Marie-France Garaud, former advisor to Presidents Pompidou and Chirac, is dead

This figure of the conservative right was elected MEP in 1999, before supporting Marine Le Pen in the 2017 presidential election.

Marie-France Garaud died on Wednesday, May 22, at the age of 90, at her home in Saint-Pompain (Deux-Sèvres), her son, Jean-Yves Garaud, announced on Thursday. A figure of the conservative right, she was Georges Pompidou’s éminence grise at Matignon then at the Elysée (1967-1974), alongside another influential advisor, Pierre Juillet. She was then, as the magazine wrote Newsweek, “the most powerful woman in France”.

Marie-France Garaud then became the éminence grise of Jacques Chirac, exercising a determining influence during his political rise in the 1970s. She ran for the presidency of the Republic in 1981 against her former foe, Jacques Chirac, to defend a “moral rearmament” from the West, obtaining only crumbs (1.32% of the vote).

She was elected MEP in 1999 on a list led by Philippe de Villiers and Charles Pasqua, then indicated that she had voted for Marine Le Pen during the 2017 presidential election.

The president of LR, Eric Ciotti, welcomed, on Thursday, “an immense figure of Gaullism”while Marine Le Pen paid tribute to a “respected and listened to figure”Who “leaves behind her an indelible mark on French political history”. “No one will forget his independence of mind, his intellectual rigor and his unfailing commitment to defending the sovereignty of France”she added.