In the hours following the death of Jacques Chirac, a France was revealed that was no longer known: not a divided country, but a united country. Every minute, Marine Le Pen concocted from the right-wing populist "Rassemblement National", socialists, Gaullists and Macron supporters. Even the belligerent Jean Luc-Mélenchon of the left-wing party "La France Insoumise" confessed that grief should now be allowed to justify good reasons for her.
It was not the usual, routine explanations that would otherwise follow the deaths of old politicians. Chirac had been seriously ill for years and had not shown himself in public. Everyone knew how it was about him. And yet, all these obituaries were genuinely sad, their writers strangely shaken.
A part of his life had come to an end today, wrote ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy. Of a "deep sadness" said the former Minister of the Environment Nicolas Hulot and known, without a meeting with Jacques Chirac his career would have taken a different path. And the acting senate president of the governing party "En Marche" declared that Chirac embodied the soul of France.
Ingenious campaigner, popular mayor
Not everyone likes to see it that way. Although Chirac was very close to the French, his popularity achieved new records, especially after his retirement from the Elysée Palace in 2007 - but he was also a questionable politician: corrupt, with his own advantage in mind, a sometimes unscrupulous tactician. But one with human warmth, even his political opponents confirm.
But above all, this man, unusually tall for a Frenchman of 1.92 meters, has always been there in some way, an integral part of this fifth French republic. That too makes the loss so unimaginable. Jacques Chirac was a deputy for decades, a total of seven times Minister, twice Prime Minister and twice President, as well as Mayor of Paris for 18 years. A similar political career is unlikely to happen again in this country.
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Jacques Chirac: France's "bulldozer" is deadThere are things that will be more memorable from this extraordinary political biography than others: his resolute no to a French involvement in the Iraq war in 2003, which then linked him closely with the Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder, is certainly one of them. Likewise, his clear distinction from the extreme right "Front National" of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his sincere, at the same time supported by political calculation commitment to Europe. As the first French president, Chirac admitted that the French were partly responsible for the deportation of Jews during the Second World War.
The French, however, liked this president for other reasons: the conservative, deeply down-to-earth Gaullist was near, human and compassionate. He was an ingenious campaigner and a popular mayor, because he touched the people, talked to them, kept his distance. Chirac, who had completed a classical French elite education and 1956 married Bernadette Chodron de Courcel, the daughter of a noble family, was far less aristocratic than his predecessor, the socialist François Mitterrand. There are countless photos of Chirac drinking and eating with his constituents, pouring Pastis into village pubs and proving at the annual Agricultural Salon in Paris that he is not afraid of cows or tripe.
No TV debate with the rights
Shortly after his wedding Chirac was recruited as a young lieutenant in the Algerian War, so he was also the last president of the V. French Republic, who has still fought in a war and experienced the difficult phase of decolonization in his own body.
At the end of the sixties, Gaullist Georges Pompidou became his political mentor, appointing the then 34-year-old state secretary in the Ministry of Labor. After Pompidou's death in 1974 Chirac sat down for the election of the Liberal Valéry Giscard d'Estaing President and positioned himself against the Gaullist candidate, which earned him the anger of his party. Two years later, he left Giscard d'Estaing's government and founded the Gaullist rally RPR ("Rassemblement pour la République"), which was intended primarily to serve his own political ambitions.
The following year he was elected mayor of Paris and remained there for almost two decades. At this time go back the allegations that he had used black boxes. In 2011, a Paris court sentenced him to two years in prison on probationary felony from his time in the town hall. Chirac renounced a vocation at that time.
In 1995, he moved in the third attempt in the Elysée Palace: After he was inferior to the presidential elections of 1981 and 1988 Mitterrand, he now succeeded, against the Socialists Lionel Jospin, the victory. In 2002, he started again and had to face, a premiere in the history of France, in the second ballot next to a presidential candidate of the right-wing extremist "Front National" (FN) voters. Chirac resolutely rejected a joint television debate with Jean-Marie Le Pen and founded the right-wing electoral alliance UMP. In the second ballot, he scored the best result ever given to a president in France: 82, 2 percent of all votes. He saw it as his duty to now speak and govern for all the French.
It is this second term that has given Chirac his greatest popularity, starting with his no to the American war of aggression in Iraq. But it is also the term of office that brought him one of his greatest defeats: at just under 55 percent, the French voted in May 2005 in a referendum initiated by Jacques Chirac against the European Constitutional Treaty. In the same year he suffered a stroke, from which he should never recover properly.
Farewell to the "world of yesterday"
In spring 2007, the incumbent president announced that he would run for a third time. After leaving the Elysée Palace, he lived with his wife Bernadette, with whom he won a lifetime, first in a luxury apartment on the Quai Voltaire in Paris, just across the street from the Louvre, overlooking the Seine.
The apartment belongs to the family of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafi Hairiri, who provided it to the couple Chirac free of charge, from old bondage. The investigative weekly "Le Canard Enchainé" estimated the market monthly rent at 10,000 euros. But Jacques Chirac had no problem accepting the gift from Lebanon. It was not until 2015 that the couple moved to another, more accessible apartment - Chirac had been using a wheelchair for a while longer. Last Sunday, Chirac was admitted to the Paris hospital Pitié-Salpêtrière, on Thursday morning he died at home, in the circle of his family.
With Chirac's death, the newspaper "Le Monde" writes today after Stefan Zweig, the "world of yesterday" disappeared. A world in which there was still a clear right and a clear left. A world in which politicians ruled, who had still experienced the Cold War, were happy about the fall of the Berlin Wall and experienced the end of the great ideologies. Jacques Chirac was one of the last representatives of this generation of politicians in France - with all their advantages and all their disadvantages. He was 86 years old.