France's future president once sold communist newspapers and nearly mastered Russian by 17
At 16 Jacques Chirac went looking for a Sanskrit tutor in Paris and found a White Russian exile who taught him Russian instead. He briefly sold the communist daily L'Humanité, and signing a Soviet-backed petition against nuclear weapons later got him questioned when he applied for an American visa.
Chirac was born in Paris on 29 November 1932, the only surviving child of an aircraft company executive; his grandparents were teachers and his great-grandparents peasants in the Corrèze. After his baccalauréat he slipped away, without telling his father, to spend three months as a sailor on a coal ship, and at 18 he dreamed of captaining one. He played rugby in the back row and second row, including for Brive's youth side.
He studied at Sciences Po, took a summer course at Harvard in 1953 and spent time working at Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis before entering the elite civil service school ENA in 1957. In April 1962 Georges Pompidou put him in charge of his personal staff and nicknamed him my bulldozer for getting things done, a label that stuck and also described his abrasive style. Elected deputy for the Corrèze in 1967, he helped negotiate a truce during the unrest of May 1968.
As agriculture minister from 1972 he became known abroad for fighting American, West German and European Commission farm policies on behalf of French farmers. At 41 he became prime minister under Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, but quit in 1976, complaining he lacked authority, and built a new Gaullist party, the RPR. When Giscard revived the post of mayor of Paris, unfilled since the 1871 Commune, Chirac won it in 1977 and held it until 1995. Giscard long blamed him for his 1981 defeat and claimed an RPR staffer, not recognising his disguised voice, told him not to vote Giscard.
Elected president in 1995 with 52.6 percent in the run-off, Chirac ended military conscription in 1997, won a 2000 referendum shortening a president's mandate from seven years to five, and recognised the wartime French state's part in deporting Jews. He opposed the American-led invasion of Iraq. In 2002 he beat Jean-Marie Le Pen with 82.2 percent. In 2011 a court convicted him of diverting public funds, handing down a two-year suspended sentence. He died on 26 September 2019.
Source: Jacques Chirac
