Late president helped reshape France, Europe
PARIS — No one who saw it will forget Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s imperious exit from the Elysee Palace. Seated alone at his desk, he offered a stiff televised farewell to the French who had voted him out of office, then stood and left the room. For 45 seconds, the camera kept rolling on an empty chair.
Eventually, the former French president refashioned himself as elder statesman for a united Europe, a veteran of World War II who befriended German chancellors and helped lay the groundwork for the shared euro currency. Tributes poured in from France and around Europe on Thursday after he died Wednesday of complications from COVID19 at age 94.
“France has lost a statesman, Germany a friend and all of us a great European,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a tweet, via her spokesman.
President Emmanuel Macron praised Giscard’s achievements at home and abroad of the man whose “sevenyear term transformed France.”
“He allowed young people to vote from the age of 18, women to legally terminate unwanted pregnancies, divorce by mutual consent, got new rights for people with disabilities.” But he also “worked for a stronger Europe, a more united FrancoGerman couple, and helped stabilize international political and economic life by founding the G7.”
Known affectionately in France as simply by the initials VGE, Giscard was president from 1974 to 1981. He was the
model of a modern French president, a conservative with liberal views on social issues.
But having long groomed himself for an office he won at 48, Giscard then seemed to lose touch with common concerns. When two newspapers reported he had accepted diamonds from selfproclaimed Central African Emperor Bokassa I, Giscard airily refused comment and stopped reading them.
After French police arrested the man who had produced documents related to the scandal, the influential Le Monde commented, “France is no longer a democracy.”
Giscard eventually countered the charges. But by then a new election was approaching, and France wanted a change. He lost to Francois Mitterrand in 1981, after just one term.
He then found a second calling
in the European Union. He worked on writing a European Constitution which was formally presented in 2004, but rejected by French and Dutch voters. However, it paved the way for the adoption of the Treaty on European Union in 2007.