The man appeared me intelligence and exceptional stature

The theorist of the rare floor tells the long course is an event in itself. He says their four truths to their rivals always is a second. Because it is first this pen rasping against Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to Edouard Balladur who strikes in the first volume of his memoirs - from birth to the victory of 1995 - that Jacques Chirac publishes this week (1). After two and a half years of mezmerize, former President of the Republic book a severe portrait of his two political rivals. Allowing it to passage was exempt from charges of treason (for the first in 1988) and naive (to the second to be candidate against him in the presidential election of 1995). The hostility of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in his regard is his immediate: 1969, VGE, Minister of finance, taught him that Georges Pompidou wished that remains Secretary of State for the Budget. "Implication:"this is not me who wanted it"", decodes to readily Jacques Chirac. The portrait he lists then will never disown: it was already quite impressive and indeed was all that was needed to support this image." The man appeared me intelligence and exceptional stature. "But with a manifest tendency to consider that others have few", he wrote.

In the Budget as at Matignon, Jacques Chirac is depicted as a man humiliated (to the famous episode of Brégançon dinner with Professor of tennis) by a Giscard obsession of control, although that itself under the influence of his advisors. What in any case justify the "failure" of August 1976, including Jacques Chirac gum all political ulterior. Just as he denies having worked for the election of Mitterrand in 1981, as Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in knocking. "The evening of May 10, 1981, each will be able to verify, figures in hand, President (VGE) did the voice of right full and even won 300,000 additional voices."

"Humanist" left

Edouard Balladur, the scenario is different, since Jacques Chirac begins his chapter with these words: "I had confidence in Edouard Balladur."He repeats the theme of the friend of thirty years which broke the moral Pact that they had found together: Matignon to Edouard Balladur, the Elysee Palace for Jacques Chirac. And for cause, "skeptical by nature and liberal by conviction, Edouard Balladur is a cool calculator, which is uncomfortable to the runaways and the lashes to shine, as to any form of open conflict," describes. He - with Charles Pasqua - one of the artisans of his secret meeting with Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 1988 campaign.

These shots of claw cannot to much to summarize the book of Jacques Chirac, who is portrayed instead as a man of loyalties and admiration for the beautiful figures throughout his political life, Georges Pompidou in mind - "a model"-, but also the General de Gaulle, François Mitterrand "more fine and subtle than me had described", Pierre July and Marie-France Garaud... Long indifferent to the political thing, it is his career to these meetings which convinced him to devote his life to the service of the French. Beliefs, they were rather those of a "humanist" of left, provides, preferring to ignore the Liberal enthusiasm for the period 1986-1988. If it refuses to accede to the SFIO as he proposes Michel Rocard at Sciences po, it is because it is "not enough left"!As a whole, it is necessarily partial history - not a word about business-, and reading better for his career, but a highly sympathetic character, in phase with the image of the grandfather of the nation which well out in front of the polls, adventurer in the soul (he is dreaming "master course"), special child (if his father was authoritarian, his mother deprived him of his lollipops paper for not that to fatigue)deeply attached to rural, open to all cultures (he thinks to convert to Hinduism at sixteen), schoolboy and happy, but also moving when it comes to describe the illness of his eldest daughter and the unwavering support of his wife Bernadette. A simple man: is the self-portrait that draws Jacques Chirac at the time, where the calendar coincidence, the judges come to decide that it was now one party like the others.