Valéry Giscard d'Estaing

Anyone asking who was Valéry Giscard d'Estaing usually begins with a surprising detail: the future French president was born in Germany. He arrived on February 2, 1926, in Koblenz, then under French military occupation after the First World War, where his father Edmond was serving as a finance official with the occupying administration ^[1]. The family belonged to the upper bourgeoisie of the Auvergne region in central France, with deep roots in public administration and finance, and the young Valéry grew up between Paris and the family properties in the Puy-de-Dôme.

His education followed the classic route of the French elite. He studied at prestigious Paris lycées, and as a teenager during the Second World War he took part in the liberation of Paris in August 1944 before enlisting in the French First Army, serving in a tank regiment during the final campaigns in Germany and receiving the Croix de Guerre ^[2]. The experience of war service, brief but real, remained a point of pride throughout his political life.

After demobilization he entered the École Polytechnique, France's foremost engineering school, and then joined the first cohorts of the newly created École Nationale d'Administration (ENA), the training ground for the postwar administrative class ^[1]. Graduating in 1951, he joined the Inspection des Finances, the most selective corps of the French civil service. The combination of Polytechnique and ENA marked him from the start as a technocrat of exceptional promise, fluent in economics at a moment when France was rebuilding and modernizing at speed.

Politics came early. In 1956, at the age of 30, Giscard d'Estaing won a seat in the National Assembly for the Puy-de-Dôme, effectively inheriting the constituency once held by his maternal great-grandfather ^[2]. He aligned himself with the center-right Independents and, when Charles de Gaulle returned to power in 1958, supported the new Fifth Republic while keeping a certain distance from orthodox Gaullism.

His rise through the finance ministry was rapid. Appointed a junior minister for finance in 1959, he became Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs in 1962, aged just 36 ^[3]. He held the post until 1966, pursuing a stabilization plan that curbed inflation but slowed growth, a policy that cost him the job when de Gaulle reshuffled the government. Out of office, he built his own political vehicle, the Independent Republicans, positioning it as a partner of Gaullism rather than a subordinate. His formula for the relationship, support qualified by independence, summed up a career-long strategy of cooperation without absorption.

He signaled that independence dramatically in 1969, declining to back de Gaulle's referendum on regional and Senate reform. The referendum failed and de Gaulle resigned ^[3]. Under the new president, Georges Pompidou, Giscard returned to the finance ministry in 1969 and served through 1974, presiding over the tail end of the postwar boom. When Pompidou died in office in April 1974, the finance minister was ready. Campaigning as a modern, reformist alternative to both the Gaullist candidate Jacques Chaban-Delmas and the socialist François Mitterrand, he squeezed into the runoff and won the presidency that May by one of the narrowest margins in French history, taking 50.8 percent of the vote ^[4].

At 48, Giscard d'Estaing was the youngest president France had elected since the nineteenth century, and he set out to look the part. He walked up the Champs-Élysées at his inauguration instead of riding, invited garbage collectors to breakfast at the Élysée, and dined at the homes of ordinary citizens ^[4]. The style struck some as refreshing and others as contrived, but the substance of his first years was genuinely reformist.

Within months his government lowered the voting age and the age of majority from 21 to 18, eased divorce law to allow separation by mutual consent, and, most consequentially, backed the 1975 law legalizing abortion carried through parliament by his health minister Simone Veil ^[5]. He also broke up the state broadcasting monopoly ORTF and made contraception more accessible. Any fair account of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing achievements has to place this burst of social liberalization near the top: in a few years France's legal framework for private life moved decisively into the modern era.

Economics proved harsher terrain. His term coincided with the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, the end of the thirty-year postwar expansion the French call the Trente Glorieuses, and the return of mass unemployment. His prime minister from 1976, the economist Raymond Barre, applied austerity policies that stabilized the franc but never restored full employment ^[3]. Abroad, Giscard worked closely with the West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Together they launched the European Monetary System in 1979, a precursor of the euro, promoted direct elections to the European Parliament held the same year, and convened the first summit of major industrial democracies at Rambouillet in 1975, the origin of what became the G7 ^[6].

