The Rest Is History - 178. French Presidents: 1958-1981

Episode Date: April 25, 2022

It's the day after the French election runoff between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, so naturally here's a Rest Is History French Presidents special. Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. Join Tom and Dominic for the first of two episodes on the topic, as they dive headfirst into the first three post-war presidents.  Join us tomorrow for the second part of this special double-bill, where we'll cover the remaining historical residents of the Élysée Palace. If you can't wait until then, sign up to The Rest Is History Club (restishistorypod.com) to hear the next episode right now and also get ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.comic Sandbrook. What is an exciting day for all fans of French politics is it not because today is the day that the result of the French presidential election 2022 is announced and we should say that we are recording this the week before so we don't know who will have been elected. But we know that it will either be Emmanuel Macron or Marine Le Pen. And I'm guessing, Dominic, that your money would be on the former. I probably would be, Tom. But this is a terrible way to kick off, because if Marine Le Pen has won,

then you're just humiliating me in the eyes of the listeners with my terrible prediction. But no, we did, so Tom, we did the chancellors of Germany, didn't we, to tie in with Angela Merkel's retirement. So we thought it would be fun to do the presidents of France's Fifth Republic. So that's from 1958 onwards, to tie with um either the re-election of emmanuel macron or the um election of marion de pen depending on what's happened absolutely and um i think we found when we did the um the german chancellors that they were i mean they were they were kind of a much more remarkable collection of politicians than I had kind of appreciated before. We disgraced ourselves by laughing a lot at Helmut Kohl. Do you remember?

Yes, we did. About his German-ness. But also about Gerhard Schroeder. Yeah, the Lord of the Rings. And our condemnation of Gerhard Schroeder as a shyster, I believe, turned out to be very prophetic. We've been completely vindicated. We have been vindicated with that. So the French presidency, as you say, so when we looked at the German chancellors, of course, that's an institution that got set up in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.

The French presidency, as it has existed under the Fifth Republic, is a later creation, but it is a creation of the dominant French political figure who emerges out of the Second World War, who is, of course, Charles de Gaulle, General de Gaulle. Yeah, that's right. So for people who don't know, there have been five French republics since the French Revolution. So there was the first one in the 1790s. There was one in the 1848-52 that was basically subverted by Napoleon III, not a friend of the show. After the fall of Napoleon III, there was a third republic, 1870 to 1940. That basically was ended with the collapse in 1940

against the Nazis in World War II. Then after the Second World War, they set up a fourth republic. Now, de Gaulle, of course, lots of people will know. We'll come to him in just a second. We will, by the way, do a podcast just about de Gaulle, won't we people will know we'll come to him just a second we will by the way do a podcast just about de Gaulle when we tell him at some stage yeah um but de Gaulle was the sort of face of the liberation and of um defiance during the second world war and the face of France really wasn't he yeah he was a genius he made himself the emblem of France he did and we'll come to that in just a sec because I think that's really important in the way that French presidents perceive their role and the French public perceive the French presidency.

But de Gaulle had sort of flounced out of French politics at the end of the war in 1946, partly because the Fourth Republic was going to have a very weak presidency. And it was going to basically be a sort of parliamentary republic in which the prime minister held all the power. The Fifth Republic comes into being in 1958, and it is associated very much with the Gaul, and it's created in the crisis surrounding the Algerian War of Independence. So France is torn apart by the Algerian crisis. It's sort of paralyzed. There's a coup, an attempted coup, basically, by the military who are fighting in Algeria. And de Gaulle is this sort of unifying figure who can resolve the crisis and avert a possible civil war. And de Gaulle insists that the Fifth Republic will be in his image,

with a really strong executive presidency. The president will basically have all the power. I mean, domestic policy, the sort of nuts and bolts will be left to the prime minister but it's the presidency who will who will embody france and and i think he de gaulle is like churchill in the sense that he as a as a even as a boy there's this amazing story that he rather like churchill famously a harrow said to another boy you know i can see that one day I will save London and the empire from invasion. De Gaulle wrote a story, you've seen this when he was 15, about a character called General de Gaulle who would lead France to victory over the Germans. So he has this sort of demented sense of his own importance, which actually is then completely vindicated because, of course, although he doesn't lead the French army to victory over the Germans, he does become the face of resistance in the Second World War.

