EUROPEAN CONVENTION: Twenty years after voters cast him out of the Elysee Palace, the former French president, Mr Valery Giscard d'Estaing, is making an improbable political comeback - as the European Union's Benjamin Franklin.
The domed head, razor-sharp intellect and patrician accent that dominated France in the 1970s will preside from today over a year-long Convention on the Future of Europe, expected to draft an embryonic EU constitution.
To critics who argued that he is too old, at 76, to rekindle enthusiasm among young people for European integration, Giscard replies that Franklin, one of the fathers of the United States constitution, was 81 when the Philadelphia convention met to draft that historic document in 1787.
Despite initial misgivings about his age and embarrassing publicity over an unsuccessful bid for a princely salary for his convention role, the elder statesman has convinced EU leaders and parliamentarians in recent weeks that he has the political skill and mental agility to fulfil the task.
"I was agreeably surprised that he had taken on board the initial criticism and adapted for the convention," the Franco-German Greens politician, Mr Daniel Cohn-Bendit, said.
He faces a daunting task of steering the forum of national and European parliamentarians, representatives of member states, candidates and the European Commission towards consensus on issues that have provoked controversy for half a century.
No one questions Giscard's European credentials. One of a dozen big names linked to the rebuilding of Europe after the second World War, he helped lay the foundations for the euro by co-founding the European Monetary System in 1979 to stabilise European currencies by linking their exchange rates. He initiated the regular summits of EU leaders as well as the direct election of the European Parliament in 1979.
Born in the German city of Koblenz under French occupation of the Rhineland in 1926, he saw European unity as a matter of peace or war, like others of his generation.
Giscard was profoundly influenced in the 1950s by Jean Monnet, the French official who was one of the EU's founding fathers. It was in Monnet's Paris office that he first met a "young and brilliant" German called Helmut Schmidt.
Two decades later, the French and West German leaders together helped launch the European Monetary System. But his overall record as president was mixed. After introducing a series of liberal social reforms, his presidency fell foul of a world recession and his own personality, which proved too arrogant for many French people.