Long-serving Chirac bids adieu
French President Jacques Chirac, whose political career spanned 40 years, steps down Wednesday as Nicolas Sarkozy takes the presidency.
from the May 16, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
Truth about history
Chirac's main legacy may be his work to rebalance the historical truth about France, say experts and diplomats. He led efforts to come to terms with and apologize for Nazi collaboration and French colonialism. His apology for the Vichy government was more than a belated reconciliation with the Jews, says one commentator. It was a broader effort to adjust the postwar story of France: Chirac's generation was weaned on a triumphal narrative by de Gaulle, a story in which the majority opposed Nazi occupation.
But the story wasn't accurate, as many learned by the late 1980s. Scholars like Tony Judt of New York University documented that few French resisted.
"Vichy was acceptable to most French people after the defeat of 1940," Mr. Judt notes. "Not [since] it pleased them to live under a regime that persecuted Jews, but because [Vichy] allowed the French to continue leading their lives in an illusion of security and normality…"
Chirac also inveighed against a rosy view of colonialism. Every president has left an architectural stamp on Paris. Chirac's is the Quai Branly museum, devoted to the arts of non-Western cultures.
"A legacy museum of primitive art on the banks of the same river as the Louvre, visited by schoolchildren all over France," says one political commentator. "It wouldn't have occurred to anybody to do this 40 years ago."
The main image of Chirac in the French mind is his charm with the public. Laulan calculated in 1999 that Chirac had shaken "five million to 10 million hands ... It's the old style."
The cabinet adviser notes that, "For most of us, France exists since World War II. We can't really imagine France before that. Chirac was present in the Algeria crisis, the '68 riots.… He is part of French history, and now he is leaving."
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