Chirac Research Articles

A history of the Iraq crisis: France, the United States, and Iraq, 1991–2003

Frédéric Bozo's book was first published in French in 2013, under the rather sexier title: Histoire secrète de la crise irakienne. Now translated into English, it will provide a new audience with a uniquely full and authoritative account of the clash between France and the United States during what the author describes as the greatest—and also the best-documented—international crisis since the end of the Cold War. What makes this account unusual, and often revealing, is that the author gained access to the official archives of both the Élysée Palace and the Quai d'Orsay (Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Lacking similar access on the American side, he makes up for this through the rigorous use of written sources and interviews with some of the senior US officials involved. At the heart of the crisis was a dramatic rift between two very different men: George Bush and Jacques Chirac. While in Paris Chirac was very much in charge of policy-making—despite occasional differences with his flamboyant foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin—in Washington Bush was strongly influenced by a group of close colleagues (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice) with greater experience of world affairs. Perhaps surprisingly, the personal contacts between the two presidents were generally civil. But privately it was a different story: Bush was irked by Chirac's ‘pontificating’ (p. 86), while, for his part, the French leader was appalled by Bush's contempt for multilateralism and his ignorance of the Middle East. Chirac's (unheeded) warnings were to prove prescient. ‘Once you are there [in Iraq]’, he told Bush when they met in November 2002, a few months before the start of the war, ‘you are going to have to stay there for years, and you run the risk of creating battalions of little Bin Ladens’ (p. 159).

Construction d’un ethos post-discursif satirique: le Président Jacques Chirac d’après Le Canard enchaîné

Personality traits constitute an essential component of the image of politicians that spreads through the media. In the particular case of the satirical press, this image is constructed through a process of simplification, exaggeration and alteration which highlights specific traits susceptible of provoking laughter and disqualification. In this study we propose to analyse this image in terms of a post-discursive ethos, thus mediatised and twisted. In order to do that, we take as a case study 234 headlines and 405 political cartoons published by the weekly Le Canard enchaine and referring to President Jacques Chirac (1995-2007) during four periods of great political importance.

Contributors

Contributors

Editorial introductions

Editorial introductions

The impact of extreme-right parties on immigration policy in Italy and France in the early 2000s

In May 2001, the Italian Lega Nord (LN) was included in the coalition government led by Silvio Berlusconi after the general election. A year later, the French Front National (FN) provoked a political earthquake after the passage of Jean-Marie Le Pen to the second round of the 2002 presidential ballot, alongside the incumbent President Jacques Chirac. Drawing from a qualitative methodology, this article compares the LN’s and the FN’s impact on the development of Italian and French immigration policies during Berlusconi’s second term and President Chirac’s last term. Acknowledging the complexity of immigration policy, the article concludes that the LN had a moderate impact in Italy while the FN enjoyed significant impact on policy developments in France. This research highlights the presence of important endogenous and exogenous constraints on the development of this political process in the two cases, which have been neglected in the ERP literature.

Did Chirac Say ‘Non’? Revisiting UN Diplomacy on Iraq, 2002-03

THE STANDOFF BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES and France leading up to the 2003 Iraq War probably “led to the most serious deterioration of transatlantic relations in recent memory.”1 According to a prominent view first advanced by American and British officials and subsequently taken up by academic analysts, President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair made an all-out effort to secure United Nations (UN) approval before invading Iraq, but French president Jacques Chirac's public veto threat on 10 March 2003 doomed that effort to failure.2 Put differently, France's determination to use the UN Security Council (henceforth SC or UNSC) as an instrument for “soft balancing” American power made UN approval unattainable.3 This article challenges that conclusion. Chirac only threatened to veto the particular draft resolution then on the table, leaving open the possibility of a future French abstention on the use of force in case the UN weapons inspectors determined that Iraq had clearly failed to cooperate. Building on this insight, I develop a counterfactual thought experiment using new evidence from declassified documents and more than a dozen interviews that I conducted with senior American, British, and French officials. What emerges from this evidence is that the Bush administration would have stood a good chance of securing a French abstention and ultimate UN approval for the use of force—had it been willing to postpone the start of military operations by up to six weeks and endorse a set of demanding (and, we know now, virtually impossible to achieve) benchmarks for Iraqi compliance, as proposed by Britain and several nonpermanent members of the SC. In short, there are strong indications that President Bush failed to secure UN approval primarily because he was unwilling to make even tactical concessions to his SC partners and deviate from a timetable for war set months in advance.

