Valery Giscard d'Estaing
Valery Giscard d'Estaing liberalised French private life in two years and spent the next five being blamed for an economy nobody could have governed. He came from the higher civil service, finished top of his year at the school that produces it, and was finance minister at thirty-six under de Gaulle and again under Pompidou, which made him the most experienced economic hand in the country and the least Gaullist of its leaders. He was elected in May 1974 at forty-eight, the youngest president of the century, by less than two per cent against the united left, after a televised debate in which he told his opponent that he did not have a monopoly on compassion. The first two years were the most socially consequential of any French presidency since the war. The voting age went to eighteen, divorce by mutual consent was legalised, contraception was made reimbursable, broadcasting was broken up, and in January 1975 abortion was legalised by a law carried through a hostile chamber by his health minister with opposition votes. He also abolished the practice of governing as though the president were a monarch, at least at first, and was photographed dining with ordinary families. Then the economics arrived. The oil shock of 1973 ended a quarter-century of growth, unemployment tripled during his term and inflation ran at double figures, and no combination of stimulus and austerity did anything about either. He responded by building institutions instead: the European Council, the summit of industrial democracies, and with the German chancellor the monetary system that held European currencies together and became the road to the euro. He decommissioned much of France's African interventionism late, and was damaged at the end by a gift of diamonds from a deposed central African emperor which he handled as though the question were impertinent. He lost to Mitterrand in 1981 and spent forty years afterwards in European politics, presiding over the convention that drafted the constitutional treaty rejected by French voters in 2005.
- Lived: 1926 CE – 2020 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
