WITH HIS successor smarting from poor mid-term opinion polls and fighting to reassert himself after a series of setbacks, former president Jacques Chirac returned this week to the national stage he bestrode for three decades with the publication of the first volume of his keenly awaited memoirs.
Chronicling his life from his childhood years in Corrèze in south central France to his election as president in 1995, the book covers Chirac’s rise to power, his periods as prime minister, and his time as mayor of Paris between 1977 and 1995.
Along the way he settles some old scores, writes with unusual candour of his family life – and takes a swipe at Margaret Thatcher’s handling of the hunger strikes in 1981.
However, the book, Every Step Must be a Goal, avoids mention of the corruption scandal for which the former president was last week ordered to stand trial, and observers of the complex relationship between Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy will have to await the second volume – which will focus on his 12 years as president – for new insights.
Chirac recalls his disappointment when Sarkozy decided to support his rival Édouard Balladur (“a cold calculator“) for the presidency in 1995. The defection “did not leave me indifferent”, writes the 76-year-old Chirac, going on to note Sarkozy’s desire “to make himself indispensable, to always be there, nervous, in a hurry, ready for action and distinguishing himself with an undeniable gift for communication”.
Little attempt is made to conceal Chirac’s dislike of another former president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, whom he served as prime minister and later challenged for the presidency in 1981. Giscard is portrayed as arrogant and aloof, and communication between the two became “eventually impossible”.
“One day, Giscard assured me that he had thrown rancour to the river,” Chirac writes. “But that day, the river bed must have been dry because his rancour remained persistent and inexhaustible.”
There is praise for Georges Pompidou, whose death Chirac likens to that of a father, and for the late Socialist leader François Mitterrand, “whose tactical intelligence was of a sort I have rarely found in the world of politics”.
Although he writes affectionately of Margaret Thatcher, he recounts a “bout of anger” with the former British prime minister over agriculture subsidies and takes a swipe at her handling of the hunger strikes in 1981.
Explaining why, as prime minister, he abandoned university reform proposals in 1986 after police beat a student protester to death, Chirac remarks: “No reform is worth the death of a man. Anyone who knows me knows that I have little in common, in this regard, with Margaret Thatcher, who preferred to let a dozen Irish militants starve rather than give in to their demands.”
During his career, Chirac guarded his family’s privacy assiduously. In the book, he writes with warmth of his wife and confidante, Bernadette, admits to having spent too little time with his children, and wonders whether he could have done more to help his elder daughter Laurence, who struggled with mental illness and attempted to take her own life.
Of his wife, he writes that her opinions “can at times be blunt, sometimes too blunt in my view, especially when they concern me. But her views, her advice and her criticism have always enlightened me . . .”
One of the most surprising sections deals with Chirac’s first sexual experience at the age of 18 in an Algerian port where he had travelled while serving in the navy.
The memoirs make no mention, however, of the controversy over accusations that Chirac rewarded cronies with contracts for non-existent jobs while mayor of Paris. An investigating magistrate last week ruled that the evidence against the former president was strong enough to bring a trial.
Despite his legal problems, Chirac’s popularity has risen lately, with an Ifop poll this month rating him as France’s most popular politician, with a 76 per cent approval rating.
After a month of incessant coverage of political controversies, including that sparked by the candidature of Jean Sarkozy, the president’s 23-year-old son, for the position of chairman of the organisation that runs the Parisian business district La Défense, a separate Ifop poll recently suggested that just 39 per cent of French voters approve of Nicolas Sarkozy’s actions as president – the lowest figure since he arrived at the Élysée in 2007.