Giscard d'Estaing, Valéry

Giscard d'Estaing, Valéry (1926- ), French politician, President of France (1974-1981), who continued the conservative policies established by his two Fifth Republic predecessors.

Giscard was born on February 2, 1926, in Koblenz, Germany, where his father was a financial inspector for the occupying French administration. He was educated at the École Polytechnique and École Nationale d’Administration, and began his career in 1952 in the ministry of finance and economic affairs, where he served as assistant director of the minister’s staff. Elected to the National Assembly in 1956 and re-elected in 1958, Giscard was appointed secretary of state for finance under Charles de Gaulle in 1959; three years later he became minister of finance. His economic programme lowered the rate of inflation but was also the cause of a brief recession, and he was dismissed in 1966; soon afterwards he was returned to the National Assembly. In 1969 Giscard joined the government of President Georges Pompidou as minister of finance and economic affairs, imposing strict economic controls. After Pompidou died in April 1974, Giscard was narrowly elected president of France as an Independent Republican. He was inaugurated on May 27, 1974.

Giscard was a proponent of closer economic and political ties among European nations and promoted French interests in Africa, most notoriously through his association with the dictator of the Central African Republic, Jean Bédel Bokassa. His presidency also saw the implementation of several liberal reforms, including the lowering of the voting age to 18, the legalization of abortion, and the authorization of divorce by mutual consent. Giscard also made a strong effort to improve France’s recession-bound economy; in 1976 he outlined a wide-ranging programme that included reforms designed to revitalize the economy. He could not, however, halt the economic deterioration and social unrest caused by a worldwide recession, and he was defeated by the Socialist François Mitterrand in the 1981 election.

Giscard remained active in politics; in 1978 he had founded a coalition party, the Union pour la Démocratie Française (Union for French Democracy), serving as its president between 1988 and 1996. He was elected to the National Assembly (1984-1989; 1993-2002), where he served on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and the European Parliament (1989-1993). In 1986 he and Helmut Schmidt founded the Committee for the Monetary Union of Europe, which formulated the programme for European Economic and Monetary Union. He founded the Foundation for Democracy in Europe in 1996. At the Laeken Summit in 2001, Giscard was appointed president of a 105-member convention that was established to propose reforms to the structure of the European Union (EU) in order to accommodate its proposed expansion. One of his suggestions has been that the EU replace its system of a rotating presidency with a permanent president. In December 2003 Giscard was elected to the Académie Française, the institution responsible for safeguarding the French language.