The French president who invited Paris garbage collectors to breakfast at the Élysée
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing entered the Élysée at 48 wanting to seem less like a monarch. He rode the Métro, dined monthly with ordinary families and hosted Paris refuse collectors for breakfast. When voters seemed unmoved, he swung the other way and was soon attacked as remote and aloof.
Born on 2 February 1926 in Koblenz, during the French occupation of the Rhineland, Giscard came from a family of civil servants and politicians. The aristocratic-sounding d'Estaing was added by his grandfather; the connection to the old noble line ran only through an illegitimate female branch. As a young man he joined the Resistance, took part in the Liberation of Paris and earned the Croix de guerre, then passed through the École Polytechnique and the École nationale d'administration into the elite finance inspectorate.
Elected a deputy for Puy-de-Dôme in 1956, he rose to run the finance ministry, where he coined the phrase exorbitant privilege for the dollar's dominance under Bretton Woods. His relations with de Gaulle were famously summed up as yes, but, and Gaullists blamed him for the general's departure after Giscard backed a no vote in the 1969 referendum. After Pompidou died suddenly in 1974, Giscard beat François Mitterrand in the runoff by 425,000 votes.
Reform came quickly. He lowered the voting age to 18, modernised divorce law, extended health insurance to everyone and appointed Simone Veil, whose law legalised abortion. He backed the TGV, the Minitel network and nuclear power as a route to energy independence. Yet he let three death sentences stand, and the last execution carrying his signature took place in September 1977. The oil shock that ended the postwar boom brought austerity under Raymond Barre, whose first plan in September 1976 included a three-month price freeze.
In Europe he worked closely with his friend Helmut Schmidt, helping create the European Council and the European Monetary System, and in 1975 he gathered leaders at Rambouillet in what became the G7. Mitterrand defeated him in 1981. Later he chaired the convention that drafted the doomed European constitution, joined the Académie Française in 2003 in Léopold Sédar Senghor's former seat, and died on 2 December 2020 at 94, France's longest-lived president.
Source: Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
