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.
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.
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.
Henri Philippe Bénoni Omer Joseph Pétain (24 April 1856 – 23 July 1951), commonly known as Philippe Pétain (, French: [filip petɛ̃]) or Marshal Pétain (French: Maréchal Pétain), was a general who commanded the French Army in World War I and became the head of the collaborationist regime of Vichy France, from 1940 to 1944, during World War II.
Pétain was admitted to the Saint-Cyr Military Academy in 1873 and pursued a career in the military, achieving the rank of colonel by the outbreak of World War I. He led the French Army to victory at the nine-month-long Battle of Verdun, for which he was called "the Lion of Verdun" (French: le lion de Verdun). After the failed Nivelle Offensive and subsequent mutinies, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief and succeeded in restoring control. Pétain remained in command for the rest of the war and emerged as a national hero. During the interwar period he was head of the peacetime French Army, commanded joint Franco-Spanish operations during the Rif War and served twice as a government minister. During this time he was known as le vieux Maréchal ("the Old Marshal").
On 17 June 1940, with the imminent Fall of France and the government desire for an armistice, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud resigned, recommending to President Albert Lebrun that he appoint Pétain in his place, which he did that day, while the government was at Bordeaux. The government then resolved to sign armistice agreements with Germany and Italy. The entire government subsequently moved briefly to Clermont-Ferrand, then to the town of Vichy in central France. It voted to transform the French Third Republic into the French State, better known as Vichy France, an authoritarian puppet regime that was allowed to govern the southeast of France and which collaborated with the Axis powers. After Germany and Italy occupied all of France in November 1942, Pétain's government worked closely with the Nazi German military administration.
After the war, Pétain was tried and convicted for treason. He was originally sentenced to death, but due to his age and World War I service his sentence was commuted to life in prison. His journey from military obscurity, to hero of France during World War I, to collaborationist ruler during World War II, led his successor Charles de Gaulle to declare that Pétain's life was "successively banal, then glorious, then deplorable, but never mediocre".
Pétain, who was 84 years old when he became Prime Minister and later Chief of State, remains both the oldest person to become the head of government and the oldest person to become the head of state of France.