Pierre Eugène Bérégovoy (French pronunciation: [pjɛʁ øʒɛn beʁeɡɔvwa]; 23 December 1925 – 1 May 1993) was a French politician who served as Prime Minister of France under President François Mitterrand from 2 April 1992 to 29 March 1993. He was a member of the Socialist Party and Member of Parliament for Nièvre's 1st constituency.
Michel Jean-Pierre Debré (French pronunciation: [miʃɛl dəbʁe]; 15 January 1912 – 2 August 1996) was the first Prime Minister of the French Fifth Republic. He is considered the "father" of the current Constitution of France. He served under President Charles de Gaulle from 1959 to 1962. In terms of political personality, Debré was intense and immovable and had a tendency to rhetorical extremism.
Alain Marie Juppé (French pronunciation: [alɛ̃ maʁi ʒype]; born 15 August 1945) is a French politician. A member of The Republicans, he was Prime Minister of France from 1995 to 1997 under President Jacques Chirac, during which period he faced major strikes that paralysed the country and became very unpopular. He left office after the victory of the left in the snap 1997 legislative elections. He had previously served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1993 to 1995, and as Minister of the Budget and Spokesman for the Government from 1986 to 1988. He was president of the political party Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) from 2002 to 2004 and mayor of Bordeaux from 1995 to 2004.
After the ghost jobs affair in December 2004, Juppé suspended his political career until he was re-elected as mayor of Bordeaux in October 2006. He served briefly as Minister of State for Ecology and Sustainable Development in 2007, but resigned in June 2007 after failing in his bid to be re-elected in the 2007 legislative election. He was Minister of Defence and Veterans Affairs from 2010 to 2011 and Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2011 to 2012.
Juppé announced in 2015 his intention to contest his party's primary election ahead of the 2017 presidential election. He came in second place in the first open primary of the right and centre, and in the run-off, he lost to François Fillon. At the beginning of 2019, he accepted a nomination to become a member of the French Constitutional Council and subsequently announced that he would be resigning as mayor of Bordeaux.
Jacques René Chirac (French: [ʒak ʁəne ʃiʁak] ; UK: , US: ,; 29 November 1932 – 26 September 2019) was a French politician who served as President of France from 1995 to 2007. He was previously Prime Minister of France from 1974 to 1976 and 1986 to 1988, as well as Mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995.
After attending the École nationale d'administration, Chirac began his career as a high-level civil servant, entering politics shortly thereafter. Chirac occupied various senior positions, including minister of agriculture and minister of the interior. In 1981 and 1988, he unsuccessfully ran for president as the standard-bearer for the conservative Gaullist party Rally for the Republic (RPR). Chirac's internal policies initially included lower tax rates, the removal of price controls, strong punishment for crime and terrorism, and business privatisation. After pursuing these policies in his second term as prime minister, he changed his views. He argued for different economic policies and was elected president in 1995, with 52.6% of the vote in the second round, beating Socialist Lionel Jospin, after campaigning on a platform of healing the "social rift" (fracture sociale). Chirac's economic policies, based on dirigisme, allowing for state-directed investment, stood in opposition to the laissez-faire policies of the United Kingdom under the ministries of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, which Chirac described as "Anglo-Saxon ultraliberalism".He was also known for his stand against the American-led invasion of Iraq, his recognition of the collaborationist French government's role in deporting Jews, and his reduction of the presidential term from seven years to five through a referendum in 2000. At the 2002 presidential election, he won 82.2% of the vote in the second round against the far-right candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and was the last president to be re-elected until 2022.
In 2011, the Paris court declared Chirac guilty of diverting public funds and abusing public confidence, giving him a two-year suspended prison sentence.
Valéry René Marie Georges Giscard d'Estaing (UK: ZHIH-skar dess-TÃ(N), US: zhih-SKAR-, French: [valeʁi ʁəne maʁi ʒɔʁʒ ʒiskaʁ dɛstɛ̃] ; 2 February 1926 – 2 December 2020), also known as Giscard or VGE, was a French politician who served as President of France from 1974 to 1981.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. 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. 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.
Édouard Daladier (French: [edwaʁ daladje]; 18 June 1884 – 10 October 1970) was a French Radical-Socialist (centre-left) politician, and the Prime Minister of France who signed the Munich Agreement before the outbreak of World War II.
Daladier was born in Carpentras and began his political career before World War I. During the war, he fought on the Western Front and was decorated for his service. After the war, he became a leading figure in the Radical Party and Prime Minister in 1933 and 1934. Daladier was Minister of Defence from 1936 to 1940 and Prime Minister again in 1938. As head of government, he expanded the French welfare state in 1939.
