life in his service. Yet there were many who did their utmost to respond to his desires throughout his long career and well afterwards. The former president always made the most of his status and his periods in office. In 1986, when he became the prime minister and thus head of the government in France's first political 'cohabitation' – under socialist president François Mitterrand – he stayed on as mayor of Paris and continued to live in the 1,400 m2 official apartment at City Hall in Paris, part of which socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoë later turned into a crèche.
- From corruption affairs to management with due diligence
On December 15th 2011, Jacques Chrirac was given a two-year suspended prison sentence in a corruption case relating to his time as mayor of Paris. Then aged 79, the former president was found guilty of abuse of trust, misappropriation of public funds and illegal conflict of interest for having used Paris taxpayers' money to pay the salaries of several staff who worked either at the RPR party or for him as Gaullist presidential candidate, but who did not work for the city itself.
Enlargement : Illustration 6
It was the first time that a French head of state had been convicted by a standard court (Philippe Pétain, the head of state of Vichy France during the WWII German occupation of France, was convicted of treason after the war by the special Haute Cour de Justice (or High Court of Justice) reserved for heads of state). The XIth criminal chamber of the Paris criminal courts, presided over by Judge Dominique Pauthe, ruled that the former mayor was the the person who initiated the unlawful system and was its main actor and beneficiary, and that it had been set up knowingly. The court was damning in its conclusions about Chirac's role in the case.
The affair had started in 1996 in Nanterre, a western suburb of Paris, after a judge was alerted by a bookkeeper working for a construction firm, Les Charpentiers de Paris. A second aspect of the case started in parallel in 1998 following a complaint from a Paris taxpayer called Pierre-Alain Brossault. For years progress in this two-pronged case – the two separate parts only came together at the trial – came up against constant obstruction from the public prosecution services in Paris and Nanterre. The French prosecution services are answerable to the political powers, in the form of the justice minister. At the trial itself the Paris prosecution services, then headed by Jean-Claude Marin, continued to insist there was no case to answer.
It took a great deal of time and energy from the investigating judges in the case for the affair to reach court. The majority of cases that threatened Chirac in his first term of office from 1995 to 2002 were tied up in knots, buried, slowed down or downgraded and ended up going nowhere. There was a well-oiled machine discreetly put in place to shelve such affairs, with lawyers and judges working behind the scenes to ensure that Chirac escaped some ten serious cases.
These cases included falsified deals involving social housing in Paris, and others involving the Paris regional council, living allowances at City Hall in Paris, journeys suspiciously paid for in cash, falsified electoral registers in Paris, the management of private property estates by City Hall, and questionable management practices at the municipal printing firm. This succession of corruption affairs, which went on for years, have been overlooked by Chirac's supporters who insist that he was an enlightened redistributor of money – if not in fact a Good Samaritan – at a time when the country needed him.
- From chief political assassin to an icon for the common good
There was a Terminator side to Chirac's nature and woe betide anyone who got in his way. He did not need to use the revolver which he kept in his pocket during the crisis of May 1968, when he was negotiating with the CGT trades union in the utility rooms of blocks of flats in Paris. He did not need to open fire on Jacques Chaban-Delmas in the 1974 presidential election, having managed to kill him politically by leading the support for the rival campaign of Valérie Giscard d'Estaing. And Chirac did not have to strike the blow himself to see the demise of his closest and most dangerous rival, Robert Boulin, who died in 1979.
Boulin was seen as an implacable and incorruptible Gaullist whom president Giscard d'Estaing considered making prime minister in 1979 to replace the incumbent Raymond Barre and help ensure Giscard's re-election as president in 1981.
Robert Boulin then disappeared. His body was found a day later at the Étangs de Hollande lakes in the Forest of Rambouillet, south-west of Paris. The attempts to make his death look like a suicide were far from perfect, despite dirty tricks involving the medical records, the gendarmes and the judiciary. It appears that Boulin was in fact the victim of an assassination, and his family suspected the Gaullist RPR party of the time of seeking to cover it up. As for Chirac, who had created the RPR in 1976, he had 'inherited' the Service d'Action Civique (SAC), a Gaullist militia founded in 1960 to protect the general's regime against the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) which had opposed Algerian independence from France, and which was still operational.
One theory surrounding Boulin's death is that individuals from the SAC had received orders – which they had exceeded – from senior Gaullist figures who are now themselves long dead. The finger has been pointed at Charles Pasqua, who died in 2015, and Jacques Foccart who died in 1997, both co-founders of the SAC. The further suggestion is that Jacques Chirac may have given his discreet approval to an attempt to intimidate Boulin to ensure he was no longer a political threat, but distanced himself should matters get out of hand. Now that all the key protagonists in this murky affair no longer fear exposure because they are dead, it is possible that the truth may yet emerge.
