Paris (AFP)

The youngest president of the Fifth Republic when he was elected in 1974, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who died Wednesday at the age of 94, wanted to be the embodiment of a triumphant modernity, resulting from the liberal and democratic center-right. -Christian who built post-war Europe.

Born on February 2, 1926, enlisted at the age of 18 in 1944 in the 1st army of General de Lattre de Tassigny, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing said he admired two men, General de Gaulle and Jean Monnet, father of Europe.

He was only 48 years old when he was elected president in 1974, beating François Mitterrand on the wire, and thus became, in a France which buried the Thirty-Glorious Years and digested May-68, the first non-Gaullist to s' seize the Élysée.

His election blows a wind of freedom on the country, after the years of De Gaulle and Pompidou.

To progressive reforms - lowering of the majority to 18, decriminalization of abortion - the new president adds a new style, appearing on the ski or on a football field, summoning his daughter to his campaign posters and his wife Anne-Aymone in televised New Year greetings.

The man with the slender figure and the bald head gives up the presidential pageantry for his official photograph, has the blue and red of the tricolor lightened and the rhythm of the Marseillaise slows down.

The Auvergnat who plays the accordion on television also invites himself to the French for dinner, opens the Elysee Palace to Malian garbage collectors for a Christmas breakfast, renewing a political communication that is still very padlocked.

The very official ORTF was abolished a few months after coming to power.

Giscard d'Estaing is however a pure product of the French elite: polytechnician and enarque, he distinguished himself under the orders of Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny during the Liberation, then for eight months in Germany and Austria until the surrender of the Reich.

Born in Koblenz, in Germany then occupied by the French forces, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing comes from a large bourgeois family.

- "Never imagined defeat" -

Entering the government in 1959, VGE multiplied the ministerial posts in the Economy and Finance in the 60s and 70s. The mayor of Chamalières eclipsed Jacques Chaban-Delmas, to impose himself as leader of the right until his victory in 1974.

After a promising start, VGE experienced a first crisis with the resignation of its Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, in 1976. Initiator of the "G7", the club of the leaders of the richest countries, he gave a decisive boost to the Franco axis -German alongside Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

The economic slowdown following the oil shock, business - the suspect suicide of his minister Robert Boulin, diamonds offered by Central African President Bokassa - as well as a shift in his policy, more conservative and economically austere, weigh on his popularity.

On May 10, 1981, he failed to be re-elected against François Mitterrand, who received more than a million votes more than him.

"I had never imagined defeat," he later confided.

After his departure remained in the memories - he left an empty chair during a final televised address - Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, then the only ex-president alive, was going through a deep depression.

"What I feel is not humiliation, but something more severe: the frustration of the unfinished work", he wrote in 2006 in "The power and the life" (Company 12).

- French Academy -

Elected general councilor in 1982 in his stronghold of Chamalières, in Puy-de-Dôme, then deputy in 1984, some believe he intends to lead the first cohabitation government in 1986 - Jacques Chirac is preferred to him.

Despite everything, he again became one of the leaders of the right by again leading his party, the UDF.

But, certain of the re-election of François Mitterrand, he does not compete in the presidential election of 1988. Seven years later, credited with 2% in opinion studies, he gives up again.

Shortly before his death, however, he said he was convinced that, if he had come forward, he would have won against Balladur and Chirac.

From the second half of the 90s, Giscard and Giscardism gradually disappeared from the political landscape.

The former president of France, a convinced European, nevertheless pursues an ultimate goal: to become president of Europe.

In 2001, he headed the Convention for Europe, responsible for drafting a European constitution, which was rejected by referendum (55% of no).

This brilliant economist, author of several books including a novel in which he imagines a relationship with Lady Di, was elected in 2003 to the French Academy, in the chair of former Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor.

Last May, he was investigated for sexual assault after a complaint from a German journalist who accused him of touching his buttocks in an interview more than a year earlier.

Hospitalized several times in recent months, especially for "heart failure", he died Wednesday evening, surrounded by his family, at his property in Authon in Loir-et-Cher.

© 2020 AFP