But it's also, I mean, he has a sense of his own greatness, but he also has a sense of France's greatness, doesn't he? And in fact, I mean, he kind of says that France cannot be France unless it is great. Yeah. And our very first podcast, of course, was on the theme of greatness. And I think you could say that the thing about de Gaulle is that he is probably the last European leader who you would call great, with a great big capital G. And I think that that certain idea of France that de Gaulle talked about, it flutters like the tricolor over every french president and maybe a measure of how effective a president is leading france is is how convincing they are standing

there and taking on the mantle i think that's absolutely right i think so de gaulle the nickname for him one of the nicknames for him by the way way, was the Great Asparagus. He's such a sort of tall, beaky man. And he clearly, I mean, you can even see it in sort of photos and newsreels and things. de Gaulle always had this presence and this sort of incredible sense of himself. I always think with de Gaulle and with a lot of French presidents, there's only a very thin dividing line between them and Inspector Clouseau. So Inspector Clouseau, the Peter Sellers character, has this tremendous sense of his own dignity. Even when he's being attacked by a dog

or his servants hiding in fridges. Right, exactly. When he's dressed in a knight's suit of armour and a disguise or he's disguised as a Swedish sea dog or whatever, or he's falling down the stairs. He has this immense sense of his own importance and his own seriousness. And de Gaulle has this tremendous sense of his own seriousness and of France's seriousness. France is a unique country with this kind of exceptional history and destiny.

And its duty is to lead the world towards civilization. And French presidents are expected to live up to that in a way that British prime ministers never are. I mean, a British prime minister can look kind of shabby and stand on a soapbox and have his hair all messed up and just be shambolic and all these kinds of things. And that's fine because they are merely the king or queen's servant. You know, they're the king's first minister or whatever. But a French president is france

yes you know de gaulle thinks he is the reincarnation of joan of arc or i mean church apparently he said this to churchill and churchill said we've burned one joan of arc yeah well the only cross i have to bear is the cross of lorraine he said yes exactly so so he looks like a stick of asparagus but i think he he also looks like Julius Caesar in Asterix the Gaul. I know you haven't read, but Julius Caesar in Asterix looks very, very like de Gaulle. And de Gaulle always spoke of himself in the third person, like Julius Caesar did. And there is that sense of the dictator, the man of destiny who arises and seizes control of his nation. And I think the other thing about de Gaulle is that

he has something quite dictatorial about him, but he never goes the full dictator. Yeah, that's right. So there's always that kind of slight tension about him. So it's there when he... I mean, you describe him as Cusse, but I think that's a bit harsh about him. So it's there when he, I mean, you describe him as Cusse, but I think that's a bit harsh on him because he really does kind of create an image of himself as the saviour of France, almost from nothing. And more than that, he creates an image of France as a victor in the Second World War that is wholly disproportionate to the reality. But he kind of bluffs it through, doesn't he? He persuades Churchill.

And he persuades Eisenhower that he can be first into paris when paris is liberated in august 1944 no i mean the comparison with cluso i don't mean to that the goal is purely ridiculous i mean that there's only that the sense of this is the genius by the way the sense of dignity yeah is really really important to peter sellis's characterization of cluso but it's also really important to french presidents' sense of themselves. And you say the thing about dictators. So de Gaulle had been out of office. I mean, as I say, we'll do de Gaulle properly another time.

