Some of the only things that Chirac has been consistent about in a long political career are an abhorrence of racism and an unswerving devotion to his own political viability, suggests Lara Marlowe.
This time he was really finished. Jacques Chirac's disastrous dissolution of the National Assembly in 1997, five years of idleness at the Élysée Palace, the sheer weight of suspicion in a half-dozen financial corruption cases.
Socialist party hacks were saying just two months ago that this time there was no hope for the Gaullist politician. Chirac's aides spoke unconvincingly of the possibility of a second term of office; a term of redemption, so that France would forget the broken election promises, the interminable paralysis of "cohabitation", the judges waiting for his presidential immunity to expire so they could serve him with summonses.
On April 21st, France - and the world - were shocked by the comeback of the extreme right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. On May 5th, when Jacques Chirac was re-elected with 82.2 per cent of the vote, his extraordinary comeback was the direct result of Le Pen's revival. You could imagine both men standing next to open graves, like an artist's impression of the Last Judgment.
For his sins, Jean-Marie Le Pen was rejected by a landslide popular referendum. Notwithstanding a multitude of human foibles, Jacques Chirac's basic goodness was rewarded. In the pompous words of Le Figaro, the French President was "touched by history".
Whether through opportunism or lack of conviction, Chirac's ideology has changed with the times. He briefly sold the communist daily L'Humanité when he was a student and signed the Stockholm appeal, launched by the World Peace Committee, which was manipulated by Stalin.
He attended a socialist study group run by his friend and fellow student, the future prime minister Michel Rocard. But it was the Algerian war that most marked him. As a lieutenant in Algeria, Chirac sided with Gen de Gaulle and the Republic against the extreme right-wing putschists of the OAS.
When he founded his own party in 1976, Chirac talked about "French-style Labour socialism". In 1981, he modelled himself after Ronald Reagan; in 1986 he was for liberal economics; in 1995 for "healing the social fracture".
On his return from the Algerian war in 1962, Chirac found a post in prime minister Georges Pompidou's cabinet. His aristocratic heiress bride, Bernadette Chodron de Courcel, believed her husband, who had attended the prestigious school for high-ranking civil servants, ENA, would settle into a quiet job at the government auditing body, the Cour des Comptes. But Chirac had acquired a taste for adventure in Algeria and he did not want to be bored.
He thought politics was the only field that could ensure him a decent living and excitement. Chirac's family had risen up the French social ladder. His great-grandfather was an illiterate farmer, his grandfather a school teacher and his stern, disciplinarian father, Abel, was a banker.
Chirac's parents' first child, a daughter named Jacqueline, died in infancy 10 years before he was born. His mother, Marie-Louise, adored him and he telephoned her every day, even when he was a cabinet minister, until she died in the 1970s. The Chiracs have known tragedy; their eldest daughter, Laurence, is handicapped.
Bernadette and their younger daughter, Claude, who is President Chirac's communications councillor, are the closest of trusted advisers.
Pompidou treated Chirac as an adoptive son, a role mirrored by Mrs Claude Pompidou, who took the long-suffering Bernadette under her wing. At the age of 35, Chirac became a junior minister. Through Pompidou's good graces, he would hold five portfolios between 1967 and 1974, when at the age of 41 he became one of the country's youngest prime ministers to its youngest president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.
1974 marked Chirac's first betrayal, when he defected with 43 Gaullist parliamentarians from the camp of Jacques Chaban-Delmas to Giscard. Two years later, he began plotting against Giscard, resigning on the pretext of fatigue to found his own Gaullist party, the RPR, then sabotaging Giscard's bid for re-election by standing himself in 1981.
When the journal Canard enchaîné revealed that Giscard had accepted gifts of diamonds from Emperor Bokassa, one of Chirac's allies, Charles Pasqua, sent his toughs out at night to glue diamond stickers over the eyes on Giscard's election posters.
In 1995, it was Chirac's turn to know betrayal. Edouard Balladur, the ally whom he had pushed to take the prime minister's job under the second "cohabitation" of the Mitterrand era, challenged Chirac for the presidential candidacy. For months, it looked like Balladur was winning; most of Chirac's supporters went over to him.
The Guignols television satire portrayed Chirac with knives stuck in his back. Those who were loyal - the former prime minister Alain Juppé and Jean-Pierre Raffarin, whom Mr Chirac named prime minister yesterday, remain closest to him now.
Chirac ingeniously re-invented the almost defunct office of Mayor of Paris. For 18 years, from 1977 until he was elected president in 1995, the town hall treasury was virtually indistinguishable from the RPR's party coffers.
Most of the financial scandals which marred his first term as president stem from the Paris cash cow: kickbacks on council housing and the construction of lycées; party workers paid by the city or would-be contractors; vote-rigging; city-owned luxury flats rented to acolytes at ridiculous prices; millions for personal groceries and airline tickets and so on.
Chirac's supporters point out that he has held high government office since 1967 and that in France, high-ranking officials have always lived in palaces, had chauffeur-driven cars, cooks and butlers.
If anything, his predecessor, Francois Mitterrand, was more prone to financial excess.
In their horror at the possibility of a Le Pen presidency, French voters forgot - at least temporarily - the high living and party finances.
Even Judge Eric Halphen, who long pursued Chirac, sided with him against Le Pen. Chirac seems to have understood. He pitched his campaign headquarters in a high-crime district near the Gare du Nord and chose the "popular" Place de la République for his Sunday night victory party.
Jaques Chirac's greatest assets are incredible physical energy and a personal magnetism which does not come across on television, but makes him a machine for winning elections. "No one ever said no to me, especially not a woman," he said in 1990. Among contemporary politicians, only Bill Clinton has a comparable ability to grasp a voter's hand, look into his or her eyes and provoke a meltdown.
One human quality upon which even Chirac's critics agree is his abhorrence of racism.
When he learned on April 21st that Le Pen, not Jospin, was his challenger, "he breathed in deeply for several second, with all his being", the centre-right politician Nicolas Sarkozy said, "as if he'd found air after a long dive under water". Chirac has spent four decades in the pursuit of power and he obviously realised that his chances of re-election were better.
However, he rose to the occasion and was infused with an almost de Gaulle-like aura of a man determined to save his country.
"It's the battle of my life, it's a mortal combat," he said in a campaign rally. Echoing de Gaulle, he told the French people on Sunday night, "I have heard you, I have understood you." Jacques Chirac now has an unforeseen opportunity to redeem himself and his uneasy country. Even he may not know if he's up to the challenge.