France is preparing, Friday, September 27, to pay tribute to Jacques Chirac, died on Thursday, September 26, at 86 years. A day of national mourning was declared Monday, and a solemn service will be given that day at 12 pm in the Saint-Sulpice church in Paris.

Days of national mourning had already been decreed after the deaths of presidents Charles de Gaulle in 1970, Georges Pompidou in 1974, and François Mitterrand in 1996.

  • De Gaulle : the fervor in Colombey

"I do not want a national funeral": the general had specified in his will, nearly 30 years before his death on 9 November 1970 in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, Haute-Marne. "I want my funeral to take place in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises (...) The ceremony will be settled by my son, my daughter, my son-in-law, my daughter-in-law, helped by my cabinet, so that it is extremely simple. (...) Neither president, nor ministers, nor assemblies nor constituted bodies. "

Georges Pompidou, the president then in office, decrees a day of national mourning on 12 November. A solemn requiem Mass is celebrated at Notre-Dame-de-Paris. That morning, the whole world meets in the cathedral, in the absence of the deceased. Eighty-six nations are represented, including US President Nixon, the Shah of Iran, Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandi and Prince Charles of England. Behind them, some 6,000 people attend the national funeral.

True to the general's wishes, the de Gaulle family meets in Colombey. Enveloped in a simple tricolor sheet fringed with gold, his coffin placed on an armored vehicle passes under a hedge of soldiers. Fifty thousand people hurry to the grave and the silence along the way to the church. Mass is said by the priest and Maurice Cordier. In the evening, Parisians pay a last tribute to Charles de Gaulle by gathering on the Champs-Élysées.

>> See also: General de Gaulle's tomb vandalized during National Day of Resistance

  • Pompidou: a simple stone slab

"I want to be buried in Orvilliers, I do not want flowers, nor crowns, nor funerary monument, of course, a simple slab of stone, with my name and the dates of my birth and death." Mass will be said in Paris in St-Louis-en-l'Ile, it will be sung in Gregorian ". Signed: "Georges Pompidou, August 1972".

The letter, handwritten, was entrusted to the secretary general of the presidency, Édouard Balladur, who will make it public the day after the death, on April 2, 1974, of the president suffering from a blood disease. On the day of the funeral, on April 6th, 80 heads of state and government gather at Notre-Dame. The Archbishop of Paris celebrates a mass in the absence of remains, without miter or butt, in order to respect the desire of simplicity of the deceased.

Only 17 people attend the burial and gather around the simple grave, with a slab of white cement, in Orvilliers, a small village of Yvelines where he had acquired a second home in 1954.

  • Mitterrand: two families together

It was in his homeland of Jarnac, in the Charente, in a private ceremony, that François Mitterrand was buried on January 11, 1996, three days after his death at 79 years of a cancer long kept secret. In the small Romanesque church of Saint-Pierre, his wife Danielle is surrounded by their two sons, Jean-Christophe and Gilbert, while Mazarine, his 21-year-old daughter born from his affair with Anne Pingeot, holds tight against his mother.

The close family of François Mitterrand had insisted much on this "harmony" wanted by all. At the same time, a solemn tribute is paid to Notre-Dame-de-Paris in the presence of some sixty heads of state and government. January 11 is declared the day of national mourning.

In Jarnac, family and friends parade before the remains before leaving only their closest to burial: Danielle and his sons, Mazarine and his mother, and Roland Dumas, Robert Badinter, André Rousselet and Michel Charasse. Before leaving the cemetery, Danielle Mitterrand tightens Mazarine in her arms.

Paris Match publishes a tribute issue on January 25, 1996 with a stolen photograph of the former president on his deathbed. The weekly is doomed, but refuses to reveal the author of the cliche.

With AFP