De Gaulle is this great war hero. He has retired at the end of the Second World War to Colombie-des-Eglises, which is the sort of now famous worldwide as de Gaulle's kind of home. Does it have two churches? I assume it does, yeah. And as you say, Tom, he has this great line, the first line of his war memoirs, All my life I've had a certain idea

of France. And there he is, he's the sort of very Roman figure actually, isn't he, Tom? This sort of great gentleman in retirement. Waiting to be summoned. Absolutely. Waiting to be summoned. Then in 1958, Algeria, which is being presented to the French as part of France,

and there are – what are there? There are about a million people, Europeans, in Algeria. France feels it has to sort of defend them. They're the pieds noirs. The army in Algeria is kind feels it has to sort of defend them. They're the pieds noirs. The army in Algeria is kind of loyal to them, doesn't want to give up on Algeria, feels it's being betrayed by the Republican politicians. There's all kinds of political turmoil. The army called for de Gaulle. De Gaulle says, you know, I'm willing to serve. And actually, even then in 1958, some people say he wants to be a dictator. And de Gaulle

actually makes a statement. He says, at the age of 67, I'm too old to be a dictator and de Gaulle actually makes a statement he says at the age of 67 I'm too old to be a dictator don't you think I'd be a dictator by now if I isn't one of the people who suspect he wants to be a dictator someone who will appear later in our story François Mitterrand exactly well François Mitterrand will make his name as an anti-Gaullist you know that's one of Mitterrand's great calling cards Jean-Paul Sartre said, I'm not a Jean-Paul Sartre fan by any means. He said of de Gaulle in 1958, I would rather vote for God because God is more modest.

That's a good joke. But anyway, de Gaulle does come in in 58. He insists that the constitution is rewritten. He has a referendum. So now you get this new institution, effectively, there have been French presidents before, but you get this strong executive presidency, in some ways stronger even than the United States presidency. Well, and longer, right? Because initially it's seven years.

Seven-year term, but also you're not as dependent on the votes of the legislature. although there will be issues of so-called cohabitation where the prime minister is from another party doing domestic policy, the French president basically has complete power over foreign policy. Well, he's the king, isn't he? I mean, that's the other thing. It's that idea that France is kind of Oedipally haunted by the figure of the king that it got rid of in the revolution. Well, that's the funny thing, that France got rid of its king, but it has in some ways a more a more monarchical system monarchical system certainly than britain

does yeah so the very first election that de gaulle fights as president is against meteron and we'll come to meteron later and de gaulle wins reasonably easily um and then he has this sort of he has this sort of period he's quite an old man, but he definitely has this sense of greatness. I mean, when you compare him with Harold Wilson, who's the British prime minister at the same time in the mid-60s, de Gaulle is clearly the more obviously, in a verticom, great man. And de Gaulle goes around sort of being very French. He goes to Quebec and he says,

Vive le Québec libre, which offends the Canadians, and he has to go home straight away and cut short his his visits i remember there was an outraged a fabulous uh british cartoon of him as the force to frap the um the nuclear missile yeah um which kind of sums him up really he's well he does stuff like he he france is still in nato but he refuses to have french troops under sort of nato command and they'll withdraw from nato's command structures he obviously twice vetoes britain's application to join the common market which is his way of thanking us for our help in world war ii he he has a sense does he not of france as not being beholden to the united states and he sees britain's uh special relationship with the united states or slavish dependency with the United States,

depending on what you prefer. De Gaulle definitely sees it being the latter as something to avoid. And so his ambition is to situate France between the United States and the Soviet Union. Yeah, that's right. He thinks of France as a sort of third force in between the... Which is a bit of an illusion, really, because France is clearly part of the kind of Western Alliance, a key part of the Western Alliance. And de Gaulle is an anti-communist. But it's, but,

but the illusion is really important that in an, an increasingly kind of Anglo-Saxon world, he needs to maintain France's kind of exceptionalism. And then in 1968, the, the great, again, a brilliant subject for a podcast, Tom, the événement of May 1968 when the students have this uprising. They're throwing cobblestones at the Parisian police and there's a general strike.

