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My Life in Politics
By Jacques Chirac, Jean-Luc Barre, Catherine Spencer St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2011 NiL Editions
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-137-08803-1
CHAPTER 1
BEGINNINGS
For many years I have kept with me a document depicting the main stages of the evolution of life, the earth, and the universe. This chronological table has accompanied me in both my personal and my political life, at the Élysée Palace or during my trips abroad. I would often get it out of my briefcase and study it in meetings that dragged on or got lost in futile discussion.
Reading this document gave me a comforting sense of the relativity of things and the detachment needed to understand people and events. It is still today one of my most valuable references in appreciating the importance of the issues our planet faces and in interpreting the psychologies of peoples and their leaders in light of the traditions and ways of life, being, and thinking that have fashioned them.
If I reflect on the reasons for my involvement in over forty years of public life, I inevitably come back to the conclusion that for me everything is linked to that passion for the human being, for everything that makes each person unique and the distinct quality — irreplaceable, in my view — of each race and each nation. Nothing, in fact, really predestined me for a career in politics. Surprising as it may seem, I did not grow up with an overriding obsession to one day attain the highest office in the land. For a long time, I had other aspirations and dreams, even if they still tended, one way or another, toward service of my country. After envisaging a career in the army at the time of the war in Algeria, for which I volunteered to fight, my sole ambition on graduating from the École Nationale d'Administration was to become head of the civil aviation authority or governor of the Bank of France, as my father hoped. It was only by chance, and virtually under orders, that I entered politics in 1967 at the age of thirty-five.
Appointed to Georges Pompidou's staff in December 1962, I was summoned by the prime minister one day in May or June 1966. "Chirac," he said, "you will run in Paris in the general election. That is how you will be of most use to me." Caught off guard, I replied that I did not think it was my vocation — having other ambitions, as he knew — but that, nonetheless, I would obey. However, I insisted on standing not in Paris as he asked but in Corrèze, a region in central France that was home to my ancestors and with which I felt more familiar. "Out of the question," Pompidou retorted. "The region is divided into three constituencies. The first is taken, the second is unwinnable at the moment, and the third is one of the hardest in France for us. Since the creation of the republic, the constituency of Ussel has never been out of the left's hands. And then there's the traveling — the roads are appalling. You'll wear yourself out and, when I need you, you will be no use for anything. Given all that," he insisted, "better to run in Paris." In the end, however — and not without difficulty — I won the battle. So that was how I was unwittingly born, if I can put it like that, into political life, at the heart of upper Corrèze, on the plateau of Mille-Sources, where human warmth makes up for the harshness of the climate. I was quickly fired up by the challenge.
Much more than a question of parties or ideologies, politics was from the first a question of people, personalities, and sensitivities for me. Instinctively and temperamentally drawn to other people, it was in this domain that I naturally found my true voice. Although the product of a family that fiercely defended secularism and authentically radical values — my four grandparents were all schoolteachers — I did not receive what might be called a political education from my father or mother. Neither of them had ever demonstrated any beliefs liable to influence me and even less to prepare me to become, one day, the member of Parliament for Corrèze. Were they rather more inclined to the left than to the right or vice versa? I never succeeded in finding out. Both of them, genuinely generous people, taught me the importance of sharing and of service to others, particularly the most deprived.
The only member of my family to have gone into politics was my paternal grandfather, Louis Chirac. I was barely five when he died in May 1937, but I still remember him quite clearly. He was an imposing character, in stature as well as character, being well over six feet tall. With his magnificent head of hair and his majestic voice, he terrified me as a child with an authority that none of his nearest and dearest dared challenge. In his presence, everyone knuckled under. He had only to enter a room and I would immediately flee or hide myself under a table. A teacher as much appreciated by his students as by his superiors, Louis Chirac ended his career as a principal of a school that is still called the Chirac school, so anchored was my grandfather in people's memories. I knew several of his previous pupils, whom he used to hit on the fingers with his ruler.
Well known as a Freemason, Louis Chirac became the venerable host of the local lodge. He was fervently anticlerical. An active member of the radical Socialist Party of Brive, Louis Chirac was involved in all the political battles between the two wars. In 1936, already president of the Popular University, vice president of the association of secular schools, and secretary of the local section of Pupils of the Nation, he took part in the convention of the French Union for Female Suffrage. A photograph that appeared in the newspapers shows Louis Chirac in the middle of a group of feminists under a banner proclaiming "Frenchwomen want the vote!" I was happy and proud of the role my grandfather played in the antifascist rallies held in Brive during the summer of 1936 to support Spanish republicans in the terrible civil war that pitted them against Franco's troops.
