The Emperor of the Fifth Republic

His life, as the poet said, must not be measured by its worth; for then, it hath no end. This repeated catchphrase may not be one associated with the late, very belated Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the third man to serve as president during the fifth republic and captain of its empire and nuclear arsenal (sorry, Alain Poher, but you would go on to serve as the effectual dauphin in the shadows until 1992). But among the gallery of exciting men (sorry, Ségolène, though by your husband's merits you might not regret losing at the moment) he might be the most impressive, 

He arose to this most supreme office in a very narrow pushback - if yet the last - against the leftist incursion ringing its battle cry over France since the spring of 1968. But this was, as would later be apparent, a mere icing on the cake or a plateau on, or beneath, a series of careers in the service of the French magistracy and political administration emerging out of the revolution. At his birth, in Koblenz in then-occupied Ruhr, the Third Republic was into its second half-century, yet hardly measurably on the ropes. The Pyrrhic victory of the great war was felt, however, thus its 

I am convinced he was the greatest to hold the office, maybe since Adolphe Thiers,