Jean-Claude Trichet, previously known as the ayatollah of the strong franc, brings a track record of fierce independence to his ECB presidency, writes Laura Marlowe in Paris

When Mr Jean-Claude Trichet appeared before the European Parliament's committee for economic and monetary affairs last week, he ruffled feathers back in Paris by dissociating himself from his government's lax budgetary policy. "I am not here as a Frenchman," the governor of the Banque de France responded - in English - to British and German MEPs who sought to tar him with French budget deficits.

Mr Trichet (60) passed the hurdle of the committee hearing effortlessly. He is the sole candidate to succeed Mr Wim Duisenberg as president of the European Central Bank, and barring an unforeseen calamity the European parliament will vote its approval on September 25th. His nomination will be confirmed by EU heads of state at a summit in mid-October, and he will move into Mr Duisenberg's office in the Eurotower in Frankfurt on November 1st, for an eight-year term of office.

The Eurotower will seem soulless after the Hôtel de Toulouse, the 17th century mansion once inhabited by an illegitimate son of Louis XIV, where Mr Trichet has reigned over the Banque de France for the past decade. He transformed the French central bank from a subsidiary of the treasury department into a legally independent body, then stuck so stubbornly to his policy of parity with the deutschmark that he became known as "the ayatollah of the strong franc".

French politicians - including the then presidential candidate Mr Jacques Chirac in 1995 - accused Mr Trichet of stifling economic growth to fight inflation. But Mr Trichet refused to lower interest rates and observed the strictest monetary orthodoxy, ensuring that France entered the euro system with its finances in order.

Mr Trichet's office is decorated with Louis XVI furniture, and he sat before a glass case filled with leather-bound editions of the Pléiade classics for our background chat.

Except for the chiming of a gold clock on the mantelpiece every quarter hour, the Hôtel de Toulouse seemed silent, its gilded, frescoed, reception rooms frequented by ghosts.

So was it difficult to be a Frenchman? I asked. Mr Trichet laughed, implicitly acknowledging his country's reputation as the prodigal child of the euro system, exceeding the 3 per cent ceiling on deficit spending for the third consecutive year and running the risk of a €3 billion fine.

France, with Austria, is the only EU country where public spending exceeds 50 per cent of GDP - 53.4 per cent to be exact. This week, the EU Commission turned down Paris's request to be allowed to bail out the private company Alstom with €300 million in government funds.

Mr Trichet wasn't trying to deny his nationality at the parliamentary hearing. "When I myself attend the \ governors' council," he explained, "each of us is there not as a representative of a nation or of national interests, but as the guardian of a currency, gaining the most accurate possible idea of the supreme interest of the zone. That is the fundamental rule of the Treaty of Maastricht. It is really as wise men, as guardians of the currency on behalf of the entire zone and in the interest of its 305 million inhabitants. What is true for the governors of national central banks is obviously all the more so for the perhaps future president of the European Central Bank. At the end of the day, it is a question of inspiring confidence. A currency is a sort of crystallisation of confidence."

Mr Trichet's whole persona is bound up in that quote: the guardian of a currency; the Holy Grail of the Maastricht Treaty; the cautious inclusion of the word "perhaps" about the high office he will accede to in little more than a month; the stress on confidence. Of three pages of quotes that I submitted to him, transcribed verbatim from a tape recording of our meeting, this was the only one whose publication he authorised unaltered.

In a recent editorial, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung predicted that despite his reputation as a scourge of budget deficits, Mr Trichet would find the Frankfurt job less than comfortable. "He will be confronted with all sorts of pressures from French politicians, who will consider that the new strong man of the central bank is 'theirs'. Rough times are ahead for the ECB," the German newspaper said.

The German editorialist obviously didn't know Mr Trichet. Mr Chirac reportedly defended Mr Trichet's candidacy because he knew that no other Frenchman would be welcomed by his European peers. But relations between the two men have never been warm, in part because Mr Trichet was seen as a protégé of Mr Édouard Balladur, the erstwhile Chirac rival and former prime minister who appointed him governor of the Banque de France.

The most recent friction between Mr Trichet and Mr Chirac occurred this summer, when the central bank governor sent the president a letter outlining the conditions for economic growth. The first condition, he noted, was "a healthy budgetary policy" - a scarcely veiled dig at Mr Chirac's allowing French budget deficits to climb to 4 per cent.

