Valéry Giscard d’Estaing: the man who modernised France

“Your friend, Tony Blair, who does he think he is? He’s now calling for Albania to be let into Europe?”

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing stretched out his long legs in the French Embassy in Brussels as he gave me his little lecture on the errors of the former British Prime Minister.

I replied politely. “Monsieur le President, the Albanians are a small nation just to the north of Greece, which was let into Europe 40 years ago as a small backward nation, with pre-modern politics, hopelessly corrupt, recently under military dictatorship. Remind me who was the President of France who urged the swift entry of an unreformed, unprepared Greece into the European Community?” He snorted and changed the subject. The point about Giscard d’Estaing was that he loved a good argument. At the time, 1981, he swept away criticism of letting Greece enter Europe with the line “What is Europe without Plato?”

Giscard was born in the same year as the Queen: 1926. He was in the Resistance as a teenager in the war, and joined the Free French army that helped to liberate France and entered Germany. After that, he went off to the rigorous mandarin-type schooling of the French higher education schools that train the nation’s elite.

His seven-year-long presidency of France from 1974, when he was elected aged 48, to 1981, when the socialist François Mitterrand took over, oversaw the transformation of this deeply traditionalist, conservative and then still Catholic country. The first President of the Fifth Republic, Charles de Gaulle, dictated each day what the news headlines of French television should be. Giscard d’Estaing turned the country into a modern, exciting, dynamic, youthful nation which re-entered history.

Giscard had in fact been De Gaulle’s finance minister, a 1960s 

French version of Rishi Sunak. In that role, he lectured French citizens by holding up charts in TV broadcasts to explain the economic changes the country needed.

His presidency oversaw major reforms, including legalising abortion and contraception, despite the opposition of the Church and the Right. He handed over this arduous task to Simone Veil, who had survived Auschwitz and still bore the Nazi tattoo on her arm. As Minister of Health she carried out other pro-women reforms.

Unlike Labour Britain in the 1970s, when an out-of-touch 1945 generation Labour government could not read or harness the new energies of the 1968 generation, Giscard opened up France. TGV railways connected the regions of France — some feat, as the country is twice the size of Britain. The Airbus took off. Giscard, to put it politely, enjoyed the company of women and promoted several to be ministers. He reduced the voting age to 18.

While British journalism was falling under the sway of Rupert Murdoch and his loyal right-wing editors, who prepared the way for the decade of Thatcher’s politics, the 1968 generation of journalists and publishers in France were producing new newspapers and extending French publishing or radio stations.

In political terms, Giscard never had a majority in the National Assembly. He faced venomous and cynical opposition from his rival Jacques Chirac, who shamelessly pandered to the anti-European passions of the French Right as well as the Communist Left.

Chirac got his revenge by running against Giscard in 1981, to split the centre-right vote, and thus let in the socialist François Mitterrand. Giscard believed there was a secret pact between Mitterrand and Chirac, two deeply cynical men, to bury their ideological differences in order to defeat him at the 1981 election. He visited Mitterrand on his deathbed in 1995 to ask him to confirm his suspicion, but Mitterrand, as ever, remained elegantly ambiguous and refused to satisfy his predecessor’s curiosity.

Giscard got his delayed revenge when he campaigned for and won a reduction in the term of the French presidency from General de Gaulle’s seven years to five, but Chirac won two five-year terms, so died having just beaten his rival of the 1970s.

The biggest reform of Giscard’s presidency was to make France a builder of Europe. Giscard set up the G7 with Jimmy Carter, who is still alive at 96. Under him France strongly supported the Polish trade union movement, Solidarity in 1980, which announced the end of Soviet communism.

But it was his intimate partnership with Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of West Germany and a man of the same generation, that laid the foundation of the modern European Union. They were both modernising finance ministers who spoke fluent English, their working language. They created the first European monetary system, the forerunner of the euro currency and brought in direct elections for the European Parliament in 1979, providing Europe with an embryonic democratic base.

Giscard’s defeat by Mitterrand, who was ten years older, left him in a void and at just 55 years old he wandered around France, Europe and the world dispensing advice but without anything serious to do.

He tried a last stab at European politics when he presided over the EU’s constitutional treaty process after 2000. He worked with the stellar British diplomatist, John Kerr, who drafted the treaty, including inserting the famous Article 50 that later allowed the UK to withdraw.

Then in 2005, his long-standing rival, Chirac, got his final revenge on Giscard by holding a referendum which defeated the constitutional Treaty. In truth, most of his provisions were incorporated in the 2008 Lisbon Treaty. That treaty brought back old Treaty language, including the reference to “an ever-closer union of the peoples of Europe”, which as Europe Minister, I had excised from the final text of the constitution.

Most referendums in EU member states this century with the word Europe on the ballot paper, were lost – a point David Cameron might have noted if he had ever taken the slightest interest in European politics before calling his Brexit plebiscite.

Giscard went from seminar to seminar and, as chair of one of them, I had to explain the purpose of the clock in front of each speaker which showed how much time each platform participant had left. Giscard was just warming up when he spotted it, stopped and said “C’est quoi, ce machin?” – “What’s that thing?” Sadly, I had to tell him. “It’s a clock, Monsieur le Président, and it tells you time’s up.”  He snorted in a very Giscard way and finished his point. 

Giscard entered and left office a young man, but his seven years as President saw more reforms in France and one of the fastest modernisations of the nation in history, as well as laying the foundations of today’s European Union. Pas mal.

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