Giscard d’Estaing and the monopoly of the heart

There are politicians who act as if they were the exclusive recipients of citizen affection. A mixture of dream and illusion. Unattainable star lighting from which they believe the only beneficiaries. To later verify that such an aspiration is usually equivocal, like all pretentious audacity in matters of the heart.

In the debate leading up to the second round of the 1974 French presidential elections, François Mitterrand, a socialist candidate, said that the fair distribution of wealth was almost a matter of intelligence and also a matter of the heart. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing replied that he found it shocking that someone claimed the monopoly of the heart. And then he released the famous phrase: “you do not have a monopoly on the heart.”

Giscard d’Estaing came from being minister of economic affairs under the presidencies of Charles de Gaulle, when he returned to power to save France not from foreign aggression but from the confusions that seemed to lead to its own devastation, and from Georges Pompidou, who had just died in power. He had taken the full course of the aspirants to govern within the republican tradition, with a high government school training and experience in the exercise of positions of high responsibility. In addition to the natural mood of a seducer.

The “May 68” revolt and the intellectual turmoil of progressive thinkers had made demands on new ways of living life and understanding society. New content had to be given to the Fifth Republic, tailor-made for General de Gaulle. Although there were times of economic growth, there was a longing for renewal in traditional aspects of French life, and the results of a first round presented two ways to achieve it: that of the socialists, who claimed the postulates of a leading state in development. , and that of Giscard d’Estaing, the center-right technocrat, who at 48 years of age claimed to represent the future and champion modernization.

Elected president, Giscard d’Estaing proved to be both young and transformative; far from that kind of youthful-looking presidents who, to the frustration of their peoples, rule in the manner of dictators of other times and end up renewing the tricks of the past. When he passed away last week, at 94 years old, four decades after his departure from power, the general recognition echoes, even from the socialist camp, towards a head of state who marked with clairvoyance and historical sense the rhythm of France for face internal and external challenges that would allow it to enter the 21st century with solvency.

The list of achievements of this technocrat of aristocratic origin and style begins with the promotion of women, whom he brought out of the lethargy of a traditional society by assigning them high responsibilities in government and opening new spaces for them in society. With the support of a Secretariat for the Status of Women, led by Françoise Giroud, the legendary minister Simone Veil, a survivor of the holocaust, obtained the approval of mass access to contraception with the support of public funds, the decriminalization of abortion, divorce for mutual agreement, the recognition of rape as a crime, and the possibility for women to open their own bank accounts and sign employment contracts without the need for the permission of their spouse.

With the coming of age from the age of 18 the perspective of action of the youth changed. With the option that members of the National Assembly could go to the Constitutional Council to dispute the constitutionality of certain laws, it broadened the spectrum of the exercise of political representation. With the reform of audiovisual systems, it expanded the spaces for freedom of information. With the adoption of teaching schemes of common and universal content, it laid the foundations for a basic education that would serve as the foundation for access to vocational training under equal conditions.

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was one of the builders who, at crucial moments, laid the foundations for the new Europe. His interest in building Franco-German friendship, and in advancing towards a community institutionality began with his presidency and lasted throughout his life, to the point of having been much later the protagonist of the lost cause of the adoption of a European constitution. He also always declared his love for Africa, “for its charms, its mysteries and its intrigues”, and precisely one of the latter contributed to his fall from power, in the midst of the monumental entanglement of having received the gift of a batch of diamonds from by Jean Bédel Bokassa, “emperor” of the former French Congo, who supposedly the president put up for sale to donate the fruits of the business to charities that failed to certify the veracity of the excuse.

More than in the case of most presidents, their political defeat began to be outlined from the day of their inauguration, which coincided with the international oil crisis of that time and marked a declining destiny of the economy that, paradoxically, led to his specialty in the matter did not serve him much as an argument to sustain himself in power. To this would be added a personal style of distant appearance, which evoked the antipathy of the old nobility, and the calculated withdrawal of the support of former political partners such as Jacques Chirac, who in an encrypted way supported the candidate in the next election, but not the project. , of the opposition.

In a new debate, Mitterrand allowed himself the luxury of masterfully taking advantage of the discontent with the “Giscard style” and in the 1981 elections he removed him from power at the impulse of the social democratic fervor of the beginning of the decade that was beginning and that so many illusions of equality achieved. to sow among the enthusiastic followers of that cause and citizens of libertarian spirit that led the defeated president to become a discreet, elegant former president, and dedicated to occupying his position in the Constitutional Council and in the French Academy, without allowing himself to be invaded by the virus of unhealthy anxiety in return, the high-sounding claims arising from the widowhood of power and much less from the hindrance of the work of his successors.

Looking at the complete accounts of the life of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, everything seems to indicate that his aversion to the monopoly of the heart was reduced to the realm of politics. Her own daughter has acknowledged that her father never ceased to be a seducer and that her mother, Anne Aymone Sauvage de Brantes, daughter of nobles and at the same time discreet and efficient first lady, patiently endured the unwritten rules of a marriage that she kept open for long years the chapter of infidelity. Labyrinth of ghosts, fantasies and conjectures in the case of the characters of power.

Curiously, the former president himself came to add fuel to the fire by publishing, in his old age, a book under the title “The Princess and the President”, which narrates the alleged romance of a British princess and a French president. Argument that gave rise to speculation about a possible romance of Giscard d’Estaing himself with the most beloved of the British princesses of the last decades. Romance that he himself denied, without explaining the deep reasons that led him to publish a novel with such a plot, irrefutable proof that no one has, after all, and in no field, a monopoly of the heart.

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