Paris: Dozens of world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, paid their final respects Monday to ex-President Jacques Chirac as France held a national day of mourning for the popular former head of state.
Valdimir Putin and other world leaders joined President Emmanuel Macron for a funeral service at Saint-Sulpice church here, a day after 7,000 people queued to view Jacques Chirac’s coffin at the ‘Invalides’ monument.
Chirac’s death Thursday aged 86 prompted a flood of tributes to the centre-right politician whose career spanned four decades, capped by 12 years as French President from 1995 to 2007.
Chirac’s coffin, draped in a French flag, was carried into the church by his former bodyguards, to applause from around 1,000 onlookers lining the square outside.
Other world leaders attending the last services included Qatar Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier as well as former US president Bill Clinton.
A minute of silence was to be observed in all public institutions and schools Monday afternoon.
Florien, a 26-year-old ambulance driver, rose before dawn in a town 1.5 hours from this city to travel to the capital to pay tribute to the late president, who also served two stints as prime minister. “He was close to ordinary people,” Florien told this agency.
After a private family service attended by Chirac’s 86-year-old widow Bernadette, followed by a military ceremony presided by Macron, the coffin was driven from ‘Invalides’ under military escort through the streets of Paris to Saint-Sulpice.
Paris archbishop Michel Aupetit eulogised Chirac as a ‘warm man’ with ‘a real love of people’.
After the hour-long service the coffin was taken to Montparnasse cemetery in southern Paris, to be buried next to Chirac’s eldest daughter Laurence who died in 2016 aged 58 from anorexia.
One of Chirac’s most significant steps on the international stage was his opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Putin worked intensely with the Chirac in the first phase of his own presidency and the pair were notably united in their opposition to the Iraq invasion.
In unusually gushing comments in an interview with ‘The Financial Times’ in June, the Russian President said Chirac was the modern world leader who had impressed him the most. “He is a true intellectual, a real professor, a very level-headed man as well as very interesting,” Putin had said.
AFP