Jacques Chirac

Jacques Chirac: The Crook They Voted For

In the spring of 2002 French demonstrators marched through Paris carrying placards that read: *Vote for the crook, not the fascist.* The crook was the sitting president. Jean-Marie Le Pen had reached the run-off, and the entire French left held its nose and delivered Jacques Chirac 82 per cent of the vote — the largest margin in the history of the Fifth Republic, awarded to a man half the country believed had stolen from it. Nine years later a court agreed, and convicted him.

Sciences Po, the ENA, and an American Road

Chirac was born in Paris on 29 November 1932. He went through the machine that produces the French governing class: Sciences Po, then the École Nationale d'Administration from 1957 to 1959, the finishing school of every senior official in the Republic. What separated him from his cohort was appetite. He had hitchhiked across the United States in the 1950s, a story he told for the rest of his life, and he spoke fluent, heavily accented English at a time when few French politicians bothered.

He stood six foot two, moved like a man late for something, and worked the crowds at agricultural shows with a physical enthusiasm his rivals found faintly embarrassing. He preferred beer to wine. He named calf's head as his favourite dish. None of it was accidental: an énarque from the capital spent forty years persuading rural France that he was one of them, and it worked.

Mayor of Paris, King of the Right

He was Prime Minister twice — from 1974 to 1976 and again from 1986 to 1988 — the only leader of the postwar Fifth Republic to hold the office twice, the second time in the uneasy power-sharing with a president of the opposing party that the French call cohabitation.

In 1976 he founded the Rassemblement pour la République and led it until 1994, giving the Gaullist right an instrument he personally controlled. The following year he took the mayoralty of Paris and held it for eighteen years, from 1977 to 1995. The city was his fortress: patronage, contracts, jobs, a machine that could deliver at national level. It was also, eventually, the evidence file.

The Long Wait and the Landslide

Chirac's political career ran for five decades before it reached its object. He was elected President of the Republic in 1995 and re-elected in 2002 — the fifth president of the Fifth Republic.

The early presidency was combative. In 1995 he resumed French nuclear testing in the Pacific, absorbing international outrage without visible discomfort. He abolished military conscription, ending a two-century-old link between French citizenship and the barracks and converting the army into a professional force. The 2002 landslide against Le Pen was the strangest mandate any French president has received: an overwhelming vote that expressed almost no enthusiasm for the man who won it.

The Speech at the Vélodrome d'Hiver

The single act that will outlast everything else took about twenty minutes. In 1995, newly elected, Chirac stood at the site of the Vél' d'Hiv roundup — where French police, not Germans, had seized thousands of Jews in July 1942 for deportation — and acknowledged the responsibility of the French state.

No president had done it. Every one of his predecessors, including Mitterrand, had maintained the founding fiction of the postwar Republic: that Vichy was an illegitimate parenthesis and the French state bore no guilt. Chirac ended that on his own authority, within weeks of taking office, with nothing to gain politically and a considerable amount to lose. It reset France's relationship with its own history.

Non

In 2003 he did the other thing he is remembered for. Against enormous pressure from Washington and London, Chirac refused to support the invasion of Iraq, and refused loudly — assembling a bloc with Germany and Russia, threatening the veto, and arguing that the war would inflame anti-Western feeling across the Middle East. The reaction in the United States was ferocious. His argument has aged well. He also could not resist the needle, remarking of the British that one cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad.

The Reckoning

The Paris years came due. Allegations of fictitious municipal jobs and misappropriated funds had shadowed his mayoralty for decades, and could not be pressed while he held the presidency. In December 2011, four years after he left the Élysée, he was convicted of embezzlement and given a two-year suspended sentence — an unprecedented judgment against a former French head of state.

He founded the Chirac Foundation in 2008 to work on sustainable development and dialogue between cultures. He died in Paris on 26 September 2019, aged eighty-six.

Why Jacques Is Called a Genius

He was not an intellectual and made no claim to be one; his enemies called him *Girouette*, the weathervane, and "Chameleon Bonaparte," for a career of switching positions with untroubled ease. The genius, such as it is, was political rather than analytical — an almost feral instinct for what a country could be brought to accept and when. He built a party from nothing, held Paris for eighteen years, served as prime minister twice under two different presidents, survived five decades of French politics, and reached the Élysée after most observers had written him off.

Two moments raise that above mere durability. The Vél' d'Hiv speech was the act of a man who understood that a nation cannot be healthy while lying about its past, and who was willing to break a fifty-year political consensus alone, immediately, and for no advantage. The refusal over Iraq in 2003 required reading the likely consequences of an invasion more accurately than the American and British governments did, and then accepting the diplomatic cost of saying so. Both were judgement calls made against the tide, and both look better with every year that passes. That is the specific quality: not brilliance, but nerve fused with an unusually good ear for how history would eventually read the moment.

The counter-case is severe and cannot be talked around. He was convicted of embezzlement — the funds were public, the jobs were fictitious, and the machine that stole them was the one that made him president. His domestic record is thin; he governed for twelve years and left no reform that Frenchmen name. His convictions moved with the electorate often enough to make the weathervane nickname fair rather than cruel. And it remains true that in 2002 his own countrymen re-elected him by the largest margin ever recorded while openly calling him a crook, which is a verdict of sorts on the whole career. He was a great improviser and a poor steward, and both things are permanently true.

Legacy

France mourned him more warmly than it had ever governed with him. The two decisions he is remembered for — telling the truth about Vichy and refusing the Iraq war — were both refusals to go along with something powerful, and both were taken alone. The corruption conviction sits beside them and will not be dislodged. Chirac's own countrymen appear to have decided, on balance, that they will take the trade.

Achievements

• President of the French Republic (1995–2007)
• Prime Minister of France (1974–1976)
• Prime Minister of France (1986–1988)
• member of the French National Assembly (1967–1967)
• Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour
• Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit
• Ig Nobel Prize — 1996
• Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath
• Educated at Sciences Po and Cours Hattemer