Even those born well after 1981 retain an image of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing,
whose relatives announced the death on Wednesday at the age of 94: that of his theatrical "Goodbye", spoken in front of the camera in his chair at the Elysee Palace before getting up to reach the door of his office, in a interminable silence.
The scene, a bit ridiculous, has become a cult television sequence.
“I had miscalculated the distance that separated me from the exit,” the person later explained.
To the severe defeat inflicted by the socialist François Mitterrand, for the first alternation in power under the Fifth Republic, will be added the humiliation of the whistles of the small crowd at its exit and the burning of the “betrayal” of the Gaullist Jacques Chirac, main cause in his eyes for its failure.
At 55, Giscard saw his destiny thwarted for the first time.
VIDEO. The famous "Goodbye" of 1981
A brilliant student who does not ignore the torments of the century
Giscard's problem, to use Raymond Aron's cruel phrase, is that "he doesn't know that History is tragic."
And yet… Admittedly, the young Valéry was born on February 2, 1926 in Koblenz (Germany), the second of four siblings, in a privileged cocoon.
His father Edmond, a great bourgeois pitted aristocracy who joined the name of Estaing - an admiral of the Ancien Régime - to that of Giscard, a conservative Maurrasian and fervent Catholic, led a prestigious career as a financial administrator in the public and the private.
It is on the side of his maternal great-grandfather, Agénor Bardoux, one of the founders of the Third Republic, that the liberal Orleanist fiber resides which the centrist president will claim, who will aim to bring together "two French out of three" , title of his book in 1984.
Certainly again, the brilliant student, used to outclassing his classmates from elementary school to Polytechnique and ENA, grows up in the tranquility of the beautiful Parisian districts and, in summer, in the coolness of the Château de Varvasse, in Chanonat near Clermont-Ferrand, on Auvergne family land.
We go on crayfish fishing trips and cycle trips with cousins and friends of the village.
"Each time he spoke to me about his mother, about this happy childhood, he would ask me to turn off my recorder, because his voice was breaking under the emotion", confides his biographer Eric Roussel.
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in January 1945. Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet
But the young man with the tall figure is not unaware of the torments of the century.
On the contrary, he is haunted by the fear of missing out on "History, legend", writes on this subject exalted letters to his cousin François.
Still a high school student, he participated in the Liberation of Paris in August 1944, armed with the Sten submachine gun of the resistance fighters.
Then enlisted at 18, to the anger of his father, in the army of General de Lattre marching on Hitler's Germany.
His tank, called Carrousel, was the first to enter the city of Constance on April 26, 1945. Four days later, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin.
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The following July 14, decorated with the Croix de Guerre, VGE will parade on the Champs-Elysées in front of General de Gaulle - of whom he will later be Minister of Finance, one of the "prides" of his life - before resuming at no load his studies and start at the same pace his political career.
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing alongside General de Gaulle in July 1962 at the Elysée. / AFP
This tragic period of the Second World War, and the need to rebuild everything, will greatly influence the European commitment, the common thread of the third president of the Fifth, who will be one of the fathers, with his accomplice the German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, of the common European currency.
In politics, Giscard may well be often portrayed as a liberal, he will always keep his interventionist reflexes of Inspector of Finance - his body when leaving the ENA.
Unlike a Georges Pompidou from the bank, he has a rough relationship with the employers.
Even with the Michelin family: "When we saw them at mass at Clermont-Ferrand cathedral, it was each on his own", testifies Eric Roussel.
The latter insists rather on the deep reforms of society - abortion, majority at 18 years ... - of the seven-year term.
"I don't know how to cook but I can do the dishes"
If he revolutionized political communication, he paradoxically failed to make himself loved by the French, to erase the distance between the starched Republican monarch and the common man.
The question plagues him for a long time.
After his defeat, stunned, he invited himself to the ranch owned by businessman Jean Frydman in the Canadian Rockies.
"It's rustic, there is no service," warns the latter.
“I don't know how to cook but I can do the dishes,” insists Giscard.
During the stay of… six weeks, in their long horse rides, the defeated rethinks with his host his failure, seems obsessed with the idea of restoring the judgment of the French against him.
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Politicians are not immune to this coldness.
Even after May 1981, when he set out to redo the path in reverse, terminal after terminal, again becoming elected local, regional (he will chair the Auvergne region from 1986 to 2004) and deputy for Puy-de-Dôme, then taking the head of the UDF, "he remains incapable of caressing the elected officials in the direction of the hair to constitute a praetorian guard ready to die to bring him back to the Elysee", still laments a faithful.
Nicolas Sarkozy, admiring the intellectual brilliance of his distant predecessor but stunned by his lack of empathy, has the right formula: “Giscard is embarrassed by his feelings.
"
He will no longer set foot in Auvergne
The man is however an affective, emotional even, thus shedding a tear live while evoking his wife Anne-Aymone, or not hesitating to write a disconcerting bluette on a late princess ... at the same time letting the noise run, to the manner of a schoolboy, of a romance with Lady Di.
At the Constitutional Council, where the two former presidents sat, Chirac made a big deal out of it in the presence of his eternal enemy brother.
At the 2004 regional, defeated from his presidency of Auvergne, he was so upset that he would never set foot in the region again.
He even let go, showing his new castle of Estaing in Aveyron, that "the people of Aveyron are Auvergnats who would be kind"!
In 2005, the victory of the "no" in the referendum on the European Constitution, written by him, put an end to his dream of becoming president of the EU.
Sarkozy, Cazeneuve, Darmanin among its visitors
Since then, between two (very well) paid conferences across the planet, regular pikes against this Europe entangled at 27 - he pleaded for a Union of ten - and often acid outings on national policy, Giscard received, old wise man, in his private mansion on rue Benouville (Paris 16th).
Among his visitors, Nicolas Sarkozy (for whom he called to vote in the 2012 presidential election in our newspaper), the former Socialist Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, Emmanuel Macron's ministers such as Gérald Darmanin or Sébastien Lecornu ... Emmanuel Macron himself sometimes compared to Giscard?
“Of course, confirms the entourage of the former president, even if VGE was annoyed that he had robbed him of his title of youngest president of the Fifth Republic.
"
"He is a character as we will never see again, the last politician of the nineteenth century, with his modern sides and his conservative side, his culture turned towards Maupassant, Tocqueville", describes Eric Roussel.
Rue Benouville, her paneled office, with moderate lighting as her vision fades, is adorned at the top of the walls of Marie-Antoinette's plate service at Versailles.
Incomplete, for an indelicate to whom Giscard once lent some of them never returned them!
In the anteroom, a host of period paintings, some of which are linked to “the history of the family”, insisted the owner.
“Bruno Le Maire did not recognize her either,” he slipped to us when we had failed to identify a portrait of the Pompadour in his youth.
It was again Chirac who provoked - involuntarily this time - one of his last sorrows, when his name was given to the Quai Branly museum.
While no one has thought of that of Giscard for the Musée d'Orsay, for which he considers that he has worked a lot.