Valéry René Marie Georges Giscard d'Estaing (, ; ; 2 February 19262 December 2020), also known as simply Giscard or VGE, was President of France from 1974 to 1981.He was also ex officio co-prince of Andorra.
After serving as Minister of Finance under prime ministers Jacques Chaban-Delmas and Pierre Messmer, Giscard d'Estaing won the presidential election of 1974 with 50.8% of the vote against François Mitterrand of the Socialist Party. His tenure was marked by a more liberal attitude on social issues—such as divorce, contraception and abortion—and by attempts to modernise the country and the office of the presidency, notably overseeing such far-reaching infrastructure projects as the TGV and the turn towards reliance on nuclear power as France's main energy source. Giscard d'Estaing launched the Grande Arche, Musée d'Orsay, Arab World Institute and Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie projects in the Paris region, later included in the Grands Projets of François Mitterrand. He promoted liberalisation of trade; however, his popularity suffered from the economic downturn that followed the 1973 energy crisis, marking the end of the Trente Glorieuses (the "Thirty Glorious Years" of prosperity after 1945). He imposed austerity budgets, and allowed unemployment to rise in order to avoid deficits. Giscard d'Estaing in the centre faced political opposition from both sides of the spectrum: from the newly unified left under Mitterrand and a rising Jacques Chirac, who resurrected Gaullism on a right-wing opposition line. In 1981, despite a high approval rating, he was defeated in a runoff against Mitterrand, with 48.2% of the vote.
As president, Giscard d'Estaing promoted cooperation among the European nations, especially in tandem with West Germany under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (SPD).
As a former president, Giscard d'Estaing was a member of the Constitutional Council. He also served as president of the Regional Council of Auvergne from 1986 to 2004. Involved with the process of European integration, he notably presided over the Convention on the Future of Europe that drafted the ill-fated Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. In 2003, he was elected to the , taking the seat that his friend and former president of Senegal Léopold Sédar Senghor had held. He died at the age of 94, and is the longest-lived French president in history.
Early life and ancestry Valéry René Marie Georges Giscard d'Estaing was born on 2 February 1926 in Koblenz, Germany, during the French occupation of the Rhineland. He was the elder son of Jean Edmond Lucien Giscard d'Estaing, a high-ranking civil servant, and his wife, Marthe Clémence Jacqueline Marie (May) Bardoux. His mother was the daughter of senator and academic Achille Octave Marie Jacques Bardoux, and a granddaughter of minister of state education Agénor Bardoux.
Giscard had an elder sister, Sylvie, and younger siblings Olivier, Isabelle, and Marie-Laure. Despite the addition of “d’Estaing” to the family name by his grandfather, Giscard was not a patrilineal descendant of the extinct aristocratic d'Estaing family of Vice-Admiral d’Estaing, but rather descended through a female-line ancestor from the family’s illegitimate branch, five generations earlier.
Giscard studied at the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, the École Gerson and the Lycées Janson-de-Sailly and Louis-le-Grand in Paris.
He joined the French Resistance and participated in the Liberation of Paris; during the liberation, he was assigned to protecting Alexandre Parodi. He then joined the French First Army and served until the end of the war. He was later awarded the Croix de guerre for his military service.
In 1948, he spent a year in Montreal, Canada, where he worked as a teacher at Collège Stanislas.Mon tour de jardin, Robert Prévost, p. 96, Septentrion 2002
He graduated from the École Polytechnique and the École nationale d'administration (1949–1951) and chose to enter the prestigious Inspection des finances. He was admitted to the Tax and Revenue Service, then joined the staff of Prime Minister Edgar Faure (1955–1956). He was fluent in German.
Early political career
First offices: 1956–1962 In 1956, he was elected to the National Assembly as a deputy for the Puy-de-Dôme département, in the domain of his maternal family. He joined the National Centre of Independents and Peasants (CNIP), a conservative grouping. After the proclamation of the Fifth Republic, the CNIP leader Antoine Pinay became Minister of Economy and Finance and chose him as Secretary of State for Finances from 1959 to 1962.
Member of the Gaullist majority: 1962–1974
In 1962, while Giscard had been nominated Minister of Economy and Finance, his party broke with the Gaullists and left the majority coalition. Giscard refused to resign and founded the Independent Republicans (RI), which became the junior partner of the Gaullists in the "presidential majority". It was during his time at the Ministry of the Economy that he coined the phrase "exorbitant privilege" to characterise the hegemony of the US dollar in international payments under the Bretton Woods system.
However, in 1966, he was dismissed from the cabinet. He transformed the RI into a political party, the National Federation of the Independent Republicans (FNRI), and founded the Perspectives and Realities Clubs. In this, he criticised the "solitary practice of the power" and summarised his position towards De Gaulle's policy by a "yes, but ...". As chairman of the National Assembly Committee on Finances, he criticised his successor in the cabinet.
