He had asked to be buried, not with the pomp due to a former head of state, but in the privacy, just as a citizen, in his village, but in his own garden, next to his daughter who had died before him. Family, hobbies, private life came first before the France of honors and glory.
The super-brain of Valery Giscard d’Estaing (1926-2020), who had said in the aftermath of the reunification of Germany and of the European continent in 1989-90, that it was now necessary to go “faster than history” to make Europe, was the opposite of Charles de Gaulle, the French demigod, and also of the elitist Jacques Chirac. He wanted to be modest, simple, and sincere and not to be praised. He was close to the daily reality of the French.
“Giscard” as the French called him had got elementary things that personal ambition and the cult of personality conceal, and in this, he resembled Karl Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, even though he was quite different from both. He understood that history is made up by one or two friends who have room to maneuver and who understand which direction the wheel turns and when it is the right moment to push it forward.
In his eyes, the “fathers of Europe” were Jean Monnet, and Helmut Schmidt. In France, he relied sometimes on the weak liberals and sometimes on the few Christian Democrats. He was a victim, like Monnet, of the anti-European Gaullists. He found in the energetic Schmidt a strong supporter. Both of them spoke English quite well and thought rationally. They made Europe into the political reality that it is today. This is a Europe “that can be grasped with bare hands”, as Kohl later said, and not of empty words and rhetorical flights of fancy that are without practical fulfilments.
He followed in the footsteps of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and Otto von Habsburg when he pushed through the first direct popular election of the European Parliament in 1979, which underpinned European sovereignty beyond the nations, but also through the creation of the European Council with the heads of government. Giscard saw that Europe lacked an executive and that the illusion that the European Union would be formed by the abolition of nation-states was utopian, simple-minded and outdated. This opinion was apparently shared by the EU MP Otto von Habsburg, elected in 1979, who was so active and passionate about the freedom and self-determination of the then-Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe.
We owe to Giscard the first election of the European Parliament by universal suffrage which established in 1979 the European sovereignty beyond the nations, but also the creation of the European Council of Heads of State and Government because he saw that Europe lacked an executive and that the illusion of creating a united Europe through the abolition of states was misguided. Above all, it is to Giscard and Schmidt that we owe thanks for the glue that holds Europe together, namely the Economic and Monetary Union symbolized by the Euro.
They achieved this arithmetic by reducing and stabilizing variations in the monetary exchange rates – the “currency wars” that are poison for the economy and the union – by creating a virtual currency of reference, which under Kohl and Mitterrand would become the Euro, and a common fund of national central banks – the origins of the European Central Bank.
The other European countries adhered to this French-German project, except the United Kingdom, which Monnet had brought into the EEC. Brussels has just put an end to this British adventure. After all, Giscard was the organizer of the Lisbon Treaty of 2009, as a replacement for the European Constitutional Treaty that he drafted, which failed in 2005.
In the years 1978-79 in the opinion polls in France, fear of Germany turned to admiration and in the eyes of the French, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) became France’s best ally. Many wanted even a common Franco-German government of Europe. What a magnificent success it was coming from a man who was born in Coblence, the son of a French occupier, and who at the age of 18 joined the army that liberated Paris from the German occupiers.
*Published as part of the ”European Letters“ by the Coudenhove-Kalergi Society.