Enlargement : Illustration 7
For a long time politics in France was about men and violence. And this was reflected in Jacques Chirac's own use of language. His view on centrists: “You roll them in flour then fry them!”. When Nicolas Sarkozy betrayed him in 1995 in favour of a conservative rival for the presidency, Édouard Balladur, Chirac adapted an old superstition: “He should be crushed with one's left foot, it brings good luck!”.
Transforming this cool-headed predatory warrior into someone seen as the very epitome of kindness, who always listened to others and who would not have hurt a fly, must rank as a miracle of political communications. (It was also helped by his depiction on the satirical Les Guignols latex puppet show on French television.) Here was a political assassin, who never took a backward step before anyone or anything, now transformed into a sacred lamb suffering for the good of France.
1995: from accurate diagnosis to low blow
Jacques Chirac's presidential campaign in 1995 will remain a model of political insincerity in French public life. The leading figure of the RPR party was at his lowest point in the polls, trailing behind his “friend of 30 years” and now rival, Édouard Balladur, and lacking any ideas. He had asked civil servant turned politician Hervé Gaymard to draw up a political programme, but it lacked originality and energy.
Yet suddenly it all changed. Chirac decided to bring two more advisors on board his campaign. One was the president of the National Assembly, Philippe Séguin, (who himself worked with another advisor, Henri Guaino, who would become an advisor to president Nicolas Sarkozy) and the other was business minister Alain Madelin. In doing so he was bringing in complete opposites; the former favoured state intervention and the latter was an economic liberal. But it worked. Chirac managed to win over some electors on the Left by using phrases attacking “narrow-minded thinking” and the country's “social fracture”. But the presence of Madelin on board also helped keep the business world happy. It was as if Chirac was the political son of Fidel Castro and Margaret Thatcher.
The coupling of such different approaches could only lead to catastrophe in government, however. And that is what happened, immediately after Chirac's victory in the presidential election. In the summer of 1995 Chirac asked his new prime minister, Alain Juppé, to adopt a policy inspired by Séguin. So the minimum wage rose by more than 5% and the burden of the wealth tax – which the Left had put a cap on – was increased.
But just a few months later the government carried out an abrupt change of direction. Jacques Chirac told Alain Juppé to pursue a neo-liberal economic policy which was much more in line with his own personal views. Juppé thus proposed simultaneously three reforms which were all equally explosive. These were a reform to the state health insurance system, a reform of civil service pensions and a reform of the special pensions that applied to groups such as rail and underground transport workers.
The outcome is well known. Jacques Chirac's great lie and his spectacular pas de deux during the winter of 1995, and the election campaign, gave way to the biggest social crisis that France had seen since 1968, matching that of the 'gilets jaunes' or 'yellow vests' protest of 2018-2019.
- 2002: human barrier against the far-right FN, from containment to duplicity?
Unlike in 1995, in 2002 Jacques Chirac made little attempt in his presidential campaign to appeal to the Left. In fact, he was the first French presidential candidate to use law and order and security issues as a means of attracting voters, feeding off emotions following the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York the previous year and making use of local crimes in France to make his point. These included a much-reported attack on a pensioner called Paul Voise in the town of Orléans a few days before polling.
At the time Chirac was under pressure over the Paris City Hall corruption scandal, mocked by the satirical TV show Les Guignols which depicted him in a tracksuit knocking back the Corona beers he so liked in the Élysée. He was not a favourite to beat the unified Left in the forthcoming presidential race where he would be pitted against his own prime minister, the socialist Lionel Jospin. But Jospin's timidity in not supporting an attempt by a group of socialist MPs led by Arnaud Montebourg (a future minister under President François Hollande) to refer Chirac to the Haute Cour de Justice over the social housing scandal in Paris allowed Chirac back into the race. As did Jospin's inability to defend a “socialist manifesto” at the end of his period as prime minister, something which would have held the Left together. As a result, after the 'cohabitation' government binding Chirac and Jospin, it was the latter who came off worse and who in a major shock was eliminated in the first round of the election on April 21st 2002.
Then, having protested against the presence of the far-right Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second round against Chirac, it was the Left's voters who helped the sitting president remain in the Élysée. Before the second round, Chirac refused to debate in public with Le Pen. In the end, Chirac attracted 83% of votes cast, thanks in large part to the electorate of the Left, who came up with various stratagems and devices to ease the pain, with humour, of having to vote for the “crook” rather than the “fascist”, turning out with clothes pegs, foot baths, blindfolds and so on.
