Adieu, Chirac

JACQUES CHIRAC, president of France since 1995, has announced his decision not to run for yet another term. Though only some ten minutes long, his farewell speech was perfectly in character, its boasting indistinguishable from its mendacity.

He was, he said, “proud to have restored essential republican values”- though what these are, and how he restored them, he keeps to himself. And he was “proud to have led important reforms”-there were none, which is why France today has about 9 percent unemployment, an economy stifled by regulation, an unmanageable welfare state, and a national-identity crisis on top of everything. Also “proud to have fought insecurity unceasingly, and to have driven back crime”-though the government recently proved that it could not govern in the face of violence, first from disaffected Muslims and then from youths demanding jobs with guaranteed tenure. “France is maintaining its rank,” he concluded with his usual grandiloquence. “I never ceased acting to serve this magnificent France . . . this France which, believe me, has not stopped astonishing the world.”

JACQUES CHIRAC, president of France since 1995, has announced his decision not to run for yet another term. Though only some ten minutes long, his farewell speech was perfectly in character, its boasting indistinguishable from its mendacity.

He was, he said, “proud to have restored essential republican values”- though what these are, and how he restored them, he keeps to himself. And he was “proud to have led important reforms”-there were none, which is why France today has about 9 percent unemployment, an economy stifled by regulation, an unmanageable welfare state, and a national-identity crisis on top of everything. Also “proud to have fought insecurity unceasingly, and to have driven back crime”-though the government recently proved that it could not govern in the face of violence, first from disaffected Muslims and then from youths demanding jobs with guaranteed tenure. “France is maintaining its rank,” he concluded with his usual grandiloquence. “I never ceased acting to serve this magnificent France . . . this France which, believe me, has not stopped astonishing the world.”