And a lot of this is because basically de Gaulle is now too old, too autocratic. To the younger generation, he just seems like a… He's not a hippie, is he? He's definitely not. And de Gaulle, interestingly, and not surprisingly in some ways for a man who's lived through the world wars, he thinks this is a revolution. And he famously basically disappears from Paris, vanishes, doesn't tell anyone where he's going,

flies to the French military base in West Germany, in Baden-Baden, and basically sort of throws himself on the mercy of General Jacques Massou, who's the commander of the French troops in West Germany, basically says, if I need to, do I have your support to go back and crush the revolution? And it obviously doesn't come to that. But I think with with 1968 you know it's clearly the end of an era and actually he flounces out again in april 1969 and very sorry i don't think he flounces i think flounces in his alley what he does no i think it's more

like king arthur heading off to avalon oh i think you're being very generous. For listeners who don't know, he struts off. They have a referendum on regional government, on the system of regional councils. And everybody says it's a bad idea. de Gaulle says, well, if you won't approve my referendum on regional councils, I'm out, I'm off. And the public don't vote for it. And he says, right, well, don't say I didn't warn you. And off he he goes a day or two later and that's the end of him and he dies within the year yeah he does yeah and i think that's flouncing i mean you may not think it's flouncing but i think it's i know i think i think it's a a dignified withdrawal really well it's fair that's fair inspector cluso that's actually i'll tell you one other thing about de gaulle he was asked by the writer andre

malraux great kind of political novelist of the 20th century um who he most admired and who his great hero was and you know his answer Tom and I not Jane of Arc because that would be too obvious I guess it's not Jane of Arc it's Tintin oh very interesting yeah it's a good answer I thought no Tintin who was of course Belgian yes very peculiar yeah very strange anyway so that that's all really by way of preparation, isn't it? Yes. And in our best style, our preparation, our prologue, our forward has kind of taken up, what, 20 minutes or something. That's good.

De Gaulle is a great character, though. He is a great character. The other thing about De Gaulle, Tom. No, Dominic, we're going to do a whole episode on him. We can't stick to De Gaulle. I think, well, I just want to say one last thing about the goal before we get to the others so the others are all integral shadow and trying to be the gold or to some extent or meter on defining themselves against the goal but the goal is also unusual because to goal is is quite a family man so to

goal is famously absolutely devoted to his daughter and who had down syndrome and was the one person with whom he would open up and actually he asked him buried next to Anne um and he and he is and and when you see the sort of photos and stuff it's incredibly moving and actually given the behavior of all his successors that definitely marks him out as an anomaly because we're going to see a succession of men whose devotion to family values is at best um half-hearted so that those two those two themes and a girl um the goal's uh daughter and outrageous marital behavior yeah um lead us very neatly into the man who succeeds to go as president a man called george pompou, who we will introduce après le break. See you in a sec. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes

and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Now, Tom, it has been far too long since we have talked about our favourite sponsors. Well, it's one of our favourite sponsors anyway. I don't want to diss the other sponsors, but it's UnHerd, U-N-H-E-R-D, the online magazine that, as regular listeners will know, is always kicking back against herd mentality. So, Tom, they know their audience

because this week they have an article by one of our contributors, by one of our guests. So regular listeners will remember we did a podcast about African decolonization with Tommy Oulade. And he wrote an article for Unheard, Tom, which I would like to hear your thoughts about. It was called The Future of Anglicanism is African.

