Jacques Chirac appears to have forgiven, if not forgotten, his heir's sins, writes Lara Marlowe
Jacques Chirac's presidency will end at 11am today. The 74-year-old leader will greet president-elect Nicolas Sarkozy (52) on the steps of the Élysée Palace, usher him up to the first-floor office and divulge the codes for unleashing France's nuclear arsenal.
Then President Sarkozy will escort Chirac to a waiting car, while the Élysée staff look on and applaud. The former president will be driven across the Seine, to the luxurious apartment that the Lebanese Hariri family has lent him. Tomorrow, he and ex-first lady Bernadette will travel to Morocco for a holiday. In the autumn, he will begin work at his Chirac Foundation for the environment and dialogue between cultures.
What will Chirac be thinking as he entrusts the fate of France to President Sarkozy? Not long ago he used to tell friends, "Wipe your feet on Sarkozy; it brings good luck." After 42 years in politics, Chirac is extremely pragmatic.
By all accounts he has forgiven, if not forgotten, Sarkozy's sins.
With his brazen impatience to replace the older leader, including the seizure of Chirac's UMP party, Sarkozy poisoned Chirac's last five years in office as surely as "cohabitation" with the socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin wrecked the 1997-2002 period.
Sarkozy won the presidency on his first try. It took Chirac three campaigns, and almost from the moment of his May 1995 victory, he had a rough time.
His decision to briefly resume nuclear testing in the south Pacific provoked outrage across the world.
After being elected on promises to heal France's "social fracture", Chirac instructed then prime minister Alain Juppé to reform pensions and the social security system.
There followed a winter of discontent with strikes on a scale not seen here since the 1930s.
Juppé's popularity never recovered. Chirac then made the greatest domestic political error of his 12 years in office by calling an early election, which the socialists won.
Cohabitation was the purgatory from which Chirac helplessly watched as the socialists converted the country to an economically disastrous 35-hour working week.
Jospin banned his ministers from telling journalists they found Chirac sympathique.
Yet through his myriad errors and comebacks, that is the image of Chirac that remains: an ineffectual but endearing leader who could convince anyone he was sincere.
Laurent Joffrin, the director of Libération newspaper, captured Chirac well in his editorial yesterday. Chirac's hero, Gen Charles de Gaulle, wanted to show the French what they should be, Joffrin wrote. "Chirac reflected them as they were; hence this strange mixture of indulgence and animosity for a presidency that was human, too human."
One month from today, Chirac's presidential immunity will be lifted. His stay at the Élysée was marred by a series of financial scandals. One case in particular, involving employees at his former RPR party who were paid by the city of Paris while he was mayor, is still pending.
Chirac could be summoned by the investigating judge any time after June 16th - unless, as reported by the Canard Enchaîné this spring, Sarkozy's reform of the justice system erases these offences under a new statute of limitations.
Chirac's worst foreign policy mistake was calling the May 2005 referendum on the European constitutional treaty. At the time, he resisted calls for his resignation, but went on to endure two more terrible setbacks: the race riots of November 2005 and two months of protests against the "new job contract" (CPE) in February and March 2006.
Twice Chirac named his chosen heir as prime minister. Juppé received a suspended prison sentence for his involvement in illegal party financing, and is expected to return this week as number two in François Fillon's government.
Dominique de Villepin briefly challenged Sarkozy's take-over bid on the Élysée, but was doomed by the CPE crisis.
After his landslide victory against the extreme right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, Chirac wasted the absolute majority he won in the National Assembly. Britain and Germany moved far ahead of France in reforming their economies, yet after a partial reform of the pension system, Chirac seemed to take fright.
Some commentators traced his abhorrence of confrontation to the May 1968 revolt, when as a junior minister he experienced for the first time the fury of the French street.
Chirac kept campaign promises to reduce road and cancer deaths and improve conditions for the handicapped. But anything that might provoke unrest - notably his 2002 promise to establish a "minimum service" in public transport on strike days - was abandoned. Promised tax reductions started and then spluttered.
Seeing the insolent young Sarkozy succeed where he failed may be the greatest humiliation of Chirac's retirement.
Chirac will be remembered for ending conscription and professionalising the French military, and for forcing his country to accomplish its "duty of memory" towards slavery, collaboration and heroism during the second World War, and the sacrifice of African and Arab soldiers who fought for France.
He will be sorely missed in the Arab world, especially by the anti-Syrian camp in Lebanon.
But just as Tony Blair will leave office next month under the cloud of the Iraq war, Chirac will above all be remembered for his fervent opposition to what he rightly predicted would be a catastrophe of untold proportions.
There are no French boys returning from Iraq in coffins, and that makes up for many shortcomings.