Jacques Chirac died on Thursday, September 26, announced his family. At the age of 86, the former President of the Republic (1995-2007) had not made a public appearance for several months. With his death, it is a page of the Fifth Republic, of which he was the fifth president, who turns.

City councilor, general councilor, deputy, minister, prime minister, mayor of Paris and finally president of the Republic, Jacques Chirac climbed one by one the steps that lead to the summit of the State. The president of the "social fracture" has spent 12 years at the Elysée Palace, a "reign" marked by some brilliance but also by betrayals and retreats.

The young Jacques Chirac won his first election in 1965 as municipal councilor of Sainte-Féréole, a small town in Corrèze, a department from which he will be elected deputy in 1967.

But the first high point of his political career came in 1974, when the young minister, promised a bright future, leaves the camp of the official candidate, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, to join the camp of Valery Giscard d'Estaing. Elected President of the Republic, "VGE" named him Prime Minister. Their deal is short-lived and Chirac resigns after spending two years at Matignon. The relations between the two men will therefore always be under the sign of mistrust, even contempt.

A long way to power

Resigning prime minister, Jacques Chirac now rolls for himself and develops a war machine that will allow him to seize power. His party, the Rassemblement pour la république (RPR), was launched with great fanfare in 1976.

He only came in third place in the 1981 presidential race, behind François Mitterrand and his best enemy, Valery Giscard d'Estaing. However, he once again reaches the post of Prime Minister after the legislative elections of 1986, which open a period of two years of cohabitation.

It is in his costume of Prime Minister that he faces again François Mitterrand in the presidential election of 1988. The televised debate between the two men, passed to the posterity, turn to the advantage of the president in exercise.

Chirac is beaten again and then looks for a base to rebuild his strength. He set his sights on Paris, where he became mayor in 1989.

In 1995, the time of the presidential returns with its lot of infighting. The new Prime Minister of cohabitation, Édouard Balladur, soon joined by Nicolas Sarkozy, is facing him on the right. At the end of a fratricidal struggle, Chirac leads his rival and faces Lionel Jospin in the second round. It imposes itself with more than 52% of the votes around the theme of the "social fracture" and finally reaches the presidency of the Republic. However, the victory will be short-lived: two years later, when the social climate is particularly tense, he decides to dissolve the National Assembly, calling new laws that see the left win. He then appointed Lionel Jospin as Prime Minister.

2003: the refusal to engage in Iraq

France is experiencing a new period of cohabitation marked by a relative agreement between the two heads of the executive. 2002 must be the year of the clash between the president and his prime minister, but a thunderclap deprives them of an announced duel: Jean-Marie Le Pen ahead of Lionel Jospin and access for the first time of his career to the second presidential tower. A "republican front" is then set up to block the leader of the FN and takes Chirac to a second term as president with more than 82% of the vote. An unprecedented score that reinstates him until 2007 at the head of the state, the presidential septennat having given way to the quinquennium.

The assessment of the "Chirac years" is contrasted and always subject to controversy. Among his great feats of arms, we find among others his now famous speech of the Vel-D'hiv in 1995 as well as his refusal to associate French troops to the Iraqi invasion in 2003. A decision that even gave him a international stature prominent.

On the chess side, the dissolution of 1997 and its resounding failure in the 2005 European referendum remain as two of the main failures of "Chiraquie". Moreover, the "affairs" that targeted him, as well as his relatives (Juppé, Tiberi, Pasqua), deprived him of a peaceful and serene retreat. Withdrawn from politics from 2007, however, he enjoyed a real popularity while he devoted himself to its foundation, whose goal was "to act in the service of peace."