Paris (AFP)

France is preparing Friday to pay tribute to Jacques Chirac, the day after the death, at age 86, the fifth president of the Fifth Republic, which was never more popular after the end of his very long political career.

Jacques Chirac "goes into history and will be missed by all of us now," concluded Emmanuel Macron Thursday evening, at the end of a televised speech reminding the action of his predecessor and insisting on the personality of a " statesman we loved as much as he loved us ".

Several hundred people came on Thursday evening at the Elysee Palace to sign the guest books installed in the vestibule of the Palace, in front of a large photo of the former president disappeared, and will remain accessible until Sunday.

In a grave silence, the visitors, French, foreigners, young and old, were queuing and whispering to enter the Court of Honor, enlightened on all sides.

A day of national mourning was decreed on Monday, and a solemn service will be given that day at 12.00 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 office at the time of his death) in 1974, and François Mitterrand in 1996. The date and place of the funeral did not not yet communicated.

The former head of state, who had been suffering for many years, died "very peacefully, without suffering" and surrounded by his family Thursday morning at his home, rue de Tournon in the center of Paris, the city which he had been the mayor for 18 years before joining the Elysee Palace in 1995.

"This is a part of my life that disappears today," said Nicolas Sarkozy, his immediate successor at the Elysee, while Francois Hollande greeted "a fighter" who "had been able to establish a personal connection with the French" .

- "Paris is in mourning" -

"Paris is in mourning," said Anne Hidalgo, mayor of the capital, since the City Hall on which he had ruled for 18 years. As a sign of tribute, the Eiffel Tower died on Thursday night.

With Jacques Chirac disappears one of the main actors on the right of the French political life, since the end of the sixties until the mid-2000s. He who was also deputy of the rural Corrèze-and was judged like one of the He was twice president of the Republic, from 1995 to 2007, but also twice Prime Minister (1974-1976 and 1984-1986), three times mayor of Paris, founder of two parties - the RPR and the 'UMP, as well as minister at repetition from the age of 34 years.

"He did all the trades of the Fifth Republic," commented AFP political scientist Pascal Perrineau. And in spite of the sometimes sinuous evolutions of its political line and its proposals in economic and social matter, remain some constants: the uncompromising rejection of the extreme right, the concern for the national cohesion, a Gaullist approach of the international role of the France, seen as a power of balance to speak to all.

From abroad, German Chancellor Angela Merkel praised "a formidable partner and friend", and the President of the European Commission, the Luxembourger Jean-Claude Juncker, considered that Europe "was losing one of its leading figures, France a great statesman and I a faithful friend ".

Jacques Chirac's Elysian mandates, culmination of a political career begun in 1967 in the National Assembly, will remain marked by his "no" to the second Iraq war, by the end of the military conscription, the recognition of the responsibility of the French State in the Nazi crimes, the passage to the five-year period, the cry of alarm in front of the degradation of the environment ("our house burns"), and a first important victory on the road mortality.

- "Pain" -

In 2007, weakened by a stroke that struck him two years earlier, he must see Nicolas Sarkozy triumph, for which he is far from showing the unwavering fervor of his wife Bernadette.

"Loss of memory", "absences", deafness: Jacques Chirac will then appear more and more rarely in public.

Former prime minister Édouard Balladur, who lived a ruthless rivalry with his former friend at the turn of the 1990s, said "his emotion" of his disappearance "after so many years of suffering".

Jacques Chirac's last public release dates back to November 2014, at the Musée du Quai-Branly devoted to the primitive arts and which bears his name. The former president, weakened but smiling, was at the side of his successor François Hollande, with whom he had the Correze share.

Particularly popular since he left power, Jacques Chirac had suffered bitter failures, as when he was brutally beaten by François Mitterrand in the 1988 presidential election.

Nine years later, in 1997, the dissolution that was to consolidate his majority in the Assembly had led to a humiliating defeat of the right, installing five years of cohabitation with the left of Lionel Jospin.

He had two daughters, Laurence, anorexic since his youth and passed away in April 2016, and Claude, who was his communications advisor and gave him his only grandson, Martin, now 23 years old.

© 2019 AFP