Mitterrand's Formidable Opponents: Introducing Chirac and Barre
Oppenheimer, Franz M.
Franz Oppenheimer MITTERRAND'S FORMIDABLE OPPONENTS: INTRODUCING CHIRAC AND BARRE The coming French presidential election is one the U.S. cannot possibly lose. "Though by the force of...
...Gorbachev...
...Franz M Oppenheimer, a frequent contributor, is a Washington lawyer with professional interests in France...
...Johnson on Harvard Square for three days (after which he was promoted to the counter) and where he became briefly engaged to a Radcliffe girl from South Carolina...
...For Chirac spending his weekends on long drives to and in his constituency, stopping in numberless bistros and city halls, talking to children in hospitals and farmers in the market is a joy not a chore...
...the tide of ministerial opinion was turned around, and devaluation was voted down in a cabinet meeting...
...Only Jacques Chirac voted for devaluation...
...He was at his most quixotic when, under the shock of a car accident and disappointing polls before the European elections of 1979, he issued a violent diatribe (with strong anti-American overtones) against the pro-European Community platform of Giscard's party from his hospital bed at Cochin, the so-called "Cochin Manifesto...
...After three years he submitted his thesis for a doctor's degree in jurisprudence on the role of time in economic analysis, a thesis preceded by quotations from Paul Valery and St...
...Barre ran in 1978 because as Giscard's prime minister he felt compelled to defend on the hustings the Barriste program, then under vicious attack from the left...
...The constitutionally created joint government between a president of the left and a prime minister and a parliamentary majority of the center-right has, for the first time since the French Revolution, given France a government that has bridged the pernicious historic gulf between what socialist rhetoric used to call "the people of the left" and "the gentry of the castles...
...There is evidence that the French like it that way...
...president had the power not only to appoint cabinet ministers and the senior positions in the government bureaucracy, but, translated into American equivalents, to appoint the chairmen and chief executive officers of Citicorp, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, Dupont, Exxon, and of all utilities—and the list is far from complete...
...Thereupon Barre managed to be received by de Gaulle with that good news...
...engineering school, it was an act of liberation from an authoritarian father figure...
...from the sea, but while there he kept in touch with his parents...
...Yet this logic seems quixotic...
...When Raymond was only four, his father, who had built up a large export-import business with his wife's money, had to file for bankruptcy, a scandalous occurrence in the world of the island's bourgeoisie...
...By the same token it must be left to historians to decide whether Barre's economic policy of austerity during his last two years as prime minister or Chirac's opposition to that policy was the better course...
...Under the tutelage of a picturesque White Russian, who was something like an honorary grandfather in his parents' house, Chirac in his teens became passionately interested in Russian literature, Chinese art, Persian civilization, and Hindu philosophy—interests that never left him...
...But while Barre and Chirac are alike in their breadth of interests, they are different in temperament...
...Sure enough, in pure logic a powerful head of state and a powerful prime minister with opposing political philosophies would make destructive bed fellows...
...and Mitterrand's apostasy may be only skin deep...
...He knows and admires the difficult poetry of Saint-John Perse...
...And that is why Jacques Chirac did not become a captain in the merchant marine, but twice prime minister and one of the three leading candidates for the election of a French president in May.' Although Jacques Chirac grew up in Paris, his family's roots are in Correze, the geographical center of France, where his two grandfathers were teachers...
...Indeed one of Barre's proudest possessions today is a Proustian relic: Proust's ink pot...
...France desperately needed a loan of $2 billion from the central banks of the other members of the European Community, but the community's ministers of finance, led by Franz Joseph Strauss, sought to make devaluation of the French franc a condition of a loan...
...His school years were years of triumph, marked by a yearly prize for excellence and yearly first prizes in many subjects...
...F ranee is blessed to count no dwarfs among her presidential candidates...
...By contrast, Raymond Barre, the center right's rival candidate for the presidency, reached government service by a less classic route and from a very different background...
...they begin "BARRE (Raymond, Octave, Joseph), Professor rUniversitairel, former prime minister, member of the legislature," and "CHIRAC (Jacques, Rene), politician, former prime minister, mayor of Paris, member of the legislature...
...Nor were the relations of Mitterrand with his first Socialist prime minister, Pierre Mauroy, "without a cloud...
...The constitution of the Fifth Republic is a masterpiece of ambiguity in dealing with the respective powers of the president and the prime minister and therefore makes a certain measure of conflict between them almost inevitable...
...After graduation from high school, Barre studied law for two years at the local law school from which, although not an accredited university, he received a law degree accepted by the University of Algiers...
...Augustine, and closed with a quotation from Proust: "I cannot stand matters of intellect, what I love is life and movement...
...He persuaded his friend, Baron Ansiaux, then governor of the National Bank of Belgium and president of the committee of Common Market central bankers, to poll his fellow governors on whether devaluation of the franc was really a condition of the $2 billion loan...
...The answer was no...
...For all these reasons, the French presidential election is a contest the United States cannot lose...
...Nevertheless, Barre's life continued in the service of the intellect...
...Neither Barre nor Chirac became a politician by design...