After he won, Chirac named Jean-Pierre Raffarin, a little-known Senator from the Vienne département in west-central France, as his prime minister. Yet while Chirac had overtly distanced himself from the far-right Front National (FN) during regional elections in 1998, after his re-election in 2002 the supposed wall or 'dam' against the far-right became more theoretical than real. In the years to come, the broad outline of FN policies would be applied or attempted by Chirac or his successors. This included the removal of neighbourhood policing, an attempt to strip French nationality from terrorists, the imposition of a state of emergency in the country's troubled suburbs and then nationwide, and the conversion of the entire political class to a policy of zero immigration, at least when it came to economic migrants.
- From creator of an employment agency to presiding over the unemployed
Jacques Chirac also oversaw the creation of one of the most ineffective public services in the history of France. The Agence Nationale Pour l’Emploi (ANPE), an employment office, was set up in July 1967 under prime minister Georges Pompidou when Chirac was but a young and ambitious junior labour minister, and it replaced the existing Services Extérieurs du Travail et de la Main-d'Œuvre (SETMO). At the time the “official” unemployment figure was 436,000, representing 2.1% of the active population, far from the five million currently out of work. The ANPE disappeared in December 2009 in a merger with the agency in charge of unemployment benefit, ASSEDIC, to form an even more Kafkaesque body: Pôle Emploi.
The ANPE was supposed to find the jobs that were available and to match them with people looking for work. During some 40 years of existence, and faced with mass unemployment that just kept on rising, the agency demonstrated the limits of the (poor) bureaucratic management of unemployment, despite reforms that boosted its resources. Successive reports from the national audit office, the Cour des Comptes, and other bodies criticised its failures, its lack of productivity compared with its exorbitant cost, and its monopoly status. An example of this was that in 1975 the ANPE placed 784,000 people in work, 50% of whom were on permanent contracts. In 2005 it placed just 300,000 people, barely 33% of whom were on permanent contracts.
But like all those who would succeed him and who have to confront the French public's principal problem, throughout his career Chirac brazenly insisted that he spared no expense when it came to trying to tackle unemployment. In 1995 he promised to reduce the social fracture in French society. But he made it deeper and he remains the president who oversaw unemployment, closely followed by another presidente, François Hollande, as set out by website Slate.
Chirac's first term of office started with a jobless rate of 11.3% which peaked at 12.2% in February 1997. And while he ended his second term with a fall in the unemployment rate, down to 8.4% of the active population, the true picture was in fact rather worse. For this new figure did not take into account all categories of those without work. This meant that a whole vulnerable section of French society had been left on the sidelines.
- From the "Call of Cochin" to co-manager of the European bloc
If there was one issue that empoisoned Jacque Chirac’s political career more than any other it was the European issue. He dealt with it on instinct, according to the moment, for more than 40 years, sometimes using it for purposes of domestic politics, although avoiding the issue most of the time, and without ever demonstrating his true convictions.
Just as was often the case with him, he began approaching it in a thunderous manner. Chirac was in open conflict with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing since resigning as Giscard’s prime minister in 1976, and the conflict erupted into a political war two years later. On December 6th 1978, Chirac delivered his “appel de Cochin” – the “Call of Cochin” – which was an address delivered from his hospital bed in the Hôpital Cochin in Paris where he was recovering from injuries sustained in a car accident the previous month. The text, behind which were the pens of his two close advisors, Pierre Juillet and Marie-France Garaud, denounced the “anti-national” policies led by “a party of the foreigners” (a reference to Giscard’s centre-right UDF party), “the submission of Europe to American interests”, and “the economic subservience of France to the slump and unemployment” (see the pertinent extracts, in French, here). But the campaign led by Chirac and Michel Debré in the first direct elections of the European Parliament in 1979, with a manifesto titled “The defence of French interests in Europe”, flopped. Just as soon as he was elected as a Member of the European Parliament, Chirac resigned from the post.
Over the subsequent ten years, the European issue would remain a taboo within his RPR party, with Chirac doing everything in his power to avoid the question, which was a source of friction among the Gaullists. But ducking the issue was no longer possible when, in 1992, the referendum on the Maastricht Treaty (the Treaty on European Union) which proposed a greater integration of the European bloc, was held. Some in the RPR, led by Philippe Séguin and Charles Pasqua, called for rejection of the treaty. Chirac, meanwhile, played his cards close to his chest, concerned above all to avoid a split in the party. For a short while he leant towards advising his followers to abstain from the vote, before deciding, under the strong pressure of Édouard Balladur and Nicolas Sarkozy, to call for a vote in favour of the treaty. “To refuse Maastricht is to sign away the chances of the opposition returning to power,” argued Sarkozy, his eyes set on the parliamentary elections due in 1993, when the RPR-led opposition would indeed win power back from the socialists. In the end, the teaty was narrowly approved by the French electorate.
