QWhether he wears them or decides to do without them, his glasses marked the career of Jacques Chirac (1932-2019). Like a magnifying glass on the vagaries of its trajectory. In the 1960s, politicians were uncomfortable with glasses, supposed to age you before your time. The deputy of Corrèze, when he wears them – it is not systematic –, makes them an accessory of his panoply of young wolf. In 1968, General de Gaulle’s Secretary of State for Social Affairs wanted to be energetic and credible with his slicked back hair and austere glasses.
In 1974, Prime Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing made his combat portholes a trademark. The caricaturists are not mistaken, who highlight these glasses enthroned on the aquiline nose of the fiery Gaullist. They will alternate suppliers (Dior or the discreet Maison Bonnet), refine and sometimes change color, but they end up merging with the one who, over the years, is no longer the light horse of neo-Gaullism.
The man appears to be restless, say his opponents. Even a loser worn out by two visits to Matignon and two lost presidential elections. “In 1988, after the re-election of François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac went through a dark period, says journalist Béatrice Gurrey, author of Chirac. The secrets of the clan (Robert Laffont, 2015). It was then that his daughter Claude undertook to radically rejuvenate her image. »
Visual crutches
Founding act: take off those glasses that are eating up his face. Beneficiary of the advice of Roger Ailes, American pope of political communication who died in 2017, the new Chirac breaks with his “old right” vests and softens his ways to compose the image of a politician close to the people, walking the hand casually in the trouser pocket. Despite some croquignolesque stagings, like this photo where we see him sitting cross-legged on a lawn with a Walkman over his ears, discovering not really trendy knee-highs, Jacques Chirac is modeling a new envelope, less stiff. With many references to the “social fracture” and an apple tree as a totem, he finally reached the Elysée in 1995.
Ten years later, on November 14, 2005, glasses “à la Chirac” – the name still persists today – unexpectedly returned. The suburbs are on fire and the president must go to the front during a solemn intervention. The detail escapes no one. Two months after being the victim of a cerebrovascular accident which disturbs his peripheral vision, the Head of State cannot read his text on the teleprompter without visual crutches. The Elysée will evoke a banal question of reading comfort. He will even find someone close to him to try to argue that this return of the glasses of yesteryear will have made it possible to “rejuvenate” President.
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