Although not as politically involved, my maternal grandfather, Jean Valette — who had been educated by the Jesuits — had, along with his wife, the same republican streak as well as the same principles of a rigorous, secular, and progressive radicalism. This humanistic spirit, which each of my ancestors had defended and enshrined in his or her own way, was an integral part of a family heritage with which I had always identified. It was not by chance that I became a fierce defender of secularism, convinced that a society should give its members the greatest freedom of conscience and conviction and that it was unacceptable to impose religious direction on anyone — although this commitment to secular society has never prevented me from being a believer or having a deep interest in spiritual matters and the history of all religions. My mother, a devout Catholic, took care of my Christian education. I was a choirboy before having briefly entered the scouts, where I was nicknamed — I don't know why — "selfish bison."
I was born in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris on November 29, 1932. My father had settled there a decade earlier, leaving Corrèze to pursue his career in banking. He was at that time head of the National Bank for Business and Industry, a prestigious post that allowed him to forge close links with the aeronautical world. Like most men of his generation, my father had been deeply affected, emotionally as much as physically, by his experience of the Great War. Called up in 1917 at the age of nineteen, he was wounded in the chest by shell fire in May 1918 and left for dead. He had a three-month convalescence before returning to the front in August. The day after the armistice, he volunteered to fight in Poland against the Red Army, where he earned a citation for courage and dedication to duty as part of the First Polish Tank Regiment.
My father returned to France in June 1920, worn out by his ordeal on the Russian front. He told me about his war experiences when I asked him, but without dwelling on them and trying not to betray his emotions. He obviously found it distasteful to return to a past that had wounded him on every level. My father had great natural authority. He was sure of himself, demanding, cold, and determined. I loved him very much, but our relationship conformed to the traditional father-son hierarchy, and it was my place to obey him. At the time, such a relationship was a matter of course. My parents were married in February 1921, and their young married life was immediately struck by a drama that traumatized them both: Their first child, a little girl, Jacqueline, was carried off by pneumonia barely two years after her birth. The tragedy probably explains why they waited nearly ten years before having another child.
My mother, born Marie-Louise Valette, was a woman of character, gifted and with a sharp sense of repartee and a frankness that could be disconcerting. Energetic, tenacious, and warm, she was attentive to others and extremely kind. She was also a wonderful housekeeper, reputed for her talents in the kitchen, and her priority was looking after my father and me, her only son, whom she showered with attention and went to extremes to protect. She catered to my every whim and satisfied the slightest of my desires. I adored my mother as much as she adored me. If my childhood was imbued with an atmosphere of certain authority, it was also extremely happy and fulfilling, despite the threat of a war of which I was only dimly conscious.
In the summer, I spent much of the holidays in Sainte-Féréole, the region of my ancestors, which soon became for me a symbol of freedom and exploration. I felt in every way more Corrézian than Parisian, attached to the people I encountered in Sainte-Féréole by ties that were more binding and authentic. In June 1940, when a military defeat unprecedented in our national history plunged France, in the space of a few days, into chaos and poverty, my mother decided to take refuge in Sainte-Féréole. An old family friend, Georges Basset, hurriedly came to pick us up from Paris. We threw a few suitcases into his Renault Vivaquatre and departed for the South like the thousands who were fleeing the capital in the midst of hopeless disorder. On the Parmain Bridge, our car was held up in a traffic jam. It was there that I witnessed a scene that I would never forget.
Georges Basset, a deeply patriotic veteran of the Great War, stopped an officer who was walking along the side of the road: "Captain, what is going on? What are you doing?" "I'm getting out of here. The Germans are just fifty kilometers away." "You mean you are not fighting?" replied an astonished Basset. I can still hear the officer's response: "You must realize, sir — they are shooting at us!" Such was, unfortunately, the mentality of some of my compatriots at that time.
At the time of the exodus, my father was in Canada, where he was on business for Henry Potez, who had recruited him in 1937 as managing director of his company. Potez and his friend Marcel Bloch had revolutionized the aeronautical industry with their development of the Éclair propeller during the war in 1914. Thus it was that during my childhood I always heard about aviation and secretly dreamed of one day making my career in it.
