Valéry Giscard d'Estaing

Biography

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing was born in 1926 in Koblenz, during the French occupation of the Rhineland, the son of a senior civil servant. He served with the Free French forces in 1944-45, then studied at the École Polytechnique and the École nationale d'administration, and entered the elite Inspection des finances, later joining the staff of Prime Minister Edgar Faure.

He became finance minister under Charles de Gaulle in 1962 and held the post again from 1969 to 1974 under Georges Pompidou. He also led the Independent Republicans, the centre-right allies of the Gaullists, and was mayor of Chamalières.

After Pompidou's death he narrowly beat François Mitterrand in the 1974 presidential election. As president he liberalised the law on divorce, contraception and abortion, lowered the voting age to 18, backed the TGV and a major expansion of nuclear power, and worked closely with West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt on European cooperation. The oil-shock recession and the Bokassa diamonds scandal weakened him, and Mitterrand defeated him in 1981.

He stayed active in politics, leading the Union for French Democracy and the regional council of Auvergne from 1986 to 2004. He chaired the convention that drafted the proposed European Constitution in 2002-03 and was elected to the Académie française in 2003. He died in 2020 at 94, the longest-lived French president.