Jacques Chirac was a neighbour in Paris. He remains an occasional one in the Var for the last weeks of his present job,
since it has the perk of a holiday home down the road.
Though we choose not to live in each other's pockets, we have met twice
- perhaps leaving the bigger impact on my memory - and I have observed
him often enough to know I am not, at such times, in the presence of a
monster.
My wife, in common with many French women, likes him. Her mother adored
him and, I imagine, would have continued to do so had she not died
before he became president. But if you are British, and especially if you are English, Jacques Chirac is - or is meant to be - a hate figure.
This is expressed in more ways than the one chosen by a former editor of the Sun whose contribution to the entente cordiale
was to dispatch a posse of Page 3 girls to the Champs Elysées, armed
with a limited-issue edition of that day's paper, with Chirac depicted
on the front as a worm. Forget for a moment the inconvenient detail
that, in Paris, to be likened to a worm will cause more bemusement than
anything else (as my consoeur Agnès Poirier has pointed out in one of her books, Les Nouveaux Anglais, the term doesn't exist as an insult in French).
The gesture still reflected a view of the French president held pretty widely on the Sun's side of the Channel and the vulgar gimmickry of the tabloids has its equivalent in higher-minded journalistic circles.
Someone at that Other Place once inserted a word I had not used so that a piece
written in the run-up to France's referendum on the EU constitution in
2005 declared that recent polls had confirmed the president's "worst
fears that the electorate may use the referendum to register its
disgust with him, his government and its lot in life". I was cross at
the time, not just because a colleague wishing to change copy in such a
significant way should at least have the courtesy to mention his or her
intentions in advance, but because the change introduced a word I
considered far too harsh to describe the true nature of France's
relationship with Chirac. My own phrase had been "broader disapproval"
and I might, on reflection, have chosen something stronger.
But disgust, while undoubtedly felt by an essentially partisan portion
if the French electorate, was surely over the top and, in the specific
case, much more accurately a reflection of what a middle-class
Englishman of a certain political disposition believed. Someone
responding to one of my articles for the Guardian's Comment is Free
web pages mocked Chirac's theory that it was more important to get on
with governing France than satisfy media and political demands to end
the guessing about his own future.
A lot of French people I speak to would agree with that (French, I
assume) person's criticism of his record in office, yet it is also
commonplace to hear words of genuine admiration for the way he
represents their country on the international stage. But leave to one
side his stand on Iraq and Chirac departs from the presidency having
failed to make much impact on any of the important issues facing
France. That puts into perpective all the attempts he has made during
the dying months of his mandate to improve history's judgment on the
Elysée years of his long career.
One former confidant, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, wrote in a scathing book
last year that Chirac's career, which once promised a great deal, had
ended up as "a personal tragedy that has become, in the end, a national
tragedy". This morning, more than one French commentator assessing last
night's broadcast from the Elysée observed that here was a politician
who was invariably stronger on analysis than on delivery, on words not
actions. Perhaps in the end, Chirac's failure was that no one was ever
quite sure what he stood for, or whether what he stood for now was the
same as what he stood for a little earlier.
He proved changeable on Europe and America, on the need to drive home
reform in France; he opposed war in Iraq and loved to present himself
as utterly committed to peace but was pig-headedly determined, as one
of the first big decisions of
his presidency, to try out his own nuclear weapons in the Pacific. He
could be both a charmer, as I certainly found, and a bully (as Blair
did).
If being detested by the American or English Right (or, for sure, the
far Right of Le Pen) doesn't make him a bad person, Le Figaro
could not help noting that he wasn't, at heart, a creature of the
French Right either.
Much attention has been paid to his refusal to endorse Nicolas Sarkozy
in the broadcast (he may, of course, do so later with whatever
enthusiasm).
But I was left rather more intrigued by his reference to moving on from
the presidency to serve France and the French in some other way. What
can he possibly have in mind?
Labels: Agnès Poirier, Champs Elysées, Elysée, France, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, nuclear, Pacific, Paris, president, Sun, Var
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