Late French ex-president Giscard helped reshape Europe

PARIS — No one who saw it will forget Valery Giscard d'Estaing's imperious exit from the Elysee Palace. Seated alone at his desk, he offered a stiff televised farewell to the French who had voted him out of office, then stood and left the room. For 45 seconds, the camera kept rolling on an empty chair.

Eventually, France's president from 1974 to 1981 refashioned himself as elder statesman for a united Europe, a veteran of World War II who befriended German chancellors and helped lay the groundwork for the shared euro currency. Tributes poured in from France and around Europe on Thursday after Giscard died Wednesday of complications from COVID-19 at age 94.

"France has lost a statesman, Germany a friend and all of us a great European," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a tweet, via her spokesman.

In a televised address to the nation, French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to "a central figure in the history of our Republic."

"I belong to a generation that was born under his presidency," Macron, who was born in 1977, said. "If our society is modernized, more open, if our lives are freer, that's also thanks to his courage and his boldness."

Macron mentioned legalizing abortion, reducing the age of majority from 21 to 18, and allowing divorce by mutual consent as among Giscard's praiseworthy achievements,.

A strong pro-European advocate himself, Macron added: "if our continent is more united, stronger, that's also thanks to his passion for Europe."

Known affectionately in France as simply by the initials VGE, his name sometimes too long to pronounce, Giscard was the model of a modern French president, a conservative with liberal views on social issues.

He was full of contradictions. Like an elected monarch with a technocrat's skill and a feel for the zeitgeist, he played his accordion in working class neighborhoods. One Christmas morning, he invited four passing garbage men to breakfast at the presidential palace. He calmed a prison riot in Lyon by chatting with inmates in their cells.

But having long groomed himself for an office he won at age 48, Giscard then seemed to lose touch with common concerns. When two newspapers reported he had accepted diamonds from self-proclaimed Central African Emperor Bokassa I, Giscard airily refused comment and stopped reading them. After French police arrested the man who had produced documents related to the scandal, the influential Le Monde commented, "France is no longer a democracy."

Giscard eventually countered the charges. But by then a new election was approaching, and France wanted a change. He lost to Francois Mitterrand in 1981, after just one term.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex praised the former president's leadership during the economic turbulence of the 1970s, during which he "significantly advanced the building of Europe and the international influence of France, whose history he marked."

In 1952, he married Anne-AymoneIt de Brantes, the daughter of a count and heiress to a steel fortune. They had four children: Valerie-Anne, Louis, Henri and Jacinte.

Giscard studied at the prestigious Polytechnical Institute and then the elite National School of Administration, before mastering economics at Oxford.

President Charles de Gaulle named him finance minister at the age of 36.

After his defeat in the 1981 presidential election, Giscard temporarily retired from politics.

In Giscard's two-volume "Life and Power" he revealed that for seven years after 1981, he read no French papers and watched no newscasts for fear of seeing himself attacked.

He then found a second calling in the European Union. He worked on writing a European Constitution which was formally presented in 2004, but rejected by French and Dutch voters. However, it paved the way for the adoption of the Treaty on European Union in 2007.

He was a crack skier and keen hunter. Decades after he left office, a photo of his hero, John F. Kennedy, stayed in sight of his desk, along with those of Giscard and world leaders he met during his presidency. Statesmen respected his world view, expounded with the tones of a classic Frenchman bred to rule. When his stage broadened to include all of Europe, they listened.

He helped integrate Britain into what became the EU in the 1970s – and helped write the article of the EU charter that allowed Britain to leave.

On the eve of Brexit this year, Giscard told The Associated Press in an interview, "I feel great regret." He called it a "step backward" geopolitically, but took the long view.

"We functioned without Britain during the first years of the European Union ... So we will rediscover a situation that we have already known," he told the AP.

Earlier this year, a German journalist accused Giscard of repeatedly grabbing her during an interview, and filed a sexual assault complaint with Paris prosecutors. Giscard's French lawyer said the former president retained no memory of the incident.

At age 83, he published a romance novel called "The Princess and the President," which he said was based on Princess Diana, with whom he said he discussed writing a love story.