Along with Neville Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, Daladier signed the Munich Agreement in 1938, which gave Nazi Germany control over the Sudetenland. After Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. During the Phoney War, France's failure to aid Finland against the Soviet Union's invasion during the Winter War led to Daladier's resignation on 21 March 1940 and his replacement by Paul Reynaud. Daladier remained Minister of Defence until 19 May, when Reynaud took over the portfolio personally after the French defeat at Sedan.
After the Fall of France, Daladier was tried for treason by the Vichy government during the Riom Trial and imprisoned first in Fort du Portalet, then in Buchenwald concentration camp, and finally in Itter Castle. After the Battle of Castle Itter, Daladier resumed his political career as a member of the French Chamber of Deputies from 1946 to 1958. He died in Paris in 1970.
René Jean Pleven (French pronunciation: [ʁəne pləvɛ̃]; 15 April 1901 – 13 January 1993) was a notable French politician of the Fourth Republic. A member of the Free French, he helped found the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance (UDSR), a political party that was meant to be a successor to the wartime Resistance movement. He served as prime minister twice in the early 1950s, where his most notable contribution was the introduction of the Pleven Plan, which called for a European Defence Community between France, Italy, West Germany, and the Benelux countries.
François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand (26 October 1916 – 8 January 1996) was a French politician who served as President of France from 1981 to 1995, the longest holder of that position in the history of France. As a former Socialist Party First Secretary, he was the first left-wing politician to assume the presidency under the Fifth Republic.
Due to family influences, Mitterrand started his political life on the Catholic nationalist right. He served under the Vichy regime during its earlier years. Subsequently he joined the Resistance, moved to the left, and held ministerial office several times under the Fourth Republic. Mitterrand opposed Charles de Gaulle's establishment of the Fifth Republic. Although at times a politically isolated figure, he outmanoeuvered rivals to become the left's standard bearer in the 1965 and 1974 presidential elections, before being elected president in the 1981 presidential election. He was re-elected in 1988 and remained in office until 1995.
Mitterrand invited the Communist Party into his first government, which was a controversial decision at the time. In the event, the Communists were boxed in as junior partners and, rather than taking advantage, saw their support erode. They left the cabinet in 1984. Early in his first term, he followed a radical left-wing economic agenda, including nationalisation of key firms and the introduction of the 39-hour work week, but after two years, with the economy in crisis, he somewhat reversed course. He instead pushed a socially liberal agenda with reforms such as the abolition of the death penalty, and the end of a government monopoly in radio and television broadcasting. He faced major controversy in 1985 after ordering the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace vessel docked in Auckland. Mitterrand’s foreign and defense policies built on those of his Gaullist predecessors, except as regards their reluctance to support European integration, which he reversed. His partnership with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl advanced European integration via the Maastricht Treaty, and he reluctantly accepted German reunification. During his time in office, he was a strong promoter of culture and implemented a range of costly "Grands Projets". He was the first French President to appoint a female Prime Minister, Édith Cresson, in 1991. Mitterrand was twice forced by the loss of a parliamentary majority into "cohabitation governments" with conservative cabinets led, respectively, by Jacques Chirac (1986–1988), and Édouard Balladur (1993–1995). Less than eight months after leaving office, he died from the prostate cancer he had successfully concealed for most of his presidency.
Beyond making the French Left electable, Mitterrand presided over the rise of the Socialist Party to dominance of the left, and the decline of the once-mighty Communist Party. (As a share of the popular vote in the first presidential round, the Communists shrank from a peak of 21.27% in 1969 to 8.66% in 1995, at the end of Mitterrand's second term.)
Pierre Isaac Isidore Mendès France (French: [pjɛʁ mɑ̃dɛs fʁɑ̃s]; 11 January 1907 – 18 October 1982) was a French politician who served as prime minister of France for eight months from 1954 to 1955. As a member of the Radical Party, he headed a government supported by a coalition of Gaullists (RPF), moderate socialists (UDSR), Christian democrats (MRP) and liberal-conservatives (CNIP). His main priority was ending the Indochina War, which had already cost 92,000 lives, with 114,000 wounded and 28,000 captured on the French side. Public opinion polls showed that, in February 1954, only 7% of the French people wanted to continue the fight to regain Indochina out of the hands of the Communists, led by Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh movement. At the 1954 Geneva Conference, Mendès France negotiated a deal that gave the Viet Minh control of Vietnam north of the seventeenth parallel, and allowed him to pull out all French forces. He is considered one of the most prominent statesmen of the French Fourth Republic.
Auguste-Maurice Barrès (French: [baʁɛs]; 19 August 1862 – 4 December 1923) was a French novelist, journalist, philosopher, and politician. Spending some time in Italy, he became a figure in French literature with the release of his work The Cult of the Self in 1888. In politics, he was first elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1889 as a Boulangist and would play a prominent political role for the rest of his life.