Jacques Chirac

Jacques Chirac, Who Led France Envisioning European Unity, Is Dead at 86

As president he opposed the Iraq war, sought a ‘United Europe of States’ and cultivated comity between the left and the right. But an embezzlement conviction damaged him.

Jacques Chirac, who molded the legacy of Charles de Gaulle into a personal power base that made him one of the dominant leaders of France across three decades and a vocal advocate of European unity, died on Thursday at his home in Paris. He was 86.

His death was confirmed by the Fondation Chirac in Paris.

Mr. Chirac was elected to two consecutive terms as president, beginning in 1995, having already been prime minister under centrist and Socialist presidents.

At his death he was most remembered for his defiant stand against the United States-led war in Iraq, his ability to preside over a state in which power was divided between the left and the right — comity that is hardly imaginable today — and his championing the European Union.

His vision, he argued in 2000, was “not for a United States of Europe, but for a United Europe of States.”

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Mr. Chirac had been a highly visible mayor of Paris for 18 years, using that office as a springboard into national politics. Only years later would his mayoralty emerge as the source of a damaged reputation: In 2011, he was convicted of embezzlement and misusing public funds to finance his political party while running the city.

Historically, French politicians have seldom been tarnished by financial peccadilloes, and that was the case with Mr. Chirac: He received a two-year suspended sentence, with his legacy largely intact. His presidency is generally recalled warmly in France, with many saying that he represented the nation well and in a manner that was “presidential.”

Pascal Perrineau, a professor of political science at the Paris School of International Affairs, a part of Sciences Po, said in an interview that there were three main reasons for Mr. Chirac’s popularity. One was that he was able “to implant the idea of a president who is an ordinary person: a president who goes jogging, a president who rides a Vespa.”

“Second, he was able to bridge the left-right divide,” Professor Perrineau added. And third, “he presided over France in a relatively good time.”

To his opponents, Mr. Chirac — a tall, energetic, loquacious but not quite eloquent man — was a political chameleon, able to adjust his policies according to his reading of what voters wanted (which did not make him much different from other French politicians of his day). But almost all agreed that he was basically a conservative, suspicious of the country’s powerful leftist labor unions and friendly to private enterprise.

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As president, Mr. Chirac drifted away from a Gaullist belief in French self-sufficiency. Rather, he pressed hard for a new federal Europe, with the European Union assuming more and more power and, over time, eroding the sovereignty of member states.

His goal was the same as that of all post-World War II French leaders, including Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand: to prevent another war by hugging Germany — fraternally and self-protectively — in a tight economic and political union.

Yet when it came time to vote on a new constitution for Europe, a step that would have cemented the union, he did not campaign for it convincingly, and it lost in France, presaging the difficulties that the European Union would face in later years.

Before taking control of the Gaullist party in 1976, Mr. Chirac dallied with the Communist and Socialist Parties. But as an energetic young bureaucrat, he became the favorite of President Georges Pompidou, who had been de Gaulle’s anointed successor in 1969. A year earlier, Mr. Chirac had approved of the government crackdown on the student riots and the occupation of the Sorbonne, although he had no official role in it.

As mayor of Paris, starting in 1977, he had a spotlighted stage from which to begin a national political career. With a huge staff and budget, he kept the city humming with festivals and exhibitions.

He boasted of an array of international acquaintances, describing Saddam Hussein and the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping as his friends. He often upstaged his own president or prime minister, welcoming prominent guests like Pope John Paul II, President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and giving lavish dinners at City Hall.

By the time he left the mayor’s office, in 1995, there was increasing evidence that corruption and political skulduggery had been widespread during his tenure. But despite his later conviction in court, there were no allegations while he was in office that he had enriched himself. There were suspicions, however, that he must have been aware of the corrupt schemes of his associates, particularly of Jean Tiberi, who succeeded him as mayor.

Mr. Chirac had a ferocious temper. At a French-British summit meeting in 1988, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sought a cut in French agricultural subsidies, her obstinacy prompted an obscene outburst from Mr. Chirac. Even French-speaking Britons in the room had to consult their dictionaries to determine just how gravely he had insulted her. The next day, the British tabloid The Sun demanded in a banner headline, “Say Sorry, Rude Frog!”

But it was an otherwise winning popular touch that endeared Mr. Chirac to the French. An article in the newspaper Libération, which was often critical of him, conceded, “Even those who do not like him can acknowledge that the president of the Republic is a warm, demonstrative man, quick to become involved in individual problems and to help those hit by trouble.”

Much of the work he did to help the handicapped, with foundations and facilities, went deliberately unpublicized. “He had this incredible capacity to be interested in other people,” Professor Perrineau said. “I saw him follow the dossier of people who were ill, and he never wanted them to know it.”

In 2000, Mr. Chirac wrote that “people more and more have the feeling that their governments are cut off from their daily lives.”

“That is why I travel as often as possible to all parts of France,” he added, “to listen to people about their worries, their hopes.”

Coddled on the Rue de Seine

Jacques René Chirac was born in the Latin Quarter of Paris on Nov. 29, 1932, a few years after his father, Abel, then a minor bank official, and his mother, Marie Louise Valette, had moved to the capital from a village in central France.

In Paris, as his father began to rise as a banker, Jacques, then an only child, was spoiled by his mother, whose first child had died in infancy eight years before Jacques’s birth. When he came home from school he would find a piece of candy she had left out for him, its wrapper already opened to save him the trouble. She would ask visitors to wear white shirts, believing they were less likely to carry germs into the house and imperil her son.

In their apartment on the fashionable Rue de Seine, his father, who thought Jacques was lazy at school, would force him to listen to readings from Marcel Pagnol, Charles Baudelaire and Victor Hugo. Jacques went on to an elite secondary school in St. Cloud, west of Paris.

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