...And even though Barre has recently said that there had never been a single cloud over his relations as prime minister with Giscard, there is evidence that his last two years in that position were far from idyllic...
...not only did Jacques come home...
...It is difficult to imagine 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 him doing the sweaty work of Chirac and Mitterrand in taking over and reshaping a big political party...
...For Chirac a start in government service came as a matter of course following his graduation from ENA...
...From 1958 till 1986 the French 'See Les Sept Mitterrand, by Catherine Nay (Editions Grasset, Paris 1988), whose biography of Mitterrand, The Black and the Red, was published in the U.S...
...In 1944, just before his twentieth birthday, Barre was drafted but remained mostly in Madagascar, far from the fighting...
...A part from fortuitous events, these differences in temperament account for the present rivalry between Chirac and Barre far more than differences in political programs or values...
...Barre is aloof and not given to easy intimacy...
...His study there was relieved by a summer term at Harvard, where he earned his keep washing dishes at a Howard...
...Moreover, it can be argued that the sharing of governmental responsibility between Mitterrand, Chirac, and the National Assembly has for the first time given the French Fifth Republic a desirable system of checks and balances...
...They are equally committed to the Atlantic Alliance and the defense of the West against Soviet totalitarianism...
...Raymond never saw his father again...
...At age 16, to quote his biographer Amouroux, "he will discover Proust, embracing him as one embraces a religion...
...In 1959 Raymond Barre's and Jacques Chirac's careers finally converged...
...When the decision to devaluate seemed made—t`The Rate of Devaluation to be Officially Announced on Saturday" read the headline of Friday's Le Monde—Raymond Barre, at the time vice president of the Commission of the European Communities in Brussels, and not by any means in what Washingtonians call the loop, saw a way of intervening through a friend in the cabinet...
...And in any event the deliberate constitutional provision for a seven-year presidential term and a five-year parliamentary term makes it difficult to argue, as does Barre, that cohabitation "violates the spirit of the Constitution...
...Chirac's father had also started his career as a teacher in Correze, but he soon turned to banking, became the manager of an important branch of the Banque Nationale du Credit in Paris, the personal banker of one of the founders of the French aviation industry—Marcel Daussault's one-time partner, Henry Potez—and eventually chief executive officer of Potez's airplane manufacturing company...
...The same can be said of President Mitterrand, who seems almost certain to be again the candidate of the left...
...Their respective entries in Who's Who in France (1985-1986) are characteristic...
...Yet generally, such conceptual pronouncements have not been Chirac's way of offending reasonable people from time to time...
...Never could Chirac take umbrage, as Giscard did with him, when a staff member enters unannounced through a side door...
...last year by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...Chirac saw the political unlikelihood of a weakened government being able to take painful economic measures...
...Chirac was asked by Prime Minister Pompidou to run for parliament in 1966...
...The comradeship with the men and women of his staff is reminiscent of that in a happy boarding school...
...In this episode Barre and Chirac showed equal independence of mind and courage in their refusal to be swayed...
...hirac's and Barre's opposing stands on cohabitation spring from the same difference in temperament that explains these occasional differences on economic policy...
...Barre was violently opposed to devaluation, which he saw as a useless makeshift device designed to avoid painful measures of economic discipline...
...Nor is it likely that Barre and Chirac will fade into oblivion if Mitterrand, as the polls of February are predicting, will be re-elected...
...Barre came to his judgment by the logic of his economic principles...
...Chirac's fervent identification with his constituency and his friends, and his sensitivity to political necessities, tend to push him in the opposite direction: he can cease to be logical the moment he wants to be practical...
...Mitterrand,4 Chirac, and Barre are all men of intelligence, experience, integrity, and depth...
...The hemorrhage in France's foreign exchange reserves produced by the chaotic strikes and demonstrations of May 1968 showed the two men at their characteristic best...
...Once back in Paris, Chirac, to the surprise of many and to the delight of his parents, set out upon the classic obstacle course of studies leading to the top echelons of the French Civil Service—Sciencespo (Institute of Political Studies of Paris) and ENA (National School of Administration...
...In 1979 Barre succeeded in reducing inflation to a rate of 2.1 percent, and in increasing GNP by close to 5 percent...
...The devaluation came nine months later after the loss of more billions...
...There are no outward signs that the disappearance of his father wounded Raymond Barre...
...Most of the information on Raymond Barre is drawn from Monsieur Barre, by Henri Amouroux (Editions Robert Lafont, Paris 1986...
...For Chirac, happiness, in the words of Disraeli, can only spring from the affections...
...When Pompidou was out of power, Chirac went to see him every day...
...2 He was born in 1924, 6,200 miles away from France in Saint-Denis-de-La-Reunion, the capital of the island of La Reunion in the Indian Ocean...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 19...
...Little Raymond grew up in his grandparents' house situated in a garden large enough to be called a park, in which three fountains played...
...Barre knows Goethe well enough to quote him in his economic treatise...
...The war was faraway and hardly touched the tropical island...
...Not that the horizons of these men are walled in by politics...