Potez had decided to transfer the headquarters of his company to Rayol, where we lived in a lovely house near Potez's property, where my father and he continued to work. In fact, they no longer had much to do, other than play bridge and discuss the news. Hostile to the collaboration, my father nonetheless had a certain respect for Marshal Pétain, like many men of his generation, united in veneration of the conqueror of Verdun. But over time he began to talk about Pétain with growing regret and a sort of despair while becoming more and more openly Gaullist. He would remain so until his death in 1968.
Every morning I went to the local school in Rayol, an hour's walk from our house. My best friend was Darius Zunino, the son of an Italian immigrant who worked as a farmhand. His family was Communist. Darius had the reputation of being a little hooligan, which I did not exactly object to. Together, we naturally got up to all sorts of mischief. After school, I spent almost all my time wandering about with Darius on the neighboring hills, running in the ravines, hunting birds and fishing, usually barefoot — to such an extent that I found it very difficult to get used to wearing shoes again when we went back to Paris. I have kept an enchanted memory of that period of my life, despite the arrival of the Germans in 1942.
After they invaded the free zone and came to the coast, we started seeing them everywhere, in the vineyards or on the beach roads. They communicated between themselves with field telephones. Kilometers of black wire, which they did not bury, ran through the fields. Darius and I had fun cutting these wires, little realizing the risks we were taking. We were not, of course, engaging in an act of resistance but merely procuring black wire, which had many uses for boys of our age.
On November 27, 1942, while I was walking in the hills of Rayol, I suddenly heard a huge explosion and saw the sky become a giant fireball before filling with smoke. I had just unknowingly witnessed my first historic event: the scuttling of the French fleet anchored in Toulon. When I got home, my father told me what had happened. He was very angry at the notion that France, or rather Vichy, had decided to destroy one of its last military assets. I too was instinctively shocked, feeling that something ignoble had just happened that should have been prevented. In a way, the Toulon crisis contributed to my political awakening.
Two years later, during the night of August 14–15, 1944, the first Allied commandos landed not far from our new residence. That was my other rendezvous with history in the making. Deceived by an abnormally calm sea, Captain Ducourneau's men came ashore not at the arranged place near Potez's beach but near the sheer cliffs of Cap Nègre, which they had to climb under fire from German batteries. Then, in the light of morning, we saw soldiers who spoke our language emerging from the water. Among them was an already legendary character, General Diego Brosset, head of the Free France First Division and one of the first soldiers to rally to General de Gaulle.
My parents put General Brosset up in their house the night following the landing. Awestruck, when I saw his two stars I called him Lieutenant, as I had been taught that lieutenants always had two stripes. The mistake tickled him. Afterward, he wrote me several letters that were always humorously signed "Lieutenant." Several months later, I learned that he had died when his car had fallen into a ravine. Stricken, I decided to pay him homage by christening the dirt road linking the coast to the main road in Rayol General Brosset Avenue, fashioning a simple sign myself. Thirty years later, when I was prime minister, the sign was still there. When the mayor of Rayol learned that I had made it, he asked me to come and install a more official plaque in honor of the hero of my adolescence. Which I duly did, in the presence General Brosset's two children.
Because of the war, it was a very particular childhood. It made me into a somewhat rebellious and provocative boy who was quick not to rise up against the established order but to follow his own inspiration, impulses, and curiosity. Those five years spent on the coast left me with an impression of freedom, a feeling of a kind of wild carefreeness and of being on a permanent summer holiday that did not incline me toward returning to the fold at an age when one should start taking studies seriously.
In 1945, I was enrolled in the Lycée Hoche in St. Cloud, where my parents had temporarily settled on their return to Paris. My stay there was brief, as I was expelled several months later for throwing balls of paper at my geography teacher. Despite my mother's insistence that I wear shoes, I could no longer bear them and walked barefoot whenever I could. Rather than argue about it, I would keep them on until I got outside the house.
The next year we left St. Cloud to live in the Eighth Arrondissement of Paris, where my father had succeeded, not without difficulty, in finding an apartment. I started attending the Lycée Carnot, where I made myself work just enough not to have to repeat the year again and risk spoiling my summer holidays by having to prepare for a re-entrance exam. Having nothing to do during the three months of the summer was my sole objective. I was often sent out of the classroom for unruliness and even decided, some days, to skip school altogether, preferring to stay in my room or wander the streets.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from My Life in Politics by Jacques Chirac, Jean-Luc Barre, Catherine Spencer. Copyright © 2011 NiL Editions. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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