The cinema of Jacques Chirac: governing the French film industry, 1995–2007

During his two presidencies, Jacques Chirac was a vigorous advocate of France's system of state assistance to the film industry. The cinema, and culture more generally, were and are promoted by the country's political class as areas of vital national interest, usefully invoked in their relations with voters during and between elections. From 1995 to 2007, the President of the French Republic, working at different degrees of remove with Ministers of Culture in governments of right and left, repeatedly brought state attention to bear on the condition of French film production, distribution and exhibition. Beginning in 1995 with the possibility of enlisting culture as a means of addressing la fracture sociale, officers of state worked to devise means for French filmmakers to prosper through vagaries in the evolution of television broadcasting, to weather the storms of globalization, and take advantage of digital technologies threatening to throttle their revenue streams. Throughout these years, Jacques Chirac took the stage at home and abroad to advance and defend ‘a certain idea of France’ and the cinema's role in its culture.

Editorial introductions

Editorial introductions

Memory and Forgiveness: Addressing the Legacy of the Dark Years in Contemporary French Politics

On July 16, 1995, Jacques Chirac became the first president to publicly acknowledge the French Republic’s shared responsibility in the persecution and deportation of thousands of Jews to Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Speaking at the anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv roundup, Chirac issued a public apology for the French state’s complicit role in the deportation and extermination of Jews, while emphasizing that the errors committed during the war were a ‘faute collective’ and thus the blame for the deportations had to be shouldered collectively by the French nation. In the years following Chirac's groundbreaking speech, France as a nation has grappled with the notion of a devoir de memoire within the political and cultural frame of contemporary memory of French complicity during the war. However, with this heightened public interest in the French obligation to remember its wartime past, the tension between memory and history has become increasingly palpable and a growing debate on the problematic nature of the call for remembrance has ensued. This essay will examine the ongoing debate surrounding collective memory and history in contemporary French politics as well as the underlying question of whether forgiveness of the French Republic for its actions against Jews during the Dark Years can truly be achieved. By concluding with an examination of Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the aporia of forgiveness, I hope to further explore the symbiotic relationship between political discourse and collective memory and how this affects the reconciliation process in postwar France.

Explaining France's NATO ‘normalisation’ under Nicolas Sarkozy (2007–2012)

Shortly after coming to power in 2007, President Nicolas Sarkozy announced his willingness to ‘normalise’ France's relationship with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). His aim was to reverse a central tenet of Gaullist foreign and security policy which, since General de Gaulle's 1966 decision to withdraw France from NATO's integrated military command, had relied on the country's ‘specific’ status in the Atlantic Alliance. While there had been unsuccessful attempts – under Presidents Francois Mitterrand in 1990–1991 and, most notably, Jacques Chirac in 1995–1997 – at such normalisation over the previous two decades, Sarkozy's move proved successful and, in 2009, France again became a fully integrated NATO member. Despite hints that he would ‘review’ this decision and perhaps reverse it or at least correct it, his successor, Francois Hollande, has decided to maintain the status quo. This article seeks to offer an explanation for Sarkozy's decision and to analyse why it was successfully carried out.

Laïcité: A parallel French cultural policy (2002–2007)

The recasting of laïcité in France between 2002 and 2012 constituted a channel through which succeeding right-wing governments endeavoured to secure a form of cultural hegemony. This article focuses on the period 2002–7. The process leading to the anti-veil legislation of 2004 under President Chirac revealed how this symbolically charged motif once associated with the left had been displaced and integrated into a traditional and restrictive right-wing culture-shaping programme. Interior minister Sarkozy’s endeavours between 2002 and 2004 to fashion an institutional dialogue with Islam in France were initially at odds with Chirac’s programme. However, by 2007, Sarkozy had changed tack to produce an alternative reframing of laïcité, ‘positively’ celebrating the intertwining of national and Catholic cultures, whilst using Islam as a negative foil for the projection of that identity. This laid the groundwork for the subsequent hardening of laïcité debates and the appropriation of the term by the far right.