And he said, basically, London is a very religious place. It's the most religious city in Britain becausericans are driving this kind of church membership and tom o'lardy says conservatives who want to renew christianity in britain should stop listening to justin wilby and the pope they should lobby for an open borders immigration policy for all the african countries that britain once colonized do you tom agree with this that's my question i read the article with great interest partly because i always enjoy reading tom who is always a fabulous writer writes beautifully very very interestingly and i thought this was a great topic on something that i've kind of been pondering as well i mean

the detail that tom includes in his essay that um the place in the country that is most hostile to gay rights is London. Seems very, very counterintuitive because you imagine, you know. Which do you think it would be? Which parts of the country are you about to diss? Well, I knew that it was London. Oh, did you? And I guess kind of living in Brixton, I'm kind of very aware of that,

that you can see people pouring out of, say, gay clubs at eight o'clock on a Sunday morning. And you can also see people in their Sunday best heading off to church. And it's kind of very, that's very much a kind of Brixton scene. So I thought it was really, really interesting, really stimulating. And I think he ends on a note of saying, you know, nothing be more christian than um the recolonization of the imperial capital by people um coming from countries that have been converted by he wrote it just for you i know i know so anyway it's a wonderful essay check it out check out everything else he has uh written uh and of course check out unheard well n-h-e-r-d and do you have a special offer yeah because here is the thing as as so often as the way with unheard there n-h-e-r-d and do you have a special offer yeah because here is the thing as as so

often as the way with unheard there is a special offer for rest is history listeners now it is normally one pound a week some listeners may know these words off by heart by now it is normally one pound a week but our listeners will get their first 10 weeks free i mean they are literally giving it away and for that you will get four long pieces today, hard-hitting, penetrative, insightful essays. You will get a podcast. A podcast? I didn't read that. But you get another podcast.

You should obviously listen to our podcast. I'm sure that's quite good as well. You'll get YouTube interviews. We don't do those, so you're free to watch the YouTube interviews without feeling any trace of guilt. And that will all be showcasing new and independent thinking. And as you surely all know by now, you get that by going to unheard.com slash rest. That's U-N-H-E-R-D dot com slash rest. Bienvenue. Welcome back to The Rest is History. So, Georges Pompidou, who will be most famous as the man who gives his name to the... It's weird, isn't it? He's most famous as a centre.

Well, yes, he's most famous for having his intestines on the outside. Yes, I guess so. So the great kind of museum of modern art. And that, of course, is also a huge theme running through the French presidency is they're very, very fond of their grand projet, their kind of cultural achievements in a way that British prime ministers are simply not. But I mentioned the link with Anne de Gaulle. So Georges Pompidou, he is kind of from the Auvergne, I think, isn't he? He is from the Auvergne, yeah. Parents of farmers and

things uh yeah very rural area and he like a subsequent um french president ends up working for uh the rothschild bank yes yes i i hadn't thought of the link but obviously he and macron have then yeah um but he's then recruited from the rothschild bank by de Gaulle to go and work for the Anne de Gaulle Foundation. That's right, he did. He had worked for de Gaulle before, Tom. He had been a sort of apparatchik for him, factotum. But you're right, he did work for the Anne de Gaulle Foundation. How would we describe it?

I mean, he has huge Dennis Healy-style eyebrows. He's a cross between – I was thinking about this while I was researching it, obviously about the key historiographical questions. And it struck me the best way to describe George Pompidou for people who haven't seen him. And this will mean nothing whatsoever to overseas listeners. He is literally a cross between Dennis Ely and Ray Reardon. Yeah, good shout. Okay, well, I think what you should do for overseas listeners who may not be familiar with either of them is to put up a tweet or something on the Discord showing what they look like.

He looks like a man who might have managed Huddersfield Town in 1927. That's fair. Yeah. So he's not a man who exudes a sense of greatness. I think it would be fair to say. No, but he was actually a pretty good president. So he succeeds. Absolutely.

