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The youngest, the most modern, the most Europeanist: Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, president of the French Republic from 1974 to 1981, who died at 94 due to complications related to Covid, left an indelible mark on the history of the Quinta Republic. and of the European construction.
On two occasions, from his property in the Loire region, he had been taken to hospital for heart problems in recent months. In Tours, on November 17, he was hospitalized for heart failure, after being treated at the Parisian hospital “Georges Pompidou” several times in recent years for the implantation of cardiac stents.
In 1974, at age 48, he was the youngest president of the Fifth Republic. He elected as Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, who will assume the presidency in 1995 and whose funeral Giscard himself made one of his last public appearances, on September 30, 2019.
He arrived at the Elysee beating Francois Mitterrand in the photo finish, who 7 years later will take revenge. France had just come out of the 30-year boom (postwar les Trente-Glorieuses), still in shock from a 68 that had marked an epoch but had left many lacerations. The unbridled Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, 48, born in Koblenz, Germany, where his father was on a mission for his bank (it was Weimar Germany), comes to power as the first non-Gaullist president and the embodiment of a winning currency. Great bourgeois family, with prestigious schools behind it (ENA Polytechnic and School of Administration), had as its political roots the liberal and Christian-democratic center-right that were pillars of post-war Europe. He said he admired two men, General de Gaulle and Jean Monnet, the father of Europe.
He had already joined the government in 1959, beginning to accumulate positions and prestigious positions, especially in the Ministry of Economy and Finance, throughout the 1960s.
His arrival at the Elysee makes, after the years of De Gaulle and Pompidou, blow a wind of freedom and great novelty. It was with him that progressive reforms such as the reduction of the age of majority to 18 and the decriminalization of abortion saw the light in France. But innovating was also his style, always elegant but sporty and without frills, the first president who liked to act as a lover and practitioner of sport – skiing or soccer – or who did not doubt that his daughter would appear on election campaign posters or wife Anne-Aymone for the traditional New Year’s greetings to the French on television.
Tall, slender, he seemed to want to change France from roots to the colors of the tricolor flag and to the rhythm of the Marseillaise (the former loved them lighter, the latter a slower pace). His relationship with the French was immediate and spontaneous, to whom he was the first to open the Elysee for visits and receptions. In the international arena, he was the promoter of the G7, the group of the richest countries in the world, and gave a decisive boost to the Franco-German axis together with German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. His mandate cracked in the second part, with the economic crisis due to the oil shock and the suspicious cases that saw his name involved: the suicide of his minister Robert Boulin, never completely clarified, and the diamond scandal as a gift from the Central African president Bokassa.
On May 10, 1981, defeat with which France turned the page again and elected the socialist François Mitterrand as president.
A convinced European since the years of its formation, Giscard assumed the leadership of the Convention for Europe in 2001, in charge of drafting the European Constitution, which was later rejected by the referendum. In 2003, a brilliant economist and author of several books and treatises, he was elected a member of the French Academy. Last May, he had been questioned and investigated for the complaint of a German journalist, who denounced him for “sexual violence”: he allegedly touched his butt during an interview a year earlier.
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