The Three Myths of France's China Policy

Visiting China for the first time in spring 2013, French President François Hollande reaffirmed France's commitment to a policy defined more than 15 years ago by the Jacques Chirac administration. The Paris' unshaken position towards Beijing is nonetheless puzzling. This “global strategic partnership” has incurred significant economic, ideational and political costs for France, while benefits have remained at best meagre and questionable.

Editorial introductions

Editorial introductions

Isolating Different Factors Affecting Travel Time Reliability in an Observational Before/After Study

It is increasingly recognized that travel time reliability is important to travellers and goods, and hence there is an increasing demand to include reliability in the evaluation and appraisal of transport projects and programs, as a separate factor in its own right. A number of the policy options already in use as congestion mitigation policies have also positive impacts on the travel time reliability. It is therefore important to evaluate impacts of any remedial action separately both for average travel time (congestion) and for variability of that travel time (reliability). The impacts are generally assessed with an observational before/after study. As many things, independent from the system to be assessed, change between the periods before and after the installation of the system, observational before/after studies take also into account a reference site, where the effect of these changes is identified.In a previous paper Bhouri and Aron, (2013) presented the reliability impacts of a managed lane case consisting in a Dynamic Hard Shoulder Running (HSR) during rush hours on a French urban motorway. The study was conducted by comparing reliability indicators based on data collected in 2002 before the implementation of the system and in 2006 after this implementation. Jacques Chirac, former president of France, launched in 2003 an important campaign for road safety and against speeding. This modified the travel time distribution, differently according to the lane. As reliability is based on the percentiles (and not only on averages), it was necessary, in order not to confound the effect of this campaign with the HSR effect, to develop the observational before/after study method for determining that time effect by level of travel time: to do this, the before and after travel time distributions of the reference site are established, then their difference is analyzed as a function of the travel time, taking into account the percentiles. This method and the results are presented in this paper.

Interview with Henry Rousso

Phil Watts and Richard J. Golsan: One of the objectives of our roundtable was to reflect on recent representations of the Second World War, and on works of fiction in particular. To begin, could you comment on this in France, regarding the memory of Vichy? Henry Rousso: When speaking of a phase, I am of course referring to the chronology I adopted in The Syndrome (the most recent American version was published in 1991), which I have since supplemented in Vichy: An Ever-Present Past (published in 1998) and in other, more recent works. (2) In The Syndrome, I had developed a periodization of the memory of after 1944. The term Vichy in this work covered the question of representations of the Petain regime and of the French state, the memory of various forms of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers during the Second World War, and the confrontation of the national conscience with the knowledge that French anti-Semitism had played a decisive role in the implementation of the Final Solution in France. Through this periodization, I identified four phases in the memory of until the beginning of the 1990s: the unfinished mourning phase (le deuil inacheve) from the Liberation to the mid-1950s; the repressions phase (le refoulement) of the 1960s; the Broken Mirror (le retour du refoule) in the early 1970s; and, finally, the obsessions phase (la phase obsessionnelle), characterized by the hypermnesia of memory, beginning in the 1980s. In the 1990s, the question of the memory of reached a new stage when it became a major and recurring public issue. Public opinion confronted the state with the past, demanding that it intervene and make decisions regarding its legacies. The state was put under pressure by various groups, particularly by associations striving for the recognition of crimes that had been committed against Jews by the Regime. This emergence of the impact of public opinion and public pressure, which had already become manifest with the extradition (1983) and subsequent trial (1987) of Klaus Barbie, effected a major shift in representations of the World War II past in France. From that point on, the debate about was focused exclusively, or almost exclusively, on its role in the Shoah. Following the forms of recognition established across the public sphere--wherein the issues of Vichy, of collaboration, and of anti-Semitism were constantly discussed, studied, taught, narrated, and treated in films--everything seemed to point to the idea of official reparation for the crimes that had been committed. Reparation was symbolic in the first instance, taking the form of Jacques Chirac's famous speech in July 1995, which acknowledged France's responsibility in the deportation and mass murder of the Jews. This acknowledgment was decisive for future developments. It acquired a significant legal dimension with the Papon trial of 1997 and 1998, during which, for the first time, a senior French civil servant (and former minister) was condemned for complicity in crimes against humanity. It acquired a financial dimension with the creation of the Matteoli Commission (1997), whose task it was to evaluate the financial damages resulting from the dispossession of Jewish goods. However, this far-reaching political quest for reparation provoked numerous controversies, especially as to whether or not the memory of the Shoah was a memory belonging to a specific community or if it was in fact a broader national memory. This provoked debates about the potential legal continuity between the Regime and the French Republic, which the presidents preceding Jacques Chirac had refused to acknowledge, echoing General de Gaulle's position in 1944. A decision by the Conseil d'Etat, the highest legal institution for administrative justice in France, finally settled the issue in April 2002 when, following the Papon trial, it recognized the civil responsibility of the current French Republic, requiring that it pay half of the damages and financial interests, nearly a million dollars, owed by Maurice Papon to his victims. …

