French President Jacques Chirac on Saturday paid tribute to former prime minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, calling him "a great Gaullist, a great resistance fighter and a great servant of the nation."
Chaban-Delmas died of a heart attack late Friday at his Paris home. He was 85.
In a statement, Chirac described Chaban-Delmas as "an artisan of modern France," saying he learned of his death with "emotion and pain".
The French leader was due to visit Chaban-Delmas' home in central Paris to spend a few moments in the presence of the former resistance leader's body, a presidential spokesman said.
"The day after the 30th anniversary of the death of general de Gaulle, France loses a great Gaullist, a great resistance fighter, a great servant of the nation," Chirac said.
"Jacques Chaban-Delmas was a man of courage and panache who went into service to fight for France, and his reward was to become, in 1944, the youngest general in the Republic at the age of 29," Chirac added.
"Jacques Chaban-Delmas had a passion for the state. Several times a minister, prime minister under president Georges Pompidou he brought an authority, a brilliance to the job of president of the National Assembly (lower house of parliament), that matched his idea of parliament in a major democracy."
"The soldier in the shadows whose name shines in the history of the French resistance was an artisan of modern France," Chirac said.
In his tribute, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin said on Saturday Chaban-Delmas had "a life-long passion for France. He served the nation and the republic where he occupied, often very young, high positions in which he showed the determination of a man of conviction and the energy of a great sportsman."
Jospin went on to say that as prime minister under Pompidou's presidency, Chaban-Delmas "expressed a new vision of French society to modernize our country. Jacques Chaban-Delmas was a great Frenchman." – PARIS (AFP)
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