The Irrepressible Bulldozer

Although he was assured of an easy victory for his own National Assembly seat, no French politician campaigned harder during the recent parliamentary elections than Jacques Chirac. Hurling himself into the fray, Chirac traveled nearly 200,000 miles, visited some 170 districts and made 150 public appearances. For Chirac, who will return to the offices in the elegant Hotel de Matignon where he served between 1974 and 1976 as Premier under then President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, all the hard work was a natural extension of the drive that has made him one of France's most formidable political figures.

Like Giscard, Chirac began his ascent in the early '60s as an aide to the late President Georges Pompidou, who was so impressed by Chirac's seemingly indefatigable capacity for work that he called him "my bulldozer." After Pompidou's death in 1974, Chirac backed Giscard's candidacy for President. A grateful Giscard rewarded him with the premiership. Believing that he was not allowed enough leeway to carry out his economic policies, Chirac resigned in August 1976 and formed his own party, Rally for the Republic. The following year he was elected mayor of Paris. An able and efficient administrator who regularly puts in 15-hour days, Chirac was overwhelmingly re-elected in 1983.

The only child of a wealthy businessman, Chirac was born in 1932 in Paris and attended the city's top public schools. "Too talkative, too distracted, too excitable to succeed," predicted one school report card. Nonetheless Chirac's grades earned him entrance to the elite Institut d'Etudes Politiques, and he finished third in his class.

After graduation he traveled to the U.S., where he spent a summer at Harvard University studying international affairs, working as a waiter at the local Howard Johnson's and romantically pursuing a South Carolina debutante--without success. When the term ended, Chirac took a job as a chauffeur for the widow of a Texas oilman. Returning home in 1953, he married Bernadette de Courcel, a classmate at the institute who was from a wealthy and aristocratic family. They had two daughters, Laurence, now 28, and Claude, 23. After fighting in the French Foreign Legion during the Algerian war of independence, Chirac enrolled at the prestigious Ecole Nationale d'Administration.

Chirac had joined the Gaullist party when he was only 14, and after leaving the Ecole Nationale he rose rapidly through the party ranks, achieving the position of Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development under Pompidou. "Chirac was like fireworks," remembers one co-worker. "He took off from all sides--his arms, his legs, his ideas."

Chirac still summers at his family's farm in Correze, a picturesque but poor district in south-central France. It was there that he developed the easygoing rapport with the common people that allowed him to run for and win his first elected position, a district assembly seat, in 1967. Even today, the tall, slim Chirac is famous in the district for his prodigious memory for the names and family histories of his constituents--and for his gargantuan appetite.

In political circles, Chirac is better known for his combative nature and his fierce ambition to become President. The new Premier's advisers softened his image during the recent campaign by dressing him in muted tweeds and exchanging his severe black-framed eyeglasses for lighter tortoiseshells. Still, the real Chirac may prove irrepressible. Says Charles Pasqua, the new Interior Minister: "Chirac is a fighter, given to committing himself all the way."