Okay. But, Dominic, before we get on to that before we get on to the succession his election yeah his election exists in the shadow of a sex scandal are you are you familiar i'm not familiar with this and the markovitch scandal no because you're very excited about it and so i'm greatly looking forward to hearing okay so stefan markovitch yeah uh he was the bodyguard of uh Alain Delon famous French actor very good actor at the time was starting out on his career and used to hold sex parties Alain Delon or the driver Delon and Markovitch would film them and supposedly Pompidou's wife was at one of these sex parties and there were all kinds of rumors of blackmail and um

extortion and all this kind of stuff going on and pompadour thought that this had been leaked by de gaulle and so that contributed to his his bust up with de gaulle also the fact that de gaulle hadn't told him that he was scarpering off to germany during uh yeah the events of 1968 um and pompadour said that it wasn't his wife but a prostitute who looked exactly like his wife Germany during the events of 1968. And Pompidou said that it wasn't his wife, but a prostitute who looked exactly like his wife. But of course, I mean, Pompidou's wife must have been in her 60s. Was Delon hiring sextuagenarian prostitutes?

That seems very implausible because Alain Delon was a very good looking young man. They order things differently in France. This is the kind of stuff that goes on. Alan Delon had a, had a Macronian attitude to these attitudes, clearly. Anyway, so much so Markovic, Markovic,

Markovic got found dead. And, um, there was a kind of snarl of who'd killed him, uh, who, who this woman was, was it the prostitute?

Was it Pompidou's wife? Anyway, so this is the first of many such scandals. Yeah. That have, uh yeah that have uh that will be enlivening this narrative i think but just so i just wanted to put that on the record that that is that is kind of the backdrop to uh pompadour coming to power and you're right that he's a very very effective president i mean very effective much more effective than than say contemporary british prime ministers wouldn't you say i mean he's uh well he's he yeah because he coincides i mean he's uh well he's he yeah because he coincides with ted heath yeah but he's but um pompadour is the sort of father of

the tgv the french high-speed trains the nuclear program i think yeah all these kind of great concord and france is in a in a better condition than britain i think in the late 60s early 70s france has overtaken britain in its gdp it is a bit more um self-confident i think um a bit less i mean of course france is divided in various ways but it's it's it's more comfortable with its divisions i think than than 70s britain and it has had what the the trot glories it has 30 years of kind of economic recovery i'll tell you a couple of other things about george pompadour so george pompadour is the french president who everybody kind of forgets, apart from his centre. He is the sort of – people are tired of de Gaulle,

so they don't mind having Pompidou. He's a bit more of a pragmatist. Well, he's John Major to de Gaulle's Mr. Thatcher. That's exactly what he is. And so it's obviously – he is the one president who's not expected to play de Gaulle because he's the morning after, if you like. The two things I was going to say about Pompidou is Pompidou, in very French style, is also the author of an anthology of French poetry. Well, he studied literature.

Yeah. He was a literature professor, which is still used, I think, in some French schools, the Pompidou anthology, which is, again, you don't see that from Ted Heath. But presidents in France are meant to be cultured, right? They are. Pompidou had an excellent thing to say about history in his place in history. Did you see this, Tom? No. He said, happy people are not noted in history. I therefore hope historians do not have much to say about my term in office. And we don't. Not really. Not really. I mean, it obviously ended. The other interesting thing about Pompidou is the way it ended. So he's a pragmatist, he's a technocrat, he's sort of centre-right. His presidency is, I think in retrospect, reasonably successful.

But it ends very abruptly in April 1974 when he dies in office of a very rare blood cancer. And actually the truth of the matter is Pompidou had known he was ill. And this is another theme of the French presidency. Very secretively, he had managed to keep it, not just from the public, but also a lot of his own colleagues. He dies. And he dies four days before the Eurovision Song Contest is due to be held in Brighton in 1974. So the French withdraw from the Eurovision Song Contest. As a mark of respect for George Pompidou. And it was just as well that they did.

Because do you know the song that won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974? Had Pompidou just met his Waterloo, Tom? Oh, the irony. Golly, thank goodness they didn't go. The irony. So ABBA won and obviously did not dedicate it to no it would have been yeah that would have been would have been insensitive so the departure of pompadour paves the way for perhaps the most in some ways the most entertaining of french presidents i think um and some ways also

my least favorite well i would say definitely the the french president who looks most like he would have been guillotined but also the one who looks most like a French president provided by a casting agency. Yeah, well, I mean, they're pretty much the same thing. Yeah. So even his name sounds like he belongs on a tumbril. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. So Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the world's haughtiest man, his grandfather apparently had added Destang to the family name to make them seem aristocratic. But the Destang were a very distinguished medieval family.

