Georges Pompidou
Georges Pompidou was a literature teacher who ran a merchant bank, governed France for six years without ever having been elected to anything, and then was elected president. He was the son of schoolteachers from the Auvergne, took the top competitive examination in letters, and taught in lycees until 1944, when he joined de Gaulle's staff on a recommendation and stayed. He spent the 1950s as a director of the Rothschild bank while continuing to handle de Gaulle's private affairs, drafted parts of the constitution of the Fifth Republic, and conducted the secret negotiations with the Algerian provisional government that led to the ceasefire of 1962. De Gaulle made him prime minister that April. He had never stood for office, and he held the post for six years and three months, longer than anyone since. May 1968 made and unmade him. With de Gaulle abroad and the government paralysed by ten million strikers, Pompidou negotiated directly with the unions, conceded a thirty-five per cent rise in the minimum wage, and then won the June elections by the largest majority in French parliamentary history. De Gaulle dismissed him a month later. When the general resigned in April 1969 after losing a referendum he had not needed to call, Pompidou was elected to replace him without difficulty. As president he kept the foreign policy and dropped the veto: Britain entered the European Community in 1973 because he removed the objection de Gaulle had twice sustained. At home he pushed industrial concentration, motorways, nuclear power and the rebuilding of central Paris, believing that France's problem was that it had modernised too little rather than too fast. He devalued the franc, met the first oil shock in the last months of his life, and died in office in April 1974 of a blood cancer whose existence had been denied for two years.
- Lived: 1911 CE – 1974 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
