Valéry Giscard d’Estaing had reserved for Alsace the celebration of his first birthday at the Elysée. He owed that to the region which was one of those which had voted the most in his favor. He had invited himself to the inhabitants of Ringeldorf, in the Bas-Rhin. Lorraine had also supported him well, which perhaps explains why he chose the Inspired Hill dear to Barrès to celebrate the 6e anniversary of his mandate, highly symbolic one year from the end of his term.
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In the Saintois
Even though the evening had been disrupted by a mysterious power cut, memories in the Saintois are still scent of the meal shared by the president from Moscow – where he had the feeling of having been listened to by Brezhnev – with the inhabitants of Vaudémont and Saxon-Sion around a guinea fowl with morels and the famous gris de Toul. Fair reward: in the first village, 44 voters voted for Giscard, 7 Mitterrand, in the second 50 voted for Giscard, 12 for Mitterrand.
Should we deduce from this that Giscard liked to sit down at table with locals, he who gladly invited himself to live with locals? When he had surrendered on 1is March 1975 in Voisins-le-Bretonneux, near Versailles, to share the menu of a truck driver, at Jacques Darmagny’s, he did not come across Parisians who actually embodied three generations of Lorraine. Including the mother of the hostess, who had retired for retirement with her husband in Neuville-lès-Vaucouleurs. And when the president received a visit from a family of steelworkers at the Elysée in 1979, it was of course a family from Lorraine, the Poésys, from Richemont, including Astrid, now deputy mayor of Richemont. Giscard and Lorraine is therefore a long history of families. With its good times, its not so good, its celebrated victories, its stifled bickering (but not always).
Before Giscard president, there had already been Giscard Minister (of Finance) as a one-day visitor to Lorraine. To inaugurate the international fair of Metz in 1962. But it is above all as head of state that he combs the Lorraine lands from north to south and from east to west. On March 28, 1976, he inaugurated the Maurice-Lemaire tunnel (Vosges-Alsace link).
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Lorraine-Burgundy motorway
He will be back in the fall. Under a low sky and a fine rain, report our colleagues, he consented to a walkabout at Place Stanislas on November 25, 1976. This will only be one of the stages of a two-day trip with a very busy program, which will lead him to deliver two speeches, in Nancy and Metz, to be inaugurated, in the presence in particular of his very ephemeral Minister of Reforms, JJSS, then president of the regional council, the A 4 motorway on the Verdun-Saint-Nicolas area . Giscard is not stingy with promises when it comes to major equipment. “1000 km of highways in the East by 1981”. Including the Lorraine Bourgogne motorway. It will take a little longer: Toul-Til-Chatel will open in 84-85, Til-Chatel-Dijon in 89.
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The Lunéville-Thionville metropolis
In Metz, he pledged his aid to the steel industry, rehabilitated the coal, promises the opening up of Longwy. In Nancy, he believes that the State must cede skills and resources to communities. He evokes the role of the regional metropolis of balance which, in his mind, goes from Lunéville to Thionville.
Then in 1981, Giscard chose Lorraine as the place to launch his campaign in the provinces. It held two meetings on April 30, in Metz (5,000 people) and Nancy (7,000). Where he calls for an enlarged majority, says he is ready to help regions facing border competition. “Lorraine is not a region in decline”. He will return there between the two rounds, on May 8, to deliver a speech in Verdun where he had already come for the 60e anniversary. : “It is first of all the veteran who speaks to you, that of May 8, 1945”, he specifies. He will add: “I tell you that if my opponent wins next Sunday, it will be the end of the Ve Republic “.
But it is the veteran of politics, still a little in the race, who will return in 1992, to Nancy, to decide between Gérard Longuet and André Rossinot in the race for the regional nomination. Giscard will choose the first.
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Giscard and Poncelet
Two years later, at the end of September 1994, the president of… the UDF took part in his party’s parliamentary days in Vittel. Things are pitching to the right: justice is interested in Gérard Longuet, Minister of Industry, one of the pillars of the Balladur government. Which will officially support him when he comes to the Vosges … already thinking about the presidential election. And already, the Giscardien deputy of the stage, Jean-Pierre Thomas, is the spokesperson for the UDF to demand a reduction in the public deficit and employers’ charges.
VGE, him, makes in the political mechanism, and proposes, at the conclusion of the days, “a permanent pact of partnership and parity” with the RPR. “The union is contagious”, promises Christian Poncelet, who died in mid-September.
Retired on his Aventin, Giscard will invest himself as a tireless advocate for Europe. With a particular thought for the East perhaps: Did he not declare in November 1976 that “The East must become an exemplary facade of Europe”?
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