Former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, champion of European integration, dies
PARIS — Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the president of France from 1974 to 1981 who became a champion of European integration, died Wednesday. He was 94.
Giscard d’Estaing’s office said he died in his family home in the Loir-et-Cher region, in central France, after contracting COVID-19.
“In accordance with his wishes, his funeral will take place in strict privacy,” his office said.
Giscard d’Estaing was hospitalized last month with heart problems but remained vigorous deep into old age.
In a January interview with the Associated Press, he displayed a firm handshake and sharp eye, recounting details from his meetings as French president in the 1970s with President Carter and Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, whose photos graced his office walls.
He wrote the article in the European Union charter that allowed Brexit to happen — the brief passage stating that a member state can leave the bloc.
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On the eve of Britain’s departure this year, Giscard told the AP that it was a “step backward” geopolitically, but he took a longer view: “We functioned without Britain during the first years of the European Union … so we will rediscover a situation that we have already known.”
Born in Germany less than a decade after World War I, Giscard d’Estaing helped liberate Paris from the Nazis in the next world war. He later laid the groundwork for the shared euro currency and helped integrate Britain into what became the EU in the 1970s.
Seeing the Britons leave, “I feel great regret,” he said.
He remained unfailingly optimistic about the European project, forecasting that the EU and the euro would bounce back and gradually grow stronger and bigger despite the challenges of losing a major member.
When he took office in 1974, Giscard d’Estaing began as the model of a modern French president, a conservative with liberal views on social issues.
Abortion and divorce by mutual consent were legalized under his term, and he reduced the age of majority from 21 to 18.
He played his accordion in working-class neighborhoods. One Christmas morning, he invited four passing garbage collectors to breakfast at the presidential palace.
He lost his reelection bid in 1981 to the Socialist Party’s Francois Mitterrand.
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Born in 1926 in Coblenz, Germany, where his father was a financial director of the post-World War I French occupation administration, Giscard d’Estaing grew up with a pan-European outlook. After joining the French Resistance during World War II, he next saw Germany as a tank commander in the French military in 1944.
In 1952, he married Anne-Aymone de Brantes, the daughter of a count and heiress to a steel fortune. They had four children: Valerie-Anne, Louis, Henri and Jacinte.
Young Giscard d’Estaing studied at the prestigious Polytechnical Institute and then the elite National School of Administration before earning a master’s degree in economics at Oxford.
President Charles de Gaulle named him finance minister when Giscard d’Estaing was 36.
After his defeat in the 1981 presidential election, he temporarily retired from politics.
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.
At 83, he published a romance novel called “The Princess and the President,” which he said was based on Britain’s Princess Diana, with whom he said he discussed writing a love story.
Asked about the nature of their relationship, he said only: “Let us not exaggerate. I knew her a bit in a climate of a confidential relationship. She needed to communicate.”
Earlier this year, a German journalist accused Giscard d’Estaing of repeatedly grabbing her during an interview and filed a sexual assault complaint with Paris prosecutors. Giscard d’Estaing’s French lawyer said the 94-year-old former president “retains no memory” of the incident.
Former French President Francois Hollande paid tribute to “a statesman who had chosen to open up to the world and was thinking that Europe was a condition for France to be greater.”
Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, expressed his “deep sadness.” Giscard d’Estaing “made France be proud,” he said.
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