It was only when Chirac was elected president in 1995 that he showed himself to be a true champion of the European bloc. Soon after his election, he did all that was necessary for France to meet the requirements of the Maastricht Treaty, diminishing the country’s national debt and liberalising its economy. He adopted the subsequent European treaties of Amsterdam in 1997 and Nice in 2001, and in 2004 he became one of the most energetic proponents of enlarging the bloc, and the emergence of a Europe he described as being “at last united”.
But for Chirac, the European issue was above all about maintaining a solid and close relationship between France and Germany. Throughout his two mandates, just like his predecessors as head of state, François Mitterrand and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, he cultivated close and friendly ties with Germany’s chancellor, who was then Gerhard Schröder. The two countries adopted common approaches to many issues, notably their opposition to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. After the departures from power of Chirac and Schröder, the Franco-German entente would never be the same again.
- From Chirac “the American” to opposing the war in Iraq
In December 2000, Jacques Chirac was eager to meet newly elected US president George W. Bush, despite the protocol that sets out that a foreign leader does not meet the president-elect until he takes up office, which Bush would do one and a half months later. Driving his efforts to meet Bush were the dear memories Chirac had of a sabbatical year he spent in the US when he was a young student, later becoming a friend of the Bush family for 25 years. Admirative of former US president Ronald Reagan, Chirac “the American” wanted to seal a strong bond with the newly elected Bush, a man of his own political colours.
But three years later, relations between France and the US reached a low point when Chirac refused to join in the invasion of Iraq. This decision, presented as a question of principles and which turned into a combat at the United Nations, would become one of Chirac’s greatest political victories, briefly resuscitating a forgotten Gaullist approach to foreign affairs. Chirac had previously recurrently oscillated on policy issues, but now he stood firm against US pressure and that of a section of the French Right (and some on the Left). Despite his pro-American leanings, he had, according to his advisors, a true understanding of the Arab world and the geo-political forces at work. The French president, with a reputation for plunging head first into matters – “le bulldozer”, as he was nicknamed – had for once sided with caution, allowing France to have no part of responsibility in what would prove to be an international catastrophe.
- From "atomic warrior" to "eco warrior"
On January 29th 1996, Chirac, who as president was also head of the French armed forces, announced the “definitive halt of French nuclear tests”. The decision came after a total of 210 nuclear test explosions over the previous 36 years carried out in the French Polynesian atolls of Mururoa and Fangataufa (see more here). Announcing this in a televised address, Chirac said he had taken into consideration the protest movements in French Polynesia against the tests and which “demonstrate the growing attachment of the Earth’s inhabitants for collective security and the safeguard of the environment”.
Enlargement : Illustration 9
Yet just six months earlier, on June 13th 1995, immediately after his election as president, Chirac had ordered the resumption of the suspended French nuclear tests, despite the outrage of the local population, neighbouring countries in the South Pacific, and environmental protection organisations.
Since the ending of the tests, with the closure of the Centre d'expérimentation du Pacifique (the Pacific Experimentation Centre), the military and scientific personnel involved in the programme have departed from what is one of the last vestiges of France’s past colonial empire. But in the Tuamotu Islands chain in French Polynesia, thousands of people continue to live in zones contaminated by radiation, where there are hundreds of declared cases of thyroid cancer and leukaemia. In 2015, the then president of the local government of French Polynesia, Gaston Flosse, a longstanding friend and political ally of Chirac’s, announced he was to remove a monument which had been erected in the French Polynesian capital city of Papeete in memory of the collateral victims of the nuclear tests, in order to rename the site as the “Jacques-Chirac” square. In face of the protests by the local population, Flosse, now aged 88, finally cancelled the project.
At an international level, Chirac was never shy to champion social or environmental causes, notably during the 1997-2002 period of political “co-habitation” with his socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, appointed after snap parliamentary elections called in 1997 returned a socialist majority when Chirac lost his conservative government elected in 1995. Largely isolated at the pinnacle of state from intervening in domestic policies, Chirac’s actions were centred on foreign affairs. Following the huge and violent protests during the 1999 meeting of World Trade Organization members in the US city of Seattle – dubbed “The Battle of Seattle” – he soon understood, as French daily Libération paraphrased him as saying, that “the regulation of globalisation has become a central issue in diplomacy”. During a United Nations conference on climate change in 2000, he called on the US to respect its engagements regarding efforts to reduce global warming, and proposed the creation of a “North-South partnership for sustainable development”.
