Ex-French president Jacques Chirac honoured for key arts role

Every French pharaoh has his pyramid, symbolising the extraordinary powers invested in the presidency: the Paris airport for Charles de Gaulle;  the museum of modern art for Georges Pompidou, the Très Grande Bibliothèque for Francois Mitterrand.

In the past, they were honoured thus only after their passing.

This week's re-christening of the Musée du Quai Branly as the Musée Jacques Chirac is an exception.

Chirac, who ruled France from 1995 until 2007, is now 83 years old and suffers from a degenerative neurological disease. In his absence, the ceremony on Monday night felt like a premature funeral, with many evoking him in past tense.

Chirac’s only grandchild, Martin Rey-Chirac (21), said the former president “taught us never to show pain or emotion”.

‘Inimitable smile’

On this occasion, the young man could not obey. “I so wish he could stand where I’m standing, with that inimitable smile, to tell you how happy and grateful he is on the 10th anniversary of the Quai Branly.”

"This museum is, completely, the fruit of the will of Jacques Chirac… His presence is everywhere," President Francois Hollande said.

French politicians rarely cross political lines, but Chirac the Gaullist and Hollande the socialist have made exceptions.  Chirac was one of very few conservative legislators to vote for the abolition of the death penalty in 1981.  He long represented the Corrèze department in south-central France, where Hollande, too, made his political breakthrough.  Chirac again crossed party lines to endorse Hollande against Nicolas Sarkozy in the last presidential election.

Chirac embraced the developing world; Sarkozy disdained it.  In 2007, Chirac called Africa “the cradle of mankind”.  That same year, Sarkozy said that “African man has not sufficiently entered history.”

Chirac's protégé, the conservative presidential candidate and possible challenger to Hollande's re-election, Alain Juppé, also attended Monday night's ceremony.  French media noted that the former first lady, Bernadette Chirac – who once supported Sarkozy – kissed Juppé.  A tremor of excitement, a feeling that the right is on the verge of returning to power, ran through the audience.

A large photographic portrait of Chirac hung over the ceremony, in which the former president’s face seemed to morph into an African mask.

Hollande quoted from Chirac’s speech of June 20th, 2006, in which Chirac denounced “this false theory of evolution which claims that so-called primitive cultures have value only as objects of study for ethnologists, or, at best, as a source of inspiration for western artists”.

Chirac fought hard for the museum, in league with Jacques Kerchache, the great collector of what was once known as "primitive" art.  After Kerchache's 1990 manifesto, titled "So that all the Masterpieces of the World may be Born Free and Equal", no one dared assert that western art was superior.

It became politically correct to refer to the art of Africa, Amerindians, Asia and the South Pacific as “first arts” and more recently “distant arts”.

Jean-Jacques Aillagon, who served as Chirac’s culture minister, has curated an exhibition, Jacques Chirac or the Dialogue of Cultures, which will run until October.

Evolution in attitudes

Aillagon wanted to show how attitudes have evolved since the late 19th century, when native Africans and Americans were exhibited like animals in pens in Paris.

“Jacques Chirac grew up in the 20th century, which saw a revolution in the way western cultures viewed distant cultures,” Aillagon explained.  “We travelled a great distance;  from contempt to consideration, from consideration to respect and, at last, to admiration.”

Hollande, who has broken records for unpopularity, may take heart from Chirac’s example. The strikes, riots and political defeats that blighted Chirac’s presidency are long forgotten.  Chirac, too, was unpopular, but he is now viewed with affection.  The exhibition at the Quai Branly portrays him as an enlightened monarch.

Chirac saw western civilisation as the perpetrator of genocides.  “When he went to the US, Chirac had a speech in his pocket on the genocide of the Amerindians,” the author Catherine Clément recalls.

“His advisers managed to persuade him not to deliver that speech.  But he was always on the side of peoples who had been colonised and enslaved.

“He organised an exhibition on the Taíno, the Caribbean people who were wiped out by Europeans.  He was an art-loving, anthropologist politician.”

Keeping France out of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was doubtless Chirac's greatest achievement.

His grandson attributes that decision to the former president’s understanding of other cultures.  “One admires the man who said No to the war in Iraq,” Martin Rey-Chirac said.  “If one looks for the reason, it is here, in this museum.”