Valéry GISCARD d'ESTAING

Biography

Giscard d'Estaing was born in Koblenz, Germany, during the French occupation of the Rhineland. He is the son of Jean Edmond Lucien Giscard d'Estaing (1894 - 1982), a civil servant, and his wife, Marthe Clémence Jacqueline Marie (May) Bardoux, who was a daughter of senator and academic Achille Octave Marie Jacques Bardoux and a great-granddaughter of minister of state education Agénor Bardoux, also a granddaughter of historian Georges Picot and niece of diplomat François Georges-Picot, and also a great-great-great-granddaughter of King Louis XV of France by one of his mistresses, Catherine Eléonore Bernard (1740 - 1769) through his great-grandfather Marthe Camille Bachasson, Count of Montalivet, and by whom Giscard d'Estaing was a multiple descendant of Charlemagne. Despite the addition of "d'Estaing" to the family name by his grandfather, Giscard is not descended from the extinct noble family of Vice-Admiral d'Estaing, that name being adopted by his grandfather in 1922 by reason of a distant connection to another branch of that family, from which they were descended with two breaks in the male line from an illegitimate line of the Viscounts d'Estaing.

In 1948, he spent a year in Montreal where he worked as a teacher in Collège Stanislas.

He studied at Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, École Gerson and Lycées Janson-de-Sailly and Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He graduated from the École Polytechnique and the École nationale d'administration (1949 - 1951). He acceded to the Inland Revenue Service, then joined the staff of Prime Minister Edgar Faure (1955 - 1956).

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