And shamelessly, later in life, did you see this? Valery Zhigardestan bought the Destang castle. With his brother. Yeah. So the d'Estaing, I mean, they went right the way back to, I think one of them saved Philip Augustus at the Battle of Bavine, and they got up to all kinds of stuff, went on crusades and things. Wow. The very last of the d'Estaing was an admiral who I think had served in the American Revolution on the French side, American side, but then ended up guillotined.

And so this is the guy that Giscard d'Estaing is kind of modelling himself on. Yeah, being a 70s politician and trying to model yourself on guillotine aristocrats is absolutely ludicrous behaviour, but absolutely true to Giscard d'Estaing's character. So he's born in 1926, isn't he? He was in the resistance. He was in the army. Like so many of the people who we're going to talk about, he goes to the two institutions. I mean, people talk about British politics as kind of class-ridden and introverted and a narrow cabal and all this,

but everybody in this story goes to one of two places. They go to either a place called Sciences Po, which is where you do political science, or they go to the École Nationale d'Administration, ENA, and that's where Giscard went. And he is a pure technocrat. He's an ENA. He is an ENA and he is a pure technocrat he's an anarch he is a he's a mandarin but dominic also just before we get on to that you also said that you know he'd served

in the resistance and actually the role that people play in the second world war and i suppose also in the algerian crisis i mean this that's also very very important isn't it yeah you've got to have had a good war you've got to have had a good war you've got to have had a good war and i think all these people obviously to go um g scar being in the resistance later on meet him interesting one yeah it's slightly more conflicted but um you're right yeah g scar comes in he's 48 years old um he's definitely a new generation uh he's a modernizer and um he's modernizing and i think is less successful than pompadour's because the one thing that g sky is really famous for is embracing a thing called

minitel have you ever used minitel no i haven't but that's the french um internet yeah that's the french version of the internet so people see facts yeah it's basically well we had a thing called prestel did you ever know but we didn't really push it whereas the french absolutely went all in so when i lived in france in the 1990s they were still the internet had come along but they were still desperately sort of flogging their kind of beta max version of the internet the minitel thing um which was sort of so minitel was like you've got a little terminal and um if you ever if you lived in the 80s and you ever read sort of predictions what the future would be like and what people would use computers for, that was what Minitel was.

You know, you could do your horoscope. You could order some groceries that would arrive in a month. Order a jet pack. Yeah, you could book very complicated train tickets. Well, on the TGV, which, of course, he's also pushing. Yes, that's right. That's more successful. And actually he does.

I'm being mean to him because he does do other things. He better pensions and divorce reform and he legalizes abortion. And he does sort of other sort of 60s, 70s kind of modernizing. Well, he brings in Simone Vale, right? Right, he has female cabinet ministers. And actually, I'll tell you who the parallel for Giscard d'Estaing is. He's actually Jimmy Carter. So Jimmy Carter came to power at a similar time in America

and was very much sort of, I'm going to be a populist, I'm going to be in touch with the people. And Giscard tries that at first. Well, he goes on the metro, doesn't he? He goes on the metro, he has dinners with the public, and at one point he has some dustmen for Christmas to the Elysee Palace. And the polls show that the French public hate this

because they expect the president to be kind of sunken so he then just spends the rest of his life at the other this was just a feeble gesture that he didn't mean at all and so he spends the rest of his life trying to make up for this and actually when you go through the giscard d'estang stories they are absolutely he does things like he goes hunt he Poland and gets the French Air Force to supply him with hunting – to fly hunting rifles. He – at state dinners, when he's not dining with another head of state, he has the seat opposite him removed so he doesn't have to look anyone in the eye.

