(b. 5 July 1911; d. 2 Apr. 1974) French; Prime Minister 1962 – 8, President 1969 – 74 The son of a primary schoolteacher, Georges Pompidou was born in the Centre France department of Cantal. He completed his education in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure, the élite training ground for lycée teachers, where he developed a lifelong interest in poetry and the classics. During the Occupation he taught at the Lycée Henri-IV. Unlike other future members of de Gaulle's entourage, he took no part in the Resistance, but was introduced to his future leader in 1946 as "a Normal Sup' graduate who knows how to write". He quickly acquired the confidence of de Gaulle and his wife, and played an important backstage role organizing the political movement, the Rassemblement pour la France, which sought in the late 1940s and early 1950s to be the vehicle for de Gaulle's return to power. After the failure of the Rassemblement he stayed close to de Gaulle (he was treasurer of the charitable foundation de Gaulle established in memory of his handicapped daughter) while pursuing a new — and lucrative — career in Rothschilds Bank. He acted as de Gaulle's private secretary in the hectic months which followed the General's return to power in 1958 and became a member of the newly formed Constitutional Council. He continued to work for Rothschild, however, and was completely unknown to the general public. Thus his appointment as Prime Minister to succeed Debré in April 1962 was a complete surprise and irritated the National Assembly, who regarded the nomination of someone who was not even a deputy as a deliberate snub. In October 1962, his government was overthrown by the Assembly in retaliation for de Gaulle's decision to introduce a referendum on the direct elections of the presidency.
The National Assembly was dissolved, the referendum was carried, and Pompidou remained in office. He quickly asserted his authority over his government and over the new Gaullist majority in the Assembly. Over the next six years, President and Prime Minister formed an effective governing diarchy. Pompidou made no attempt to challenge de Gaulle's high-profile, and controversial, foreign policy and concentrated instead on developing France's industrial strength and on building up the Gaullist Party as an electoral machine capable of existing one day without its founder. There is some evidence that de Gaulle was unhappy at his protégé's increasing authority and it is certain that he planned at one stage to replace him as Prime Minister after the 1967 parliamentary elections. The decisive moment in Pompidou's future career came, however, in the mass demonstrations of May 1968. The May events demonstrated the extent of popular dissatisfaction with de Gaulle's authoritarian style of leadership and led to a major crisis for the regime. Pompidou battled tirelessly to stem the tide of protest. Aided by the most energetic of his protégés, Chirac, he organized round table negotiations between government and trade unions in an attempt to separate the fragile coalition of discontent that linked students and workers. The so-called Grenelle Agreements made substantial concessions to the trade unions. In the short run, they were unsuccessful and in the last week of May, President and Prime Minister looked helpless. There then occurred a crucial moment in the events. Without telling his Prime Minister what he was doing, de Gaulle flew to Germany to assure himself of the support of the commander of the French Army on the Rhine and returned to Paris to make a dramatic broadcast announcing his determination to fight to save the Fifth Republic. It was a turning point. The National Assembly was dissolved, the strikes faded away, and the Gaullists won a massive victory in the June elections. The regime was saved.
May 1968 was also a turning point in de Gaulle's relations with his erstwhile ally. Pompidou bitterly resented de Gaulle's actions in not forewarning him of his disappearance and was outraged at the way in which he was replaced as Prime Minister by Couve de Murville after the elections. He correctly believed that he had played a decisive role in maintaining some semblance of governmental authority during the crisis and was no longer willing to conceal his own political ambitions. In November he announced that he would be a candidate for the presidency at some future occasion. De Gaulle sought to re-establish his own authority by staking it on a referendum but the damage had been done. Pompidou's availability as President reassured enough French conservatives that a vote against the founder of the Fifth Republic was not a vote for the political unknown. The referendum was defeated and de Gaulle immediately resigned.
Pompidou easily won the presidential campaign that followed. He campaigned on a slogan of "change in continuity" and won the backing not only of the Gaullists but of a large part of the centrist electorate, and of its coming man Giscard d'Estaing. He asked the dashing, and reform minded, president of the National Assembly, Chaban Delmas, to form a government but quickly demonstrated that his conception of the presidency was every bit as interventionist as that of de Gaulle. Committed to the development of France's new status as a leading industrial power, he stage managed a successful devaluation of the franc in August 1969, oversaw a policy of company mergers, and indicated that he was prepared to accept Britain's membership of the European Economic Community. He made some attempts to restore France's relations with Washington and made an unsuccessful visit to the United States, during which he and his wife were, to his intense anger, jostled by a group of American Jews who disliked his pro-Arab policy.
The first two years of Pompidou's presidency were trouble free. France's economy boomed and the death of de Gaulle in November 1970 removed his looming, if silent, presence. In 1972, however, things started to go wrong. Part of his difficulties stemmed from the revival of the Socialist and Communist parties and from the semi-failure of the referendum on British membership of the EEC which had been designed to split the newly formed Union of the Left. Another problem was the poor relations between President and Prime Minister. Pompidou grew increasingly irritated at what he regarded as the superficial reformism — and superficiality tout court — of Chaban Delmas. Egged on by advisers who detested Chaban as a threat to the Conservative electorate on which Gaullism depended, he blamed his Prime Minister for the failure of the referendum and for growing discontent on the backbenches. In a brutal display of presidential power, Pompidou sacked his Prime Minister in August 1972, replacing him with the ultra loyalist Messmer. The new government failed to make much impact on public opinion and it was Pompidou himself who, in a strong television performance shortly before the 1973 Assembly elections, managed to swing the result his way by threatening not to co-operate with the Socialist-Communist alliance should it obtain a majority.
The old Gaullist threat — "me or chaos" — was once again successful. But by now Pompidou was a dying man. The victim of a rare blood cancer, in constant pain, he grew fat and lethargic but continued to assert his primacy, making exhausting visits to Nixon in Reyjavik and Brezhnev in Russia. He refused to contemplate resignation or even to allow his illness to become public knowledge, an act of concealment aided by the lack of independence of the French broadcast media. Thus his death in April 1974 came as a shock to the public, although not to the political class who had been preparing for it for some time.
Pompidou was an effective leader whose surface bonhomie concealed a tough, cold interior. If he lacked the visionary qualities of his mentor de Gaulle, he was committed to the model of strong presidential government created by the Fifth Republic and to the modernization of the French economy. The Pompidou Centre in central Paris, which he commissioned, is a fitting memorial to his fascination with high-tech culture and national grandeur.





