Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the forgotten president | EUROtoday

L'History is merciless, a cruel and blind man-eater, whose reminiscence, greater than selective, reduces the nice historic figures to a single picture, typically damaging, that of losers, losers, not all the time magnificent. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing is undoubtedly a sufferer of this media Moloch which freezes you without end in caricature. That of the empty chair left after his televised intervention, throughout his defeat in opposition to François Mitterrand, in May 1981. The picture remained frozen, indelible. A departure that resembles a ceremony for the useless.

The vanquished are all the time mistaken, it’s well-known. Giscard, like Napoleon III, after the defeat at Sedan in 1870, was locked into this picture of the vanquished, erasing, in a type of amnesia, his seven years in energy…