I none the less find it surprising that in what was probably Giscard’s last and deadly serious conversation with Jimmy Carter (for it concerned whether the United States would unleash nuclear warfare in order to save France from invasion) he was much struck by the fact that the US president wore long shoes with turned-up toes (winkle-pickers?). Even Giscard’s foreign minister (François-Poncet), to whom presumably he was more used, excited favourable notice for his uncreased socks during an important meeting of disagreement with Giscard. I never realized quite how appropriate a ‘please adjust your dress before arriving’ notice would have been in the Elysée lobby.
The acuteness of observation does, however, produce some memorable descriptions. Brezhnev, arriving for Giscard’s semi-illicit rendezvous (vis-à-vis his Western allies) with him in Warsaw in May 1980, walked with ‘the swaying gait of a tired bear’. And moments of political decision are successfully mingled with irrelevant but convincing images. Thus, when he was deciding on his first Prime Minister: ‘I wait a moment before letting in my next visitor. I go to the window. In sight are little groups waiting on the steps for the opening of the Musée du Louvre. Young women in bright-coloured skirts. A coach has pulled up, beige and white. It must come from The Netherlands. Tourists get heavily out, clinging to a glistening metal banister … My choice is definite. It will be Jacques Chirac.’
The fault of which some who had to deal with Giscard, and who admire many aspects of his constructive liberal statesmanship, would most accuse him was a certain false condescension. Does he dispel this in these memoirs? The answer must, I fear, be ‘no’, although he shows that it was balanced by many more attractive and less complacent characteristics. But it is still there. When he writes of the suicide of Robert Boulin, his minister of labour who was oppressed by a minor financial scandal arising out of his obtaining a free plot of land on the Côte d’Azur, Giscard was genuinely shocked by the tragedy. But it was a photograph of the villa ‘sans grâce, sans charme’, which Boulin built on it that most stuck in his mind.
When he arrived in Venice for the 1980 summit he metaphorically patted Prime Minister Cossiga on the head: ‘He was swimming in happiness … it was the consummation of his political life’ (Cossiga has since been president of the Italian Republic for seven years).
And when Giscard dined with the other heads of government in a great salon overhanging the Grand Canal, and was dazzled by the beauty of the surroundings, he was oppressed that no one else was appreciating the aesthetic feast. He may well have been right, but how did he know what was or was not going on in their minds? Perhaps that must wait for the sacred and profane memoirs of all of them. But of one thing we can be certain in advance: they will not be nearly as well written or elegantly self-revealing as are those of Giscard.
François Guizot
This miniature is based on a November 1990 European review of Guizot by Gabriel de Broglie (Perrin).
Guizot Was the close contemporary of Palmerston and Lord john Russell and lived somewhat but not much longer than either of these octogenarians. Yet I find him more comparable with those Englishmen who were born half a generation or a little more after him, Gladstone, Newman, Matthew Arnold, even Tennyson. Guizot is almost a Victorian, very ungallic in some ways, with a career and a mentalité which at once illustrates the considerable similarities, shot through with profound differences, between the two leading countries of the nineteenth-century world.
François Guizot (although he was a man like Disraeli or Asquith who hardly needed or used a Christian name) was born in 1787, the son of a Protestant advocate living and practising in Nîmes. His Protestantism was important, not because he was primarily a dévot but because it deeply affected his cast of mind and character, rather as it had done with that twentieth-century Protestant French politician, Maurice Couve de Murville. (Guizot’s mind was, however, both more erudite and wide-ranging than Couve’s.)
If this provenance and Guizot’s close knowledge of English language and literature (with his future first wife he had translated the thirteen volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall by the time he was twenty-four) linked him with England, another part of his family background divided him sharply from the British experience. His father was guillotined in 1794, and his maternal grandfather, also part of the legal and Protestant establishment of Nîmes at best did nothing to save him and at worst was one of the instigators of the execution. So, mingled with the parchment- inspired respectability of legal life in a peculiarly urbane cheflieu, was an appallingly intimate experience of the unforgiving confrontationalism, with its periodical blood-lettings, which was a feature of French politics at least from the mid-seventeenth century Fronde until 1945, several hundred years after serious violence had disappeared from the English scene.