For that reason the Gaullists refused to re-elect him to that position after the 1968 legislative election. In 1969, unlike most of FNRI's elected officials, Giscard advocated a "no" vote in the constitutional referendum concerning the regions and the Senate, while De Gaulle had announced his intention to resign if the "no" won. The Gaullists accused him of being largely responsible for De Gaulle's departure.
During the 1969 presidential campaign, he supported the winning candidate Georges Pompidou, after which he returned to the Ministry of Economy and Finance. He was representative of a new generation of politicians emerging from the senior civil service, seen as "technocrats".
Presidential election victory In 1974, after the sudden death of President Georges Pompidou, Giscard announced his candidacy for the presidency. His two main challengers were François Mitterrand for the left and Jacques Chaban-Delmas, a former Gaullist prime minister. Jacques Chirac and other Gaullist personalities published the where they explained that Giscard was the best candidate to prevent the election of Mitterrand. In the election, Giscard finished well ahead of Chaban-Delmas in the first round, though coming second to Mitterrand. In the run-off on 20 May, however, Giscard narrowly defeated Mitterrand, receiving 50.7% of the vote.
President of France
In 1974, Giscard was elected President of France, defeating Socialist candidate François Mitterrand by 425,000 votes. At 48, he was the third youngest president in French history at the time, after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte and Jean Casimir-Perier.
In his appointments, he was innovative regarding women. He gave major cabinet positions to Simone Veil as Minister of Health and Françoise Giroud as secretary for women's affairs. Giroud worked to improve access to meaningful employment and to reconcile careers with childbearing. Veil confronted the abortion issue.Frears, 1981, 150–153.
Domestic policy On taking office, Giscard was quick to initiate reforms; they included increasing the minimum wage as well as family allowances and old-age pensions. He extended the right to political asylum, expanded health insurance to cover all Frenchmen, lowered the voting age to 18, and modernised the divorce law. On 25 September 1974, Giscard summed up his goals:
He pushed for the development of the TGV high speed train network and the Minitel telephone upgrade, a precursor of the Internet. He promoted nuclear power, as a way to assert French independence, especially so after the Iranian Revolution and the following rise in the prices of oil.
Economically, Giscard's presidency saw a steady rise in personal incomes, with the purchasing power of workers going up by 29% and that of old age pensioners by 65%.
The great crisis that overwhelmed his term was a worldwide economic crisis based on rapidly rising oil prices. He turned to Prime Minister Raymond Barre in 1976, who advocated numerous complex, strict policies ("Barre Plans"). The first Barre plan emerged on 22 September 1976, with a priority to stop inflation. It included a 3-month price freeze; a reduction in the value added tax; wage controls; salary controls; a reduction of the growth in the money supply; and increases in the income tax, automobile taxes, luxury taxes and bank rates. There were measures to restore the trade balance, and support the growth of the economy and employment. Oil imports, whose price had shot up, were limited. There was special aid to exports, and an action fund was set up to aid industries. There was increased financial aid to farmers, who were suffering from a drought, and for social security. The package was not very popular, but was pursued with vigor.J.R. Frears, France in the Giscard Presidency (1981) p. 135.
Giscard initially tried to project a less monarchical image than had been the case for past French presidents. He took a ride on the Métro, ate monthly dinners with ordinary Frenchmen, and even invited garbage men from Paris to have breakfast with him in the Élysée Palace. However, when he learned that most Frenchmen were somewhat cool to this display of informality, Giscard became so aloof and distant that his opponents frequently attacked him as being too far removed from ordinary citizens.
In domestic policy, Giscard's reforms worried the conservative electorate and the Gaullist party, especially the law by Simone Veil legalising abortion. Although he said he had "deep aversion against capital punishment", Giscard claimed in his 1974 campaign that he would apply the death penalty to people committing the most heinous crimes. He did not commute three of the death sentences that he had to decide upon during his presidency. France under his administration was thus the last country in the European Community to apply the death penalty, and until the resumption of executions in the United States in 1977, the only one in the Western world. The last death sentence, bearing Giscard's signature, was executed in September 1977, the last ratified by the Court of Cassation in March 1981, but rescinded by presidential pardon after Giscard's defeat in the presidential election in May.
A rivalry arose with his Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, who resigned in 1976. Raymond Barre, called the "best economist in France" at the time, succeeded him.
Unexpectedly, the right-wing coalition won the 1978 legislative election. Nevertheless, relations with Chirac, who had founded the Rally for the Republic (RPR), became more tense. Giscard reacted by founding a centre-right confederation, the Union for French Democracy (UDF).
Foreign policy
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing was a close friend of West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and together they persuaded smaller European states to hold regular summit meetings, and set up the European Monetary System. They induced the Soviet Union to establish a degree of liberalisation through the Helsinki Accords.