Jacques Chaban-Delmas, who died on November 10th aged 85, was prime minister of France between 1969 and 1972, and played a high-profile role in his country's politics for more than 40 years.
He was a leading figure during the Gaullist movements of the fourth and fifth republics and sat in the national assembly almost continuously from 1951 until his death. He was also one of France's most celebrated regional political bosses, using his position as mayor of Bordeaux to build up a network of alliances and clients, which transcended party barriers and led to him becoming known as the Duke of Aquitaine.
He was a man of liberal views, ingratiating charm and inexhaustible energy, yet his 1974 candidature in the presidential election following the death of Georges Pompidou failed disastrously, and he never quite overcame the suspicion of his colleagues that he lacked the political substance, and perhaps even the integrity, to be president.
Jacques Chaban-Delmas was born into a relatively modest Parisian family. Educated at the Lycee Lakanal and, like his political adversary and personal friend Francois Mitterrand, at the Ecole libre des Sciences Politiques, he entered the French administration during the Vichy regime. He played a major role in the internal military resistance and, at the liberation, was appointed military delegate in Gen de Gaulle's provisional government.
His resistance record gave him the double-barrelled surname - "Chaban" was his wartime pseudonym - and, more importantly, a powerful launch-pad into post-war French politics. Originally a member of the centrist Radical party, he soon threw in his lot with de Gaulle's antifourth republic, Rassemblement pour la France, founded in 1947.
In 1958, after the downfall of the fourth republic and with de Gaulle back in power, Jacques Chaban-Delmas showed his drive, getting himself elected president of the national assembly against the general's candidate. He developed a programme of achievable social reform, which could transcend the rigid absolutes of Gaullism and communism. Thus he was an obvious choice for prime minister once Pompidou had won the presidential election which followed de Gaulle's resignation in 1969.
As prime minister, he tried to turn his new-society theories into concrete policies aimed at softening the harshness of France's system of social relations. With the help of a reformist socialist, Jacques Delors, he introduced measures to liberalise an authoritarian broadcasting network and improve industrial relations, which were characterised on both sides by sullen ill-will.
However, he lacked the personal authority to impose his views on his colleagues; on the parliamentary Gaullist party, which, once the 1968 panic was over, was all for cracking down on subversion by the left; and, above all, on President Pompidou. In May 1972, Jacques Chaban-Delmas tried to consolidate his position by asking for, and getting, a massive vote of confidence from the national assembly. But he failed to obtain presidential approval for this act of independence, and, six weeks later, Pompidou sacked him. It was a brutal demonstration of where real power lay in the fifth republic.
Out of office, he sought to establish himself as heir apparent to the Gaullist legacy - or, to put it more bluntly, as the natural successor to the dying Pompidou. Once again, however, things went wrong. While he was still prime minister, the Canard Enchaine newspaper revealed he had used tax breaks to pay no tax for several years, an omission which, though perfectly legal, cast a shadow over his claims to desire a socially more united France.
His innumerable sexual conquests, another point in common with Mitterrand, went uncriticised, but the messy circumstances surrounding the end of his second marriage accorded ill with the conservative morality to which ordinary Gaullists clung.
Things unravelled rapidly after Pompidou died in April 1974. The speed with which he announced his presidential candidacy, even before Pompidou was in his grave, offended many. He also came up against the implacable enmity of the dead president's advisers, and, in particular, of Jacques Chirac, who held the key post of interior minister.
By the end of the first-round campaign, the former prophet of the new society looked as archaic as the Gaullist old guard, whose prisoner he appeared to be. Journalist Francoise Giroud observed that to criticise his campaign was like firing at an ambulance. In the first ballot, he obtained only 15 per cent of the vote and was eliminated from the contest.
It was the end of Jacques Chaban-Delmas's presidential ambitions, but not of his career. In 1978, he regained the national assembly presidency as the candidate of his erstwhile rival, Valery Giscard d'Estaing against that of his irreconcilable enemy, Chirac; and, in 1986, his name was again cited as a possible prime minister in the new climate produced by the need for co-operation between a socialist president and a right-wing assembly. Nothing came of it, but he returned, for the last time, to the national assembly presidency.
By the 1990s, his control over Aquitaine was weakening. Ill health forced him to give up Bordeaux town hall in 1995, after a period in which he had cut a faintly ridiculous figure, endlessly running up stairs when the television cameras were present to prove that his youthful dynamism was intact. There were also signs that his management would not be spared its share of corruption scandals.
If his national policy achievement was slender, his record in Bordeaux shows how much boss politics can achieve in big-city France. For a time, he had managed to present a more attractive face of Gaullism than that offered by many of his rivals, and the pragmatic reformism of the new society has lasted better than the grandiloquent alternatives with which it was unfavourably compared in the early 1970s.
He is survived by his third wife Micheline and two sons and two daughters from his second marriage.
Jacques Pierre Michel Chaban-Delmas: born 1915; died, November 2000