My first assignment for The Irish Times , in October 1996, was to cover French president Jacques Chirac at the EU summit in Dublin Castle.
Chirac was an engaging figure, tall, with a booming voice. We published a photograph of his lips grazing President Mary Robinson’s hand in an old-fashioned baise-main.
At Chirac’s press conference, I asked a question about the umpteenth setback in the so-called Middle East peace process. He greeted me with a hearty, “Bonjour, Eerish Times!” Thereafter, he always referred to me as “Eerish Times.”
That same autumn, I covered Chirac’s landmark trip to the Middle East. The Israelis tried to humiliate the French president by forcing him to use the service lift in the King David Hotel, ostensibly for security reasons.
In Jerusalem’s Old City, the French president rounded on rude Israeli plainclothes security men. “I’m starting to get fed up with this!” he shouted in heavily accented English. “What do you want? Do you want me to go back to my plane?”
The confrontation played well on Arab television. Chirac received a tumultuous welcome in the Palestinian “capital”, Ramallah, which he was the first foreign leader to visit.
I was in the motorcade with a hard-bitten wire agency reporter. As we advanced slowly through the delirious crowd, I tried to hide my own emotion, until I saw tears flowing down my colleague’s cheeks.
In the months that followed, scores of Palestinian women named their babies Jacques Chirac.
Chirac’s talent was to make everyone feel recognised, respected and equal. He seemed to love oppressed peoples, French farmers, civil servants, the middle and working classes equally. His billionaire friends in the Hariri and Pinault families lodged him after he left office, but I never heard Chirac referred to as the president of the rich.
Rafiq Hariri, the Lebanese prime minister who was assassinated on Valentine’s Day 2005, was Chirac’s best friend and financial backer. I saw Chirac weep unabashedly at a memorial for Hariri two years later.
The Presidential Press Association recalled Chirac as “a man of dialogue, who willingly started up conversations with reporters with a warm handshake and a wide grin”.
The annual Bastille Day garden party in 1998 was an occasion of boundless joy. Chirac hoisted the World Cup trophy over his head on the Élysée terrace, surrounded by Zinedine Zidane and Les Bleus. La Marseillaise and We Are the Champions blared over loudspeakers. Chirac ogled Adriana Karembeu.
Nicolas Sarkozy would turn the garden party into a segregated affair. His clique stayed upstairs in the palace while journalists and the plebs milled about on the lawn. François Hollande did away with the tradition altogether.
Chirac organised a European culture fest at the Élysée, where journalists hobnobbed with the likes of Oxford scholar Theodore Zeldin and primatologist Jane Goodall. Chirac’s wife Bernadette was jokingly referred to in the press bus as Maman.
We didn’t realise how good we had it. After Chirac came Sarkozy with his cronyist ways, Hollande’s mortal boredom and Macron’s hauteur. Journalists came to be treated like grubby children, allowed to listen to speeches, then evicted.
Chirac’s politics were elastic. In his youth, he campaigned to ban nuclear weapons. As president, he enraged much of the world by testing nuclear weapons in the South Pacific. Chirac was a trade unionist in the 1970s, a neo-liberal in the 1980s, a social Gaullist in the 1990s, and a rampart against the far right and an environmentalist in the 2000s.
Like certain Irish taoisigh, Chirac was a bit of a rogue. He ran the conservative party he founded through cronyism, brown-paper envelopes and the occasional dip into public coffers.
Voters and media often turned on him. I remember the hounded look on his face at the beginning of his 2002 re-election campaign. He was mired in financial scandal, and polls indicated Lionel Jospin would defeat him.
Chirac’s loyal ambassador to Dublin was furious when I repeated virulent criticism of the president’s blunder in calling a referendum on the European constitutional treaty in 2005.
A colleague from a leading French newspaper lovingly referred to Chirac as “my president” when he left the Élysée Palace in 2007. I wondered if she’d lost her objectivity. But truth be told, I realise now that he will always be my first French president. It was unspeakably sad to learn that he was quietly fading away, that he no longer recognised his most faithful lieutenants.
A quarter century passed in the blink of an eye. I remember Chirac’s presidency as the last gasp of a simpler era, before the internet and globalisation changed life forever.
France mourns Chirac tenderly, with his many faults and virtues.
As Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday night, Chirac resembled the French and brought them together. A chapter in the country’s history, and a chapter of my own life, have closed with his passing.