Arnaud Benedetti is associate professor at Paris-Sorbonne University. He is editor-in-chief of the political and parliamentary review. He has published
Le coup de com 'permanent
(ed. Du Cerf, 2018) in which he details Emmanuel Macron's communication strategies, as well as
La Fin de la com'
(ed. Du Cerf, 2017).
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing entered purgatory during his lifetime.
He will have crossed the injustice of the present, this valley that many before him had to travel.
VGE was the first of the Presidents of the Republic to internalize the contingencies of his time.
He disillusioned the France that De Gaulle had poetized, he was nonetheless the man of the great transformation.
He tried an unlikely transplant in an old state, centralized, conservative country.
He was first of all an authentic liberal, seeking in an era fractured between East and West, to tie politics, this passion so French, to the argument of reason.
The man had known war, he had even been a soldier at the very end of the conflict.
He was fully aware of the harsh realities of the economy, which he believed, no doubt wrongly, that henceforth would rule exclusively the world and history.
Coming from the right, he did not hesitate to be the broker of a whole generation of aspirations: he was the one who lowered the majority to 18, who allowed the liberalization of abortion, promoted divorce by mutual consent and - major institutional reform - opened the referral to the Constitutional Council to 60 parliamentarians.
He resorted to his thirst for the poisoned delights of com 'which he made the foil of his seven-year term.
VGE had the facility of great intelligences.
He undoubtedly understood better the present, the immediate than the deep veins of history of which Raymond Aron in a definitive word reproached him for ignoring the "tragic".
This intellectual insolence was undoubtedly his asset in seducing.
He resorted to his thirst for the poisoned delights of com 'which he made the foil of his seven-year term, especially at his beginnings.
Giscard arriving on foot at the Elysee Palace on the day of his enthronement, Giscard in city costume on the official photo, Giscard inviting himself to dinner with the French: all these clichés nourish this style which he wanted closer, less sacred, certainly in the image of what he thought was his time.
This intelligence nevertheless had the limits of too great an intelligence: it deluded itself about the irreversibility of its choices.
Inaugurating with a brilliance that we will not find again after him the era of the great technocrats in politics, dreaming of a relaxed society and relieved of ideologies, Giscard did not understand or did not want to understand that people have gaps, imaginaries , convulsions, and that their satisfaction does not necessarily index on a single growth curve and the comfort of a company of executives.
The fact remains, and the years will credit him with this aura, that he embodied the function, had to manage a double oil shock which we forget that it profoundly changed the productive weight of Westerners, and that this hour of exhaustion of the presidential model, he knew how to carry with a class never contradicted all the "grandeur and the constraints".
Giscard, whatever one thinks, did not damage politics because he still belonged to a time when it was the product of excellence.
VGE was one of this “French excellence”.