ABSTRACT
The third President of the Fifth Republic, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, comes, like Pompidou, from the Auvergne. There all resemblance ends. Pompidou’s ancestors were peasants; Giscard can trace his forebears on both sides to a long line of political and industrial notables – or even, according to some ingenious genealogists, to the royal house of France. He inherited from his family great wealth, many political contacts, and a ferocious intelligence: unusually, he is a graduate of both the two schools which form much of France’s political, administrative and business élites, the École Polytechnique and the École Nationale d’Administration (ÉNA), whence he followed his father into the prestigious Inspection des Finances. The transition from the civil service to politics was effected, as so often, via a ministerial cabinet – that is, the small, often very political, private staff which every minister uses to help him run his department and liaise with colleagues. Giscard’s post in the cabinet of Finance Minister Edgar Faure in 1953 opened a meteoric political ascension: Deputy of the Puy-de-Dôme in 1956 at the age of 30 (his grandfather retired from his parliamentary seat to make way for his ambitious grandson); junior minister in the Finance Ministry from January 1959; Finance Minister from January 1962. In the meantime he was building a secure political base for himself, both locally as Deputy and as mayor of Chamalières (a wealthy suburb of Clermont-Ferrand) and nationally as leader, after 1962, of the newly created movement of Républicains Indépendants, the only group on the non-Gaullist Right to support de Gaulle after the October 1962 referendum. But by January 1966, having become both an obvious scapegoat for de Gaulle’s unpopular economic policies and a potential rival to Pompidou for the succession, he was dismissed as Finance Minister – ‘like a common servant’, he complained.
