The previous French international affairs minister and MP Roland Dumas, who has died aged 101, was as soon as described as “a person of a thousand sides … and a thousand lives”.
Dapper, suave and effectively linked, he led a charmed life, first as a journalist and lawyer, then as a politician, confidant to the Socialist president François Mitterrand and head of the nation’s constitutional council.
Often known as Mitterrand’s “Prince of Intrigue”, he loved a glittering political and mental profession spanning 75 years, till it resulted in certainly one of France’s largest postwar sleaze and affect peddling scandals.
The information journal Le Level mentioned his life learn like an “journey story”. “The person lived as if from a e-book, and for a very long time … the whole lot about Dumas’s life smacks of romance, proper all the way down to his title,” it wrote, a reference to the Three Musketeers novelist Alexandre Dumas, who was no relation.
Dumas was a pure diplomat: charming, seductive and cynical, attributes he deployed in worldwide circles in addition to in his personal life. He thought-about energy finest wielded by an informed, cultured elite by which he included himself.
The individuals of Périgueux within the Sarlat area of south-western France, who elected him twice as their MP within the Eighties, had been of much less concern. The native mayor Louis Delmon described him as one thing of a dilettante. “He didn’t become familiar with the issues that involved individuals, and wasn’t a constant spokesman for them,” he mentioned.
Trying again at their relationship, Christine Deviers-Joncour, his lover and the girl on the coronary heart of the Elf affair scandal within the 90s that resulted in jail for her and courtroom for Dumas, was equally equivocal. Dumas was “good”, she mentioned, however “he has two sides to him: black and white. I want to consider the white and neglect the opposite.”
Born in Limoges, Roland was the son of Élisabeth Lecanuet and Georges Dumas, a tax official. His father, a member of the French part of the Employees’ Worldwide, which was banned by the collaborationist Vichy authorities after the German occupation of France, was executed by firing squad two days after being arrested in 1944.
Roland was educated first on the native lycée, then at a Roman Catholic school in Lyon, the place he helped the Resistance to distribute Free French literature and was concerned in staging a protest towards a efficiency by the Berlin Philharmonic, which bought him jailed for 3 weeks. He additionally helped Jews flee France into Switzerland, and was given the Croix de Guerre after liberation.
He thought-about and rejected a profession as an opera singer – he had a high-quality tenor voice – and dropped journalism to check legislation. He was admitted to the bar in 1950 and, together with fellow lawyer and future justice minister Robert Badinter, through the years he defended shoppers corresponding to Luciano Pavarotti, Marc Chagall and the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. As a pal of Pablo Picasso, he carried out the artist’s want for the portray Guernica to be returned from the US to Spain as soon as the nation had a democratic authorities.
In 1956 he was elected to the nationwide meeting, and after Mitterrand grew to become president in 1981 he was appointed minister of European affairs in 1983 after which international minister between 1984 and 1986, occupying that submit for a second time between 1988 and 1993. He grew to become a staunch pal and ally of the president, who mentioned of him: “Dumas can do something as soon as he applies himself.” Presidential aides would add that Mitterand “has two attorneys: Badinter for the fitting, Dumas for the unsuitable”.
Dumas’s time within the international ministry was marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union and German reunification, and he was steadily dispatched because the president’s private emissary on secret, some suspected shady, missions to the Center East.
In 1995 Mitterrand appointed Dumas to be president of the nation’s constitutional council, which has accountability for making certain that constitutional rules and guidelines are upheld throughout the French system.
He resigned in 2000 after being implicated within the Elf affair, by which thousands and thousands had been found lacking from the state-owned oil firm and had been discovered to have financed French political events and shadowy offers overseas.
Deviers-Joncour, who had been recruited by Elf in 1989 after her relationship with Dumas started, had a beneficiant wage, limitless bills and a superb condominium on Paris’s Left Financial institution, whereas her solely qualification for the job gave the impression to be her relationship with the international minister.
Prosecutors argued he will need to have identified the lavish presents she gave him, together with statuettes value tens of hundreds of kilos and handmade Berluti boots costing £1,200, had been funded by Elf to win his affect. At his 2001 corruption trial he was sentenced to 6 months in jail, however he was cleared on attraction two years later.
His authorized travails continued in 2007, nevertheless, when as executor of the desire of the sculptor Alberto Giacometti he was given a 12-month suspended sentence for “abuse of confidence” over the sale of the artist’s statues.
In 1951 he married a former Miss Greece, Théodora Voultepsis; they divorced three years later. He’s survived by his second spouse, Anne-Marie Lillet, whom he married in 1961, and by their three youngsters, Delphine, David and Damien. The couple separated within the 80s.
