Jacques Chirac (1932 - 2019) was a French politician who served as president of France from 1995 to 2007. [1] A Gaullist who founded the Rassemblement pour la République, he was mayor of Paris for eighteen years and prime minister twice before reaching the presidency. His time in office is particularly associated with his formal acknowledgement of French responsibility in the deportation of Jews during the Second World War and with his refusal to join the 2003 invasion of Iraq. [2]
Early life and entry into politics
Chirac was born in Paris on 29 November 1932, the son of a company executive with family roots in Corrèze, the rural department he later represented. He studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the Paris Institute of Political Studies, spent a summer at Harvard, served as an officer in the Algerian War, and graduated from the École nationale d'administration. [1]
He entered government service and became a protégé of Prime Minister Georges Pompidou, who gave him junior ministerial office. Elected deputy for Corrèze in 1967, he held successive portfolios including agriculture and the interior. [3]
Prime minister and mayor of Paris
President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing appointed Chirac prime minister in 1974, but the two men clashed and Chirac resigned in 1976. He then rebuilt the Gaullist movement as the Rassemblement pour la République and in 1977 was elected mayor of Paris, a post he held until 1995 and which gave him a durable political base. [1]
He was defeated by François Mitterrand in the 1988 presidential election, having returned to the prime minister's office from 1986 to 1988 in the first period of cohabitation, during which his government pursued privatisation and deregulation. [3]
Presidency
Chirac won the presidency in 1995. Early in his first term he resumed and then permanently ended French nuclear testing in the Pacific, a decision that drew international protest, and he ended conscription in favour of a professional army. In July 1995 he stated publicly that the French state bore responsibility for the round-up of Jews at the Vélodrome d'Hiver in 1942, breaking with the position of his predecessors. [2]
A dissolution of parliament in 1997 backfired and produced five years of cohabitation with the socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin. In the 2002 election, the far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round; parties across the political spectrum called for a vote against him, and Chirac was re-elected with more than eighty per cent of the vote. [4]
In 2003 his government, with Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, led opposition at the United Nations Security Council to military action against Iraq, threatening a veto and placing France at odds with the United States and the United Kingdom. [2] Domestically his second term included the rejection of the European constitutional treaty by referendum in 2005 and widespread rioting in suburban areas the same year.
Later life and legacy
Chirac left office in 2007 and established a foundation devoted to development, cultural diversity and conflict prevention. In 2011 a Paris court convicted him of embezzlement and breach of trust over fictitious municipal jobs during his tenure as mayor, giving him a suspended sentence; he was the first former French head of state tried in the modern era. [1] He was in poor health in his final years and died in Paris on 26 September 2019.
His legacy includes the Musée du quai Branly, devoted to non-European art and now bearing his name, and a reputation in France that recovered substantially after he left office. Assessments credit him with defending a multipolar view of international affairs and with confronting the Vichy record, while criticising a domestic record light on structural reform. [4]
