Valéry Giscard d'Estaing

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing: The Engineer of Modern Europe

In November 1975 the leaders of the world's largest industrial economies gathered at the Château de Rambouillet, southwest of Paris, at the invitation of a forty-nine-year-old French president who had been in office barely eighteen months. That meeting became the G7. Within four years the same man had helped build the European Council and the European Monetary System. Four years after that he was out of office, undone in part by a gift of diamonds from an African dictator — a scandal so absurd that he later admitted he had "underestimated the force of derision."

Koblenz, the Resistance, the Grandes Écoles

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing was born on 2 February 1926 in Koblenz, Germany, where his family was living during the French occupation of the Rhineland. He came from the upper reaches of the French bourgeoisie, and he never pretended otherwise; the aristocratic-sounding surname was part of the package that his opponents would spend three decades using against him.

He joined the French Resistance during the Second World War, and afterwards passed through the two institutions that certify membership of the French governing elite: the École Polytechnique, and then the École nationale d'administration between 1949 and 1951. It is the most formidable educational pedigree available in France, and it shaped everything he subsequently did. He thought about government the way an engineer thinks about a system.

Minister of Finance

He was elected to the National Assembly for the Puy-de-Dôme in 1956, at thirty. He became Finance Minister under Charles de Gaulle from 1962 to 1966, and again under Georges Pompidou from 1969 to 1974 — a decade at the centre of French economic policy before he was fifty.

It was in that role that he produced the phrase for which economists still cite him: the "exorbitant privilege" enjoyed by the United States through the dollar's dominance of international commerce. It was a precise, slightly acid formulation of a structural asymmetry that nobody had named so well, and it entered the permanent vocabulary of international finance. Very few politicians contribute a term of art to a discipline.

1974: Modernising France

He won the presidency in May 1974, at forty-eight, taking 50.8 per cent against François Mitterrand. It was a narrow win, and he governed as though the mandate had been overwhelming.

The social reforms came fast and were genuinely transformative. His government lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. It legalised divorce by mutual consent. Most consequentially, in 1975 it decriminalised abortion through the law carried by his health minister Simone Veil — the reform for which his presidency is still chiefly remembered in France. He created a ministry for women's affairs. He backed the construction of the TGV high-speed rail network and the vast expansion of French nuclear power, two decisions whose consequences still define French infrastructure fifty years on.

He also worked, sometimes awkwardly, at the theatre of accessibility, famously inviting refuse collectors to breakfast at the Élysée. The gestures were mocked; the reforms were not.

The economics were harder. The oil shock of 1973 arrived just before he did, and the recession that followed dominated his term. Under Prime Minister Raymond Barre his government turned to austerity, which neither restored growth quickly nor endeared him to voters.

Europe with Helmut Schmidt

Giscard's most durable work was continental. His partnership with the West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt — two economically literate leaders who trusted each other and shared a diagnosis — became the engine of European integration in the 1970s. Together they convened the first G7 summit at Rambouillet in 1975, helped establish the European Council as the body where heads of government actually decide, and built the European Monetary System, which set the pattern for later European monetary cooperation.

This is the part of his record that has aged best. The institutions he helped design are still the institutions Europe uses.

The Diamonds

In 1979 the satirical weekly *Le Canard Enchaîné* revealed that Giscard had accepted diamonds from Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the dictator of the Central African Republic. It was not the largest corruption scandal in French history, but it was the funniest, and it destroyed him. A president whose entire authority rested on rationality, competence and manners was suddenly the punchline of every cartoon in France. The paper's editor Erik Emptaz recalled Giscard's own verdict on what had happened to him: "I underestimated the force of derision."

Mitterrand beat him in 1981; Giscard took 48.2 per cent. He was fifty-five, and he would live another thirty-nine years.

The Long Afterlife

He returned to elected politics, served in the European Parliament, and in 2002 was appointed to preside over the Convention on the Future of Europe, the body charged with drafting a constitution for the European Union. He was elected to the Académie française in 2003. He wrote steadily — including, at eighty-three, a romance novel. He described himself, without embarrassment, as a ladies' man; in 2020 the German journalist Ann-Kathrin Stracke accused him of groping her during an interview conducted in 2018.

He died on 2 December 2020, aged ninety-four, of complications from Covid-19 after being hospitalised with breathing difficulties. He was the longest-lived former president in French history.

Why Valéry Is Called a Genius

Of the modern French presidents, Giscard has the strongest claim to genuine intellectual distinction, and unusually the claim rests on documented work rather than reputation. He was a product of Polytechnique and the ENA at their most selective, and he used that training the way it was meant to be used: to see the structure of a problem before the politics of it. "Exorbitant privilege" is his, and the fact that economists still reach for the phrase sixty years later is evidence of an analytical mind, not a rhetorical one. More substantially, three of the institutions that organise the Western world — the G7, the European Council, the European Monetary System — carry his design work. Whatever one thinks of those institutions, conceiving and constructing them in under five years is architecture of a high order.

The counter-case is equally clear and he never escaped it. His analytical gift did not extend to reading his own electorate: he was widely perceived as remote and patrician, and his attempts to fix that perception — the breakfasts, the visible informality — landed as condescension. His economic management under Barre neither ended the recession nor persuaded anyone, and he lost in 1981 to a rival he had already beaten. The Bokassa diamonds were not merely a scandal but a self-inflicted absurdity by a man who should have seen exactly how it would look. And his final grand project, the European constitution he drafted, proved ill-fated. Genius, here, means something specific and limited: institutional design of the first rank, joined to political judgement that was frequently poor.

Legacy

Giscard modernised France more thoroughly than any president between de Gaulle and Mitterrand, and he did it in seven years: legal abortion, an adult franchise at eighteen, divorce by consent, the TGV, the nuclear grid. He then spent four further decades on Europe, and the shape of the European Union today is more his than almost anyone's. He was, by common agreement, easier to admire than to like — and the institutions he built have outlasted every joke made at his expense.