Valéry Giscard d'Estaing

His ancestress was Lucie Madeleine d'Estaing, Dame de Réquistat (1769–1844), who in turn was descendant of Joachim I d'Estaing, sieur de Réquistat (1610–1685), illegitimate son of Charles d'Estaing (1585–1661), sieur de Cheylade, Knight of Saint John of Jerusalem, son of Jean III d'Estaing, seigneur de Val (1540–1621) and his wife, Gilberte de La Rochefoucauld (1560–1623).

Giscard studied at the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, the École Gerson and the Lycées Janson-de-Sailly and Louis-le-Grand in Paris.

He joined the French Resistance and participated in the Liberation of Paris; during the liberation, he was assigned to protecting Alexandre Parodi.

He then joined the French First Army and served until the end of the war.

He was later awarded the Croix de guerre for his military service.

Valéry René Marie Georges Giscard d'Estaing (, , ; 2 February 19262 December 2020), also known as Giscard or VGE, was a French politician who served as President of France from 1974 to 1981.

Valéry René Marie Georges Giscard d'Estaing was born on 2 February 1926 in Koblenz, Germany, during the French occupation of the Rhineland.

He was the elder son of Jean Edmond Lucien Giscard d'Estaing, a high-ranking civil servant, and his wife, Marthe Clémence Jacqueline Marie (May) Bardoux.

His mother was the daughter of senator and academic Achille Octave Marie Jacques Bardoux, and a granddaughter of minister of state education Agénor Bardoux.

Giscard had an elder sister, Sylvie, and younger siblings Olivier, Isabelle, and Marie-Laure.

Despite the addition of "d'Estaing" to the family name by his grandfather, Giscard was not a male-line descendant of the extinct aristocratic family of Vice-Admiral d'Estaing.

His connection to the D'Estaing family was very remote.

In 1948, he spent a year in Montreal, Canada, where he worked as a teacher at Collège Stanislas.

He graduated from the École Polytechnique and the École nationale d'administration (1949–1951) and chose to enter the prestigious Inspection des finances.

He was admitted to the Tax and Revenue Service, then joined the staff of Prime Minister Edgar Faure (1955–1956).

He was fluent in German.

In 1956, he was elected to the National Assembly as a deputy for the Puy-de-Dôme département, in the domain of his maternal family.

He joined the National Centre of Independents and Peasants (CNIP), a conservative grouping.

After the proclamation of the Fifth Republic, the CNIP leader Antoine Pinay became Minister of Economy and Finance and chose him as Secretary of State for Finances from 1959 to 1962.

In 1962, while Giscard had been nominated Minister of Economy and Finance, his party broke with the Gaullists and left the majority coalition.

Giscard refused to resign and founded the Independent Republicans (RI), which became the junior partner of the Gaullists in the "presidential majority".

It was during his time at the Ministry of the Economy that he coined the phrase "exorbitant privilege" to characterise the hegemony of the US dollar in international payments under the Bretton Woods system.

However, in 1966, he was dismissed from the cabinet.

He transformed the RI into a political party, the National Federation of the Independent Republicans (FNRI), and founded the Perspectives and Realities Clubs.

In this, he criticised the "solitary practice of the power" and summarised his position towards De Gaulle's policy by a "yes, but ...".

As chairman of the National Assembly Committee on Finances, he criticised his successor in the cabinet.

However, his popularity suffered from the economic downturn that followed the 1973 energy crisis, marking the end of the "Trente Glorieuses" (thirty "glorious" years of prosperity after 1945).

He imposed austerity budgets, and allowed unemployment to rise in order to avoid deficits.

Giscard d'Estaing in the centre faced political opposition from both sides of the spectrum: from the newly unified left under Mitterrand and a rising Jacques Chirac, who resurrected Gaullism on a right-wing opposition line.

After serving as Minister of Finance under prime ministers Jacques Chaban-Delmas and Pierre Messmer, Giscard d'Estaing won the presidential election of 1974 with 50.8% of the vote against François Mitterrand of the Socialist Party.

His tenure was marked by a more liberal attitude on social issues—such as divorce, contraception and abortion—and by attempts to modernise the country and the office of the presidency, notably overseeing such far-reaching infrastructure projects as the TGV and the turn towards reliance on nuclear power as France's main energy source.

Giscard d'Estaing launched the Grande Arche, Musée d'Orsay, Arab World Institute and Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie projects in the Paris region, later included in the Grands Projets of François Mitterrand.

He promoted liberalisation of trade.

In 1981, despite a high approval rating, he was defeated in a runoff against Mitterrand, with 48.2% of the vote.

As president, Giscard d'Estaing promoted cooperation among the European nations, especially in tandem with West Germany.

As a former president, he was a member of the Constitutional Council.

He also served as president of the Regional Council of Auvergne from 1986 to 2004.

Involved with the process of European integration, he notably presided over the Convention on the Future of Europe that drafted the ill-fated Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe.

In 2003, he was elected to the Académie Française, taking the seat that his friend and former president of Senegal Léopold Sédar Senghor had held.

He died at the age of 94, and is the longest-lived French president in history.