Jacques Chaban-Delmas

Jacques Chaban-Delmas (7 March 1915 – 10 November 2000) was a French Gaullist politician. He served as Prime Minister under Georges Pompidou from 1969 to 1972. He was the Mayor of Bordeaux from 1947 to 1995 and a deputy for the Gironde département between 1946 and 1997. Jacques Chaban-Delmas was born Jacques Michel Pierre Delmas in Paris. He studied at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, before attending the École Libre des Sciences Politiques ("Sciences Po"). In the resistance underground, his final nom de guerre was Chaban; after World War II, he formally changed his name to Chaban-Delmas. As a general of brigade in the resistance, he took part in the Parisian insurrection of August 1944, with general de Gaulle. He was the youngest French general since François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers, during the First French Empire. A member of the Radical Party, he finally joined the Gaullist Rally of the French People (RPF), which opposed the Fourth Republic's governments. In 1947, he became mayor of Bordeaux, which was for 48 years his electoral fief. As a member of the National Assembly, he sat with the RPF. In 1953, when the RPF group split (and Charles de Gaulle supposedly retired), Chaban-Delmas became head of the Union of Republicans for Social Action and president of the National Centre of Social Republicans party. He "tied up" with centre-left parties and joined Pierre Mendès-France's cabinet one year later as Minister of Public Works. He took part in the centre-left coalition Re…