Emphase sur le négatif et couverture informative maigre: deux stratégies rhétoriques pour compenser le positif dans la presse satirique

The satirical press attacks what journalists and cartoonists consider contradictions, abuses and blunders of politicians. It chooses a critical, exaggerated and distorted view, which is polarized toward the negative. In this article we focus on rhetorical strategies used by the satirical press when it refers to measures or statements by political leaders which are seen positively by public opinion. Our main interest is the presidential figure, a favourite target of the satirical press. The corpus analysed consists of headlines, articles and political cartoons which refer to President Jacques Chirac (1995-2007) in the French weekly Le Canard enchaîné. We consider six political events in which the Head of State had a direct involvement. We show that the newspaper generally adopts one of the two following courses of action: either it reduces its coverage in its pages, or it associates the popular measures or statements with negative actions or negative personality traits.

New Caledonia

New Caledonia David Chappell (bio) With two years left before a possible referendum on independence, as stipulated in the Noumea Accord of 1998, local leaders struggled to position themselves for an “exit” from that transitional agreement. The provincial elections of 2014 may decide whether a referendum will be held or perhaps another accord will be negotiated. Fluctuations in metropolitan politics have had a significant impact on New Caledonia, notably in 1958 (when nationalist Charles de Gaulle regained power) and 1981 (when Socialist Fran-çois Mitterrand became president). French presidential elections in May 2012 saw the fall of Gaullist President Nicholas Sarkozy after only one term and the return to power of the Socialists for the first time since 1995, this time under François Hollande. Locally, the year-old alliance between the loyalist Rassemblement-ump (or rump, tied to Sarkozy’s Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) and the pro-sovereignty Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste (flnks) suffered a setback in the June elections to the French parliament. Former territorial President Philippe Gomès’s loyalist Calédonie Ensemble (ce, Caledonia Together) won both New Caledonian deputy seats in Paris. In regional relations, the ce objected to a visit to New Caledonia by Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama of Fiji, the head of the Melanesian Spearhead Group, arguing that he has been a military dictator since his 2006 coup. Labor unions remained active, as the cost of living remained high while world nickel prices plummeted due to a slowdown in middle-class Asian demand for stainless steel. But French development aid continued to flow amid local concerns over lingering social and ethnic inequalities. Sarkozy had proclaimed to French voters that he would strongly defend the “eternal France” of Molière, Napoleon, and Charles de Gaulle, but Hollande reminded listeners that Louis XVI lost his head to the guillotine during the French Revolution and it was the left’s turn to govern the country. Hollande opposed austerity budget cuts during the European Union’s financial crisis and instead wanted to raise taxes on the rich (bbc, 20 April, 28 Sept 2012). Sarkozy had inherited the commitment of his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, to the Noumea Accord, so transfers of self-governing powers to New Caledonia continued, most recently in civil and commercial law and civil security. But Sarkozy had also voiced his personal preference that the country should remain in the French republic, whereas Hollande remained neutral and supported an open public debate among all New Caledonians to decide their future status. Hollande and Sarkozy both wanted to promote more competition [End Page 382] among importers who kept the cost of living so high in New Caledonia, but neither wanted to end the “indexation” that paid French civil servants and retirees almost twice what they would earn in France (nc, 21 April 2012). In the second-round runoff, Sarkozy won 63 percent of the ballots in New Caledonia and 53 percent in French Polynesia, but Hollande won the French presidency; he also won clear majorities in the two Kanak-ruled provinces of New Caledonia and in Wallis and Futuna (pir, 7 May 2012; nc, 23 April 2012). Hollande appointed Victorin Lurel of Guadeloupe as overseas minister, replacing a Gaullist predecessor, also from Guadeloupe. The flnks praised Lurel as a fellow “islander,” while loyalists said he knew nothing about the Pacific (nc, 18 May 2012). In the June elections, the rump lost its long monopoly over local representation in Paris when Gomès and Sonia Lagarde of the ce won in the second-round runoff. At first, it had looked as if the flnks might win the deputy seat for the interior of the main island, Grande Terre, because its two main parties, the Union Calédonienne (uc) and Palika (Parti de Libération Kanak), ran on the same list for once. After receiving a plurality in the first round of voting, Jean-Pierre Djaiwé of Palika was interviewed by the local newspaper before the second round, as was Gomès, who came in second in the interior in the first round, having been mayor of La Foa for twenty years. Djaiwé was pleased that the reunited flnks had clearly beaten the Rassemblement...