When Mrs. Thatcher entered the scene in Britain in 1979, he wouldn't have her put next to him at dinner because she was a mere head of government and he was a head of state. And she got her own back by... Seating him opposite portraits of Nelson and Wellington, which I think is absolutely splendid behaviour. So he behaves in this incredibly ludicrously kind of haughty way. And that, I think, comes back to bite him at the end of the 70s.

Well, also what comes back to bite him is his relationship with a friend of the show, Bacasa. Emperor Bacasa. Emperor Bacasa, who we talked about in the 12 Days of Christmas. We did. Who gives him a load of diamonds, doesn't he? That's right. And so Bacasa is this sort of parodic African dictator of the 1970s

for people who don't know, who runs the Central African Republic and crowns himself emperor at this incredibly lavish ceremony modeled on napoleon's coronation and he spends kind of 90 of the entire country's gdp on yeah on his own coronation but he also finds time to give giscard these diamonds because french presidents at this point as part of their sort of self-image as a counterweight to the United States. They're spending a lot of time trying to build up influence in kind of post-colonial Africa. And Giscard takes these diamonds from Macassar. This is then exposed by the French satirical magazine, Le Canard Enchaîné. And Giscard goes ballistic, says it's an absolute disgrace that people are accusing him of taking

these diamonds, although he clearly has taken them. But's also he's also a bad man tom i think in the on the marital front um so supposedly i mean there's all kinds of doesn't it's what's very unclear whether he did or did not have a relationship with sylvie christel the star of the emmanuel um soft porn films in the 70s what is definitely true is that he used to meet people for assignations at a very aptly named hostelry called Le Petit Cocochon, which is the little cock in the field. Yeah. And he would leave sealed notes with his aides to say, this is where you can find me if there's a nuclear war or some sort of emergency.

Because he was always somewhere different he carried it into his old age didn't he because he he famously notoriously uh wrote a kind of semi-pornographic novel about him and and princess diana who who appears as patricia princess of cardiff and it's all about the french president and yeah he's called princess of cardiff it's called Jacques-Henri Lambetti. Who could he be writing about? But you know where he seduces the Princess of Cardiff? Remind me.

On a train coming back from a ceremony to memorialise the D-Day landing. Oh. Oh. I mean, his direct contemporary, James Callaghan, Tom,

would never have written an erotic novel. No. No. Nor james callaghan tom would never have written an erotic novel no no nor nor had uh james callaghan lived to the age of 93 would he have been accused of um groping a german journalist that's right about two years ago it was two years before he before he died at the age of 95 in 2020 wow so i mean that is i mean the thing about she's guy i think is she's guy has absolutely no sense of himself as a comic character at all. I don't know how many French listeners or Francophone listeners we have, but maybe they can enlighten us as to whether people in France

see Giscard as an essentially comic figure or whether they share his sense of his own tremendous importance. Well, he's a loser, isn't he? Because he ends up losing on the back of the Bacasa Diamond scandal to, for the first time, a left-wing president. That's right, François Mitterrand. And just one other thing on Giscard. Giscard, when you sort of study French presidential politics, they're only sort of, it's like one of those soap operas where there are only really 10 characters. Because they just spend all their time feuding with each other. And one of the great feuds in French politics is between Giscard and a subsequent right-wing president, Jacques Chirac.

And because Chirac runs against Giscard in 1981 and then doesn't really properly endorse him. That feud probably opens the door for François Mitterrand. So that is all for today's pod. But on tomorrow's episode, we will be covering Mitterrand. So that is all for today's pod. But on tomorrow's episode, we will be covering Mitterrand and Chirac and Sarkozy and, of course, the excellently named François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron and the shadowy figures of the Le Pens. However, if you simply can't wait until tomorrow, sign up to the Rest Is History Club, where you'll have the next episode straight away.

Just go to the restishistorypod.com, restishistorypod.com, and we will see you then. A bientot. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. TheRestIsEntertainment.com