The second half of the term soured. The 1979 crash of a Turkish Airlines DC-10 and other crises tested the government, but the most damaging affair was personal: the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné reported in 1979 that Giscard had accepted diamonds from Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the self-proclaimed emperor of the Central African Empire whom French troops later helped depose ^[4]. Giscard's aloof handling of the story fed a growing image of monarchical distance. In May 1981 he lost the presidency to Mitterrand, taking 48.2 percent in the runoff, and his televised farewell, ending with an empty chair and the Marseillaise, became one of the era's strangest political images.

In 1952 Giscard married Anne-Aymone Sauvage de Brantes, who came from an aristocratic family; the couple had four children, Valérie-Anne, Henri, Louis, and Jacinte ^[1]. Anne-Aymone founded the Fondation pour l'Enfance, a children's charity, and remained a discreet presence through her husband's long public life. Their son Louis followed him into politics as a deputy and mayor in the Puy-de-Dôme.

The president cultivated the image of a cultivated country gentleman. He hunted, skied, and played the accordion, an instrument he occasionally performed on in public to soften his patrician reputation ^[2]. He was also a writer of genuine ambition, publishing essays on political philosophy, notably Démocratie française in 1976, and later novels. His 1994 novel Le Passage sold widely, and in 2009 he published La Princesse et le Président, a romance that prompted speculation, which he denied was autobiographical, about its inspiration ^[4].

In 2003 he was elected to the Académie française, taking the seat once held by his friend and predecessor in European affairs, Senghor's contemporary in letters and politics, and joining the small club of French heads of state admitted among the forty so-called immortals ^[1]. Late in life his reputation was touched by controversy: in 2020 a German journalist filed a complaint accusing him of touching her inappropriately during a 2018 interview, an allegation his office contested and which remained unresolved at his death ^[7].

Defeat in 1981 did not end his career; it redirected it. After a short withdrawal he returned to the National Assembly in 1984 and led the union of center-right parties, the UDF, which he had founded in 1978 to counterbalance the Gaullist movement of his rival Jacques Chirac ^[3]. From 1986 to 2004 he served as president of the regional council of Auvergne, tending the political base he had held since the 1950s, and he sat in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1993.

Europe became the true project of his later decades. A committed federalist since his presidency, he was chosen in 2001 to chair the Convention on the Future of Europe, a body of more than a hundred delegates charged with drafting a constitutional treaty for the European Union. The document was completed in 2003 and signed in Rome in 2004, and Giscard promoted it tirelessly ^[6]. French and Dutch voters rejected the constitution in 2005 referendums, a bitter blow, though much of its institutional content survived in the Lisbon Treaty of 2007.

As a former president he sat by right on the Constitutional Council, France's highest constitutional body, attending regularly after 2004. He continued writing, commenting on European affairs, and appearing at commemorations alongside the leaders who had succeeded him. On December 2, 2020, he died at his family home in Authon, in the Loir-et-Cher, from complications of Covid-19, at the age of 94 ^[7]. President Emmanuel Macron declared a national day of mourning, and tributes arrived from across Europe, especially from Germany, where his partnership with Helmut Schmidt was remembered as a foundation of the modern Franco-German relationship.

Any Valéry Giscard d'Estaing biography ends with a double ledger. At home, his single term left durable marks: the 18-year-old vote, legal abortion, divorce by consent, and a loosened state grip on broadcasting all outlasted the political defeats that followed ^[5]. He modernized the presidency's style even if the modernization of its substance stalled, and historians generally treat his social reforms of 1974 and 1975 as the most concentrated period of liberal lawmaking in the Fifth Republic's history.

His European legacy is arguably larger. The European Monetary System he built with Schmidt led, through the later work of others, to the single currency; the European Council of heads of government, which he helped formalize in 1974, became the Union's central decision-making body; and the G7 summits he initiated at Rambouillet remain a fixture of global governance ^[6]. The failed constitution of 2005 hurt him, yet the Lisbon Treaty carried much of his convention's work into force, so that the Union's present architecture bears his fingerprints more than those of most elected leaders of his generation.

Among basic Valéry Giscard d'Estaing facts, one captures the arc: born in occupied Germany in 1926, he died in 2020 honored in Berlin as a builder of European unity. Contemporaries found him brilliant and cold in roughly equal measure, and the diamond affair and the empty-chair farewell still color his image in France. But the distance of time has been kind to the reformer of 1974, and obituaries on both sides of the Rhine judged that the young president who wanted to govern France from the center had, in the end, helped to govern Europe from its heart ^[7].