Valery Giscard d'Estaing, last June in Paris. J.
DEMARTHON / AFP
Valéry Giscard D'Estaing, who died on Wednesday at the age of 94, was the first, and perhaps the last, liberal president of the V French Republic until Emmanuel Macron arrived at the Elysee Palace in 2017.
Like Macron, he was also the youngest at the time.
He was one of the last survivors of the generation of leaders that lived through the Second World War and knew firsthand the price of the European tear.
That is why he was one of those who, together with his friend, the German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, most insisted on promoting European construction.
At the same time, he was a single-term head of state and an unloved leader who, until the end of his days, projected an image of an aristocratic and arrogant man.
Giscard had been admitted in mid-November to the Tours hospital, near his residence in central France.
The cause of death was covid-19, according to the agency France Presse.
With Valéry Giscard D'Estaing, president between 1974 and 1981, a politician from another era disappears, a man who lived through the war in his youth, reached adulthood in the postwar period, began to work in the office under General De Gaulle and, once in power, he laid the foundations for economic integration and the EU's single currency.
With the aura of a center-right reformist, he contributed to liberalize French society with measures such as the legalization of abortion, but was crashed by the consequences of the oil shock and economic stagnation that ended, during his tenure, three decades of economic development and growth - the era now remembered with nostalgia of the
Thirty Glorious
- and inaugurated a period of endemic unemployment that has not yet ended.
Giscard, who became president at 48 and left at 55, lived several more political lives.
He was a deputy in the National Assembly, a MEP in Strasbourg and Brussels, mayor and president of the region, and president of the Convention that, at the beginning of this century, designed a Constitution for the future of the EU that in 2015 would end up rejected in a referendum in his own country.
In the meantime, he published several novels, the last one,
Loin du bruit du monde
, in early November when he died, and another a few years ago in which he wrote an imaginary romance of a president with a British princess who bore a strong resemblance to Lady Di.
In 2018, a German journalist denounced him for an alleged sexual assault at the end of an interview in his office on the central Saint-Germain boulevard in Paris.