In his Bastille Day interview three weeks earlier, Mr Chirac has appealed for a "temporary easing" of the terms of the stability pact. Mr Trichet excluded the possibility of breaking "the European consensus on not changing the Stability and Growth Pact".

True to character, Mr Trichet then took Le Monde to task for suggesting that he had wanted to "give Mr Chirac a last lesson in healthy management".

But Mr Trichet was at it again last week, telling the members of the EU parliamentary committee that their governments had to cut public spending. The task is particularly difficult in France, where Mr Trichet has struggled to uproot an entrenched belief that government spending stimulates growth.

And he is the most ardent defender of the stability pact, in a country whose politicians denigrate the European agreement. "It was very daring to introduce a single currency without a state or a federal budget," Mr Trichet told the parliamentary committee. "With the pact, we dispose of a tool for keeping the budgets of different countries under surveillance."

France is probably the most politically polarised country in Europe, and it is something of a miracle that Mr Trichet has managed to rise above partisan politics. In 1961, as an engineering student in Lorraine, he worked for a while in a coal mine. In a rare radio interview with the French journalist Anne Sinclair on RTL last month, he described the work, "several hundred metres under ground, sometimes in extremely narrow coal veins, a metre or 90 centimetres wide, crawling between the stanchions with a pick-axe and sometimes the water seeped in". It was, Mr Trichet said, "a very, very strong experience that marked me a great deal". The son of a French literature professor, Mr Trichet briefly joined the left-wing PSU (unified socialist) party of Michel Rocard and Pierre Mendès-France after his coal-mining experience.

"And then, I took my distance, and I had no political commitment, a sensibility but not a political commitment, after this first, very young commitment," he told RTL.

After graduation from France's highly competitive civil service academy, the École Nationale d'Administration, a stint running the committee in charge of failing state-owned industries transformed Mr Trichet into a believer in liberal economics.

"I was deep into the real economy, and I must say that at the time, the dominant theory on the left seemed to me very, very far from what was necessary to make the real economy function," he said. He worked for three right-wing governments, but miraculously hung on through socialist administrations.

Left and right "are not at all the same," Mr Trichet has said. But on such crucial issues as European integration, monetary strategy and the economic modernisation of France, "there was a meeting of the minds. The left and right followed a same strategy in France". From his vantage point at the Hôtel de Toulouse, he came to embody that "meeting of minds".

Mr Trichet reportedly wants to give the ECB a profile commensurate with its importance as the central bank of the world's second largest economy - not unlike that of the US Federal Reserve. He is expected to make longer term plans than his predecessor, but the most immediate change will be in the ECB's communications style.

With his blunt pronouncements, Mr Duisenberg more than once brought chaos to financial markets. There is not a chance of that happening with Mr Trichet, who weighs every word as if it were a gold ingot. He has excluded publishing the minutes of European Central Bank deliberations, or the voting record of the governors. The Financial Times aptly refers to his "Delphic obscurity" - after Pythia, the priestess of the Greek God Apollo, to whom questions had to be submitted in writing. The cryptic answers were written down in verse and returned by male prophets.

Mr Trichet once hesitated between a literary career and engineering, in which he earned a degree before moving on to political science. One of his favourite words is "exalting"; in 45 minutes on the radio, he used it four times, always in a different context. The construction of Europe, contact with French coal miners, reading Chateaubriand on the ramparts of Saint-Malo and working as a public servant were all "exalting" he said. He even talked about his love for the poetry of Villon, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry and Senghor, and quoted the first stanza of Baudelaire's Cats.

But Mr Trichet channels the unruly emotion of poetry, breaks it into composite parts, then finds a resonance in finance.

"Poetry brings together rhythm, rhyme, scansion, stanzas... " he tells me under the chandeliers in the Banque de France. "It is probably much determined by mnemotechnics, by the necessity to remember, by the desire to render the verses inalterable. A piece of money perhaps has something in common with poetic technique. It is a value which must remain inalterable and unaltered." Mr Trichet reacted to the worst experience of his career - his trial this year in the Crédit Lyonnais banking scandal - with his usual circumspection.

His predecessor at the Banque de France and former head of the IMF, Mr Jacques de Larosière, wept when he and Mr Trichet were cleared of wrongdoing. Mr Trichet uttered a laconic, "I am moved."

The decision made it possible for Mr Trichet to assume the presidency of the European Central Bank. As the Governor of the Banque de France wrote in another context, in an article about Victor Hugo's dream of a single European currency, "One had to know how to wait... One also had to know how to act at the right moments."