Gog and Magog in the White House: Did Biblical Prophecy Inspire the Invasion of Iraq?

A recent book by the veteran journalist Kurt Eichenwald has revived the claim that in 2003 George W. Bush cited biblical end-times prophecy in a futile attempt to persuade Jacques Chirac to join in the invasion of Iraq. “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East,” Bush allegedly told the French president. “Biblical prophecies are being fulfilled.”1 This stunning charge is not new. It was first made by a theology professor at the University of Lausanne in 2007, then by a French journalist two years later. It attracted some attention in Europe but got little traction in America until now. If it is true, it could prove that the United States launched the Iraq war at least in part because of Bush's reading of scriptural prophecy. This essay will assess the veracity of that story, placing it in the context of what is known about Bush's faith and how his religious views may have influenced his Middle East policies. It will show that an important part of the end-times thinking that Eichenwald attributes to Bush reflects an error in Eichenwald's research: it was not spoken by Bush but by the theology professor at Lausanne four years later. Still, the general outline of the story has now been reported by three different sources, each of whom claims to have inside information. Bush has not denied it. Chirac, for his part, may have obliquely confirmed it in his recent memoir: describing the conversation with Bush, he says that Bush saw the invasion of Iraq as “a quasi-mystical mission that he felt was incumbent on him.”2 That comment seems peculiar in isolation. Maybe it was a broad rebuke of Bush for couching his “crusade” against “evildoers” in the language of religious certainty. Chirac's remark was pointed and specific, however, if Bush did cite biblical prophecy in his argument for war. There have been several first-hand reports that Bush has spoken of receiving divine guidance, including instructions to attack al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. So, the idea that Bush's Mideast policy was inspired by apocalyptic prophecy deserves scrutiny.

Vocal Flexibility and Prosodic Strategies in a Professional Impersonator

Voice imitation of a famous personality results in detection and reproduction of some vocal features, including spectral characteristics but also prosody, speech flow, or articulatory patterns. The objective of this study was to describe vocal flexibility in one of the best French impersonators and determine his strategies. Prospective study. We have downloaded the recording of a political speech by former French President Jacques Chirac, who we have chosen for his very specific and recognizable voice. After transcription, we asked one professional impersonator and four control subjects to do several readings in their natural voice and in a spontaneous imitation task (ie, without listening to any of Chirac's recording). To facilitate the control subject's task, we made an additional recording after having them listen to the target sample. Using Praat freeware, we have compared several prosodic measurements taken on each sample: pitch, pitch range, articulatory speed, duration of pauses, and number of pauses. Results showed significant modifications in the participant's prosody and significant differences in the strategies used by the professional impersonator and the control group. The professional impersonator's imitation strategy lies in the reproduction of global characteristics and instant alignment of prosodic variations.

Editorial introductions

Editorial introductions