...This was the first time that Barre, now 22, encountered metropolitan France, apart from a year spent there as a little boy with his family before the war...
...He kept his students at a distance as a professor, and he kept his staff at a distance as a minister...
...O n a fall day in 1949 a tall, well-dressed industrialist stood on a dock in Dunkirk to wait for the arrival of a 5,000-ton freighter from Algiers and Morocco on which his 17-year-old son, Jacques Chirac, served as an apprentice seaman...
...by saying, as did a member of Chirac's staff, "You were even more idiotic than usual...
...111 41 have tried to show why this is true of Francois Mitterrand in a review essay "Born Again Socialist," National Review, July 3, 1987...
...Barre's mother came from one of the oldest French families of the island...
...He is not without a talent for making friends, but essentially he likes to work and think alone...
...His passion for paintings makes him go on a pilgrimage to Venice every year to look at Tintorettos, Carpaccios, and Titians—but only at a single painting a day...
...there is no Spanish protocol, no exclusive entry through antechambers...
...Raymond Barre, like Mitterrand, is enormously well read...
...Chirac has written, but not published, an autobiography often quoted by Giesbert...
...When the son came down the plank, his father told him he was an idiot, and took him straight back to Paris...
...A short extract from that autobiography was published in the Nouvel Observateur of January 15, 1988...
...At the end of 1945 his class was discharged...
...Without thatwar chest Mitterrand could not have engaged in the economic frolics of his first year, and if Barre had been less principled and more political, Mitterrand might well not have been elected at all and France would have been spared the hardships of the economic belt tightening—Barrism with socialist rhetoric—forced upon Mitterrand by the facts of life...
...And as a result of Barre's austerity the Banque de France had more than 46 billion francs of foreign exchange reserves when Mitterrand became president...
...But it was not an act of rebellion...
...3 On the other hand, in the present case of Mitterrand and Chirac there are no serious conflicts in the vital areas of foreign policy and defense...
...But while Chirac took to politics with the zest of a man who has discovered his vocation, Barre, with equal electoral success, has never been able to think of himself as a politician...
...and after only a few days in his home town, he left for France to complete his studies...
...Every one of them knows, in the words of Disraeli, that a man "who wants to govern the world must know how to say boo to a goose," or, for that matter, how to say no to dear Mr...
...Barre's turn came when he wasasked by a newly appointed minister of industry, with whom he had been on a study mission to the Soviet Union, to become his chief of staff...
...He became in turn a professor at the University of Caen, at the University of Timis, and, finally in Paris, after having published a treatise on political economy in 1955 that has rivaled Samuelson's text on economics in longevity and in the number of new editions...
...Though de Gaulle bristled at such a humiliation, at the end he yielded to the arguments of his ministers...
...When Jacques Chirac went to sea instead of following his father's wish to prepare for the Ecole Politechnique, the elite French 'Most of the information on Jacques Chirac is drawn from the superb current best-seller Jacques Chirac, by Franz-Oliver Giesbert (Editions du Seuil, Paris 1987...
...Either of them may become prime minister, and neither will be silent...
...At the same age he filled his room with reproductions of modern paintings: Chirico, Balthus, Picasso, Miro, and Kandinsky...
...It would neither be kind nor meaningful to quote from it...
...Paradoxically it was Chirac who, in 1978, attacked Giscard for countenancing cohabitation upon the latter's declaration that he intended to remain president, even if the left should win that year's parliamentary elections...
...Though by the force of circumstances we are rivals, we are neither adversaries nor enemies, for we are both committed to the same values and to the same kind of society" —Raymond Barre about Jacques Chirac...
...His rise would have been unthinkable without his close ties with his chief, Georges Pompidou, his counsellors, and his staff...
...Indeed, except for their opposing stances on cohabitation, it is hard to discover any issue that could make a voter decide between them...
...The family was looked after by a maid, a driver, a gardener, a laundress, and a nurse for Raymond and his two sisters...
...He studied law and economics, and like Chirac, graduated from Sciences-po...
...Barre's Common Cause-like distaste for party politics, and the discipline of his economic thinking, sometimes cause him to forget the partial truth of the observation (made by one of Disraeli's cynical fictional characters) that a public man ceases to be practical the moment he is logical...
...As Chirac's tormented premiership under Giscard has shown, belonging to the same majority does not assure the "real confidence" between the president and the prime minister that Barre considers essential...
...Barre and Chirac are rooted in their Catholic faith...
...Economic historians will have to decide who was right...
...Barre had made the refusal to form a center-right government under the Socialist President Mitterrand a major issue in the legislative elections of 1986, thereby splitting and probably weakening the opposition to the Socialists...
...The brilliance of both men brought them quickly to the attention of their superiors, both became cabinet ministers, and both successively prime minister under President Giscard d'Estaing, and thus, by necessity, politicians...
...a religion to which he will always remain faithful...
...And although acquitted of a charge of fraud, he felt compelled to leave the island...
...and he is pressing the same issue again in his current campaign for the presidency...
...And it is unimaginable that someone on Barre's staff could answer his chief's question "How did I do on the talk show last night...
Vol. 21 • April 1988 • No. 4
