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This former lawyer also chaired the Constitutional Council between 1995 and 2000.
One of the last pillars of Mitterrand’s rule has collapsed. Roland Dumas, François Mitterrand’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, died at the age of 101, franceinfo learned from his entourage on Wednesday, July 3. During the former socialist president’s two seven-year terms, the lawyer held various government positions, first as Minister Delegate for European Affairs between 1983 and 1984, then as a short-lived government spokesperson, before moving to the Quai d’Orsay between 1984 and 1986, then from 1988 to 1993.
A controversial figure in French political life, this former resistance fighter had made a series of remarks and controversial positions in the last quarter of his life. Son of Georges Dumas and Elisabeth Lecanuet, Roland Dumas was born in 1922 in Limoges (Haute-Vienne). His father, director of the octroi and municipal services of Limoges, had led actions in the “army of shadows” as regional head of the infiltration of public administrations, before being shot by the Germans in March 1944, according to the historical site Maitron.fr. At the age of 23, Roland Dumas had been tasked with identifying his father’s remains. “We did something to each of them so that we would recognize them. My father, we cut off his tie. That’s how I knew.”he tells the World in 2015.
Roland Dumas followed in his father’s footsteps during the Occupation and transported weapons for the resistance fighters in the Grenoble region, his biographical sheet details on the website of the National Assembly. He was decorated at the Liberation with the Croix de Guerre and the Croix du Combatant Volontaire. In the post-war period, he completed his law studies and hesitated for a time between journalism at the Economic and Financial Agency (AGEFI), a career as a lawyer and opera singing. “I prepared for the Conservatoire but I don’t know if I would have succeeded in becoming a great tenor because, being at the bar, doing politics and going on stage, that would have been a lot…” he tells the World in 2009.
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He found his way into the courts by getting involved in several cases, such as the Jean Mons affair, named after the Secretary General of Defense accused of giving military secrets to the Communist Party. The far right exploited the political scandal to reach the head of government, Pierre Mendès France, and the Minister of the Interior at the time, a certain François Mitterrand. He then won the first of his five elections to the National Assembly in 1956 in Haute-Vienne, under the label of the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance, the party of the same François Mitterrand. But he was then swept away by the Gaullist wave of 1958.
The name of Roland Dumas is then found in many political trials of the 1960s and 1970s, between the cases involving the “suitcase carriers” (supporters of the National Liberation Front during the Algerian War), the Bokassa diamond affair or that of the “plumbers” of Chained Duck. He regained a seat in the Palais Bourbon by winning a constituency in Corrèze in 1967, but only for one year. It was with the return of the left to power in 1981 that he managed to make a stronghold for himself in Dordogne after being parachuted there.
Having entered the government, he quickly became one of François Mitterrand’s loyalists, his trusted man at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, regularly compared to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, the skilled diplomat who served all the regimes from the Revolution to the Restoration. “His sense of contacts and his friendships allow him to establish his authority. The downside is that he acts alone and mixes diplomacy and media appeal, which is not much appreciated in his ministry.”describe Release in a portrait in 1995. In his book Blows and woundspublished in 2011, Roland Dumas recalls this sentence attributed to François Mitterrand by one of his advisers: “I have two lawyers. For the right, it’s Badinter; for the crooked, it’s Dumas.”
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In March 1993, he was defeated in the legislative elections during the blue wave that forced François Mitterrand to cohabit for a second time. But he bounced back quickly, in 1995, when he was appointed President of the Constitutional Council by the Head of State. Under his supervision, the Sages validated the campaign accounts of Jacques Chirac and Édouard Balladur, despite obvious overspending, as revealed by the opening of the institution’s archives in 2020. Suspected of corruption in connection with the Elf affair, Roland Dumas was convicted at first instance before being acquitted in 2003 by the Paris Court of Appeal. But this affair forced him to leave the Constitutional Council. He was then definitively sentenced to twelve months in prison, suspended, and a fine of 150,000 euros for complicity in breach of trust, in connection with the estate of the sculptor Alberto Giacometti.
Far from responsibilities, he subsequently divided his time between writing his memoirs and speaking in the media. A worthy representative of the Françafrique system, he did not hesitate to create controversy by agreeing, for example, to defend Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo in 2010. He also provoked astonishment and indignation by appearing alongside the cream of the far right during a Dieudonné show in 2006, by questioning the official version concerning September 11 or by declaring in 2015 that Prime Minister Manuel Valls was “probably under the influence” Jewish.
“Old age is a shipwreck”had written in his War Memoirs General de Gaulle on Marshal Pétain. In recent years, the socialists have repeatedly used the phrase regarding the former minister. With the death of Roland Dumas, French political life has lost a vivid memory of the Mitterrand years, a fine connoisseur of the mysteries of power and international diplomacy. But it has also turned the page on an era marked by business and political tactics.