Having petulantly staked his presidency
on the outcome of yet another referendum
(on a couple of constitutional
amendments) and lost, de Gaulle once
more took himself off to his country
estate and retirement. He was succeeded
as president by his business-oriented
former prime minister,
Georges
Pompidou.
The new regime was devotedly
capitalist. Pompidou hoped to eradicate
the memory of 1968 in the creation of
wealth, property and competition. His
visions, however, had little time to
attain reality. Having survived an
election in 1972, Pompidou died,
suddenly. His successor - and the 1974
presidential election winner by a narrow
margin over the socialist François
Mitterrand - was the former finance
minister Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
.
Having announced that his aim was to
make France "an advanced liberal society",
Giscard opened his term of office with
some spectacular media coups, inviting
Parisian trash collectors to breakfast,
visiting prisons in Lyon and addressing
the nation on television from his living
room every evening. But, aside from
reducing the voting age to 18 and
liberalizing divorce laws, the advanced
liberal society did not make a lot of
progress. In the wake of the 1974 oil
crisis the government introduced
economic austerity measures. Giscard
fell out with his ambitious prime
minister, Jacques Chirac , who
set out to challenge the leadership with
his own RPR Gaullist party. And in
addition to his superior, monarchical
style, Giscard further compromised his
popularity by accepting diamonds from
the (literally) child-eating emperor of
the Central African Republic, Bokassa,
and by involvement in various other
scandals.
The Left seemed well placed to win
the coming 1978 elections, when the
fragile union between the Socialists and
Communists cracked, the latter fearing
their roles as the coalition's junior
partners. The result was another right-wing
victory, with Giscard able to form a new
government, with the grudging support of
the RPR. Law and order and immigrant
controls were the dominant features of
Giscard's second term