Despite the fact that such pronouncements were never followed by concrete measures, or that France never put in place veritable policies to protect the environmental, Chirac adored to be applauded, like at the 2002 Earth Summit in Johannesburg. “Our house is on fire and we are looking elsewhere,” he told the summit. “Nature, mutilated, over-exploited, no longer manages to reconstitute itself, and we refuse to admit this. Humanity is suffering. The Earth and humanity are in peril, and we are all responsible.” Some argue that Chirac had at least the merit of evolving in his positions and of having engaged himself, albeit in form if not in substance, in championing the defence of the environment. However, it remains that after 12 years as president his record of concrete action in this regard is slim.
- From being a gravedigger of Gaullism to becoming the victim of Sarkozy
Throughout his career, Jacques Chirac was a master in betraying his allies. His name is associated with Gaullism but it is he who, through diverse manoeuvres, contributed to burying the political current that Charles de Gaulle represented. In 1974, it was Chirac who planted a knife in the back of Jacques Chaban-Delmas, the official Gaullist candidate in that year’s presidential elections, abandoning his support for the former prime minister. During the election campaign, Chirac, then interior minister, launched the “call of the 43”, signed by 39 MPs and four ministers of the Gaullist UDR party (Union des démocrates pour la République), which was published in the press on April 13th, just one month before the first round of voting.
The text was seemingly in protest at the large number of candidates from the ruling majority who were standing in the elections, but in fact it was made in indirect support for the candidacy of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, from the rival centre-right Républicains indépendants party. After Giscard won the election, he thanked Chirac by appointing him as prime minister. Jacques Chaban-Delmas became marginalised, which allowed Chirac to take a hold of the Gaullist movement. That was consolidated with the creation of the RPR party in December 1976, which was totally at the service of Chirac, its president.
Twenty years later came the duel between Chirac and fellow RPR member Édouard Balladur in the presidential elections in 1995. Balladur was appointed in 1993 as prime minister under the socialist president François Mitterrand following the victory of the Right in parliamentary elections. Chirac was to be the RPR candidate for the 1995 presidential race, but Balladur betrayed him with a last-minute bid of his own, standing against Chirac who nevertheless finally won the contest. Balladur’s loyal political lieutenant Nicolas Sarkozy, who had served as budget minister in Balladur’s government and who was Balladur’s campaign spokesman in his bid against Chirac, was held in contempt by many within the RPR for his betrayal of their official candidate. But after several years on the sidelines, Sarkozy returned to government in 2002, when Chirac appointed him as interior minister. Chirac, however, had long been wary of Sarkozy, who enjoyed a popular image among a certain section of the public.
In 2004, Sarkozy succeeded in becoming leader of the then-UMP party, the former RPR, which was to serve as his stepping stone to the presidency. Even though he was a member of Chirac’s government, he made no attempt to hide his venom for the president, depicting him as lazy and only interested in sumo wrestling – which Chirac was a self-declared fan of. During the traditional Bastille Day televised interview with the president on July 14th 2004, Chirac took a swipe at Sarkozy, saying, “I decide, he executes”. Sarkozy did indeed go on to execute Chirac politically, further burying a Gaullist movement that was by then agonising.
- From awkward speaker to rounded communicator
The metamorphosis of Jacque Chirac’s rhetorical and gestural style, and the transmutation of this in his television appearances, was abundantly clear to the ears and eyes. Early in his career, his manner in public was awkward, stiff and ill-at-ease. In short, his presentations gave him an unlikable image. François Mitterrand summed this up by commenting: “He talks like one hits a typewriter.”
But subsequently that image softened, was even rounded, on the model of Charles de Gaulle whose physical movements became transformed from those of a wading bird into those of an elephant. Chirac became tolerable, with a heavier, then slower, style. Gone was the frenzy, giving way to affability, like a colt morphed into a draught horse. As illustrated in his laborious attempt at humour in this 1996 talk show, Chirac had previously resembled his puppet on the satirical television show Les Guignols de l’info, and vice versa. But the fragile balance ended with the onset of old age, when the stiff technocrat became something of a scatty totem.
Let us take leave of Jacques Chirac with the video below, which presents a few choice moments of the former president's appearances, before and after.