(30 Sep 2019) STORYLINE:
Jacques Chirac, a two-term French president who was the first leader to acknowledge France's role in the Holocaust and defiantly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, died September 26th 2019 at age 86.
His son-in-law Frederic Salat-Baroux told The Associated Press that Chirac died "peacefully, among his loved ones."
He did not give a cause of death, though Chirac had had repeated health problems since leaving office in 2007.
His death was announced to lawmakers sitting in France's National Assembly, and members held a minute of silence.
Mourners brought flowers and police set up barricades around his Paris residence, as French people, and politicians of all stripes, looked past Chirac's flaws to share grief and fond memories of his 12-year presidency and decades in politics.
Chirac was long the standard-bearer of France's conservative right, and mayor of Paris for nearly two decades.
He was nicknamed "Le Bulldozer" early in his career for his determination and ambition.
As president from 1995-2007 he was a consummate global diplomat but failed to reform the economy or defuse tensions between police and minority youths that exploded into riots across France in 2005.
Yet Chirac showed courage and statesmanship during his presidency.
In what may have been his finest hour, France's last leader with memories of World War II crushed the myth of his nation's innocence in the persecution of Jews and their deportation during the Holocaust when he acknowledged France's part.
With words less grand, the man who embraced European unity - once calling it an "art" - raged at the French ahead of their "no" vote in a 2005 referendum on the European constitution meant to fortify the EU. "If you want to shoot yourself in the foot, do it, but after don't complain," he said. "It's stupid, I'm telling you." He was personally and politically humiliated by the defeat.
His popularity didn't fully recover until after he left office in 2007, handing power to protege-turned-rival Nicolas Sarkozy, who praised his predecessor Thursday in a tweeted statement.
Chirac, he said, "defended with panache the very particular place of France in the great international disorder" of the post-Cold War era.
Chirac ultimately became one of the French's favourite political figures, often praised for his down-to-earth human touch rather than his political achievements.
In his 40 years in public life, Chirac was derided by critics as opportunistic and impulsive.
But as president, he embodied the fierce independence so treasured in France: He championed the United Nations and multipolarism as a counterweight to U.S. global dominance, and defended agricultural subsidies over protests by the European Union.
In 2002, he presciently made a dramatic call for action against climate change, raising awareness at a time when the world did not seem to notice, or care.
"Our house is burning down and we're blind to it. Nature, mutilated and overexploited, can no longer regenerate and we refuse to admit it," he said at the Johannesburg World Summit, adding that the 21st century must not become "the century of humanity's crime against life itself."
After two failed attempts, Chirac won the presidency in 1995, ending 14 years of Socialist rule. But his government quickly fell out of favour and parliamentary elections in 1997 forced him to share power with Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.
The pendulum swung the other way during Chirac's re-election bid in 2002, when then-far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen took a surprise second place behind Chirac in first-round voting.
He did not attend the trial.
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