Giscard d'Estaing, the bastard son who believed to defeat Gaullism

He told me this off-camera when I interviewed him for Televisión Española before he started an official trip to Spain: "I am distantly related to King Juan Carlos, after all, I am descended from Louis XV by the bastard line". Valery Giscard d'Estaing had an undoubted aristocratic bearing, which he enhanced thanks to his almost 6'2" height and his impeccable crossing of legs when he sat in the imperial chair from which he directed his television addresses, a practice he modernised and resorted to several times a year when he tried to solemnise one of his great and resounding reforms: coming of age at 18, divorce and abortion, among the most in keeping with his liberal electoral programme.  

He was the youngest president in the history of France, succeeding the late Georges Pompidou in 1974 at the age of 48, and defeating socialist candidate François Mitterrand after an electrifying televised debate in which, emulating Kennedy and Nixon in the United States years earlier, he fixed in the popular imagination a new, fresh, brilliant politician whose ideas and capacity for action could shake up the apparent accommodating conformism of the French political class. In front of him, Mitterrand seemed to embody the concerns of the Fourth Republic, the most unstable period in post-war France, which was brought to an end by a constitution in 1958 tailored to a leader like Charles de Gaulle, who had been called upon since his retirement to put an end to the chaos.  

The left-wing did not forgive his narrow victory, barely 51 percent compared to 49 percent, when all the polls at the time indicated that the presidential seat should be occupied by the man who was able to get De Gaulle himself into a second round. However, De Gaulle would not be ousted in an election, not even by the bloodless revolution of May 1968, but by a referendum on French administrative and territorial organisation, in whose campaign a hitherto unknown Giscard would voice the harshest criticisms and attacks.  

Mitterrand, representing the whole left, then grouped into a bloc of socialists, communists and left-wing radicals, would take revenge in 1981, giving Giscard a severe dose of his own television medicine, which he managed to corner from the first moments of that debate as the embodiment of an outdated right party.  

As for Giscard's service record, in addition to the social reforms, it should be added that he was the last president to present balanced accounts, which France has never achieved again. However, the electorate was weighed down more by the alleged diamond bribes of the president of the Central African Republic, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, and by Colonel Mobutu's interventionism in Zaire, not to mention minor sex scandals, which were conveniently amplified by the then booming entertainment programmes.  

In Spain, Giscard attempted to set himself up as King Juan Carlos I's tutor, a protection that the Spanish monarch never accepted, even causing a loud exchange of invective between the two at the end of that state visit, which ended at the Hostal de los Reyes Católicos in Santiago de Compostela. Giscard never forgave this challenge and refused to understand the Spanish transition process, which was shaken from the outset by the terrorism of ETA, whose gunmen found refuge, rest and fresh impetus in what he called the "French sanctuary". What is more, after much procrastination, every French co-operative action would have to be paid for out of industrial or defence contracts.

His withdrawal from the French presidency did not force him to retire, but he continued in politics in much less important positions, from mayor of the small town of Chamaliers to president of the Auvergne region, and the European Parliament. His last project could have been his great opportunity to go down in history, but he was frustrated by both his own French and Dutch compatriots when they voted no to the referendum on the draft European Constitution, whose drafting team had been chaired by Giscard himself. Coincidentally, the referendum was to be held when Jacques Chirac, who was prime minister under Giscard, was president of France and soon guessed at the capacity for treason of the man he had made his presumed best political supporter.