Roland Dumas, a former French overseas minister, agile political fixer and star protection lawyer whose style for dwelling giant proved his undoing, died on July 3 in Paris. He was 101.
The workplace of President Emmanuel Macron of France introduced his demise in a statement, which didn’t specify a trigger.
A longtime confidant of François Mitterrand, the Socialist former president, Mr. Dumas was one of many highest-profile officers in France for twenty years. His profession stretched from the French Resistance to the summit of energy, taking in epoch-making treaties, secretive negotiations with world leaders, quite a few extramarital affairs, costly artwork — works by Picasso, Braque and Chagall hung in his luxurious condominium on the Île Saint Louis in Paris — and a infamous pair of $2,700 made-to-measure Berluti sneakers that featured in a 2001 corruption trial.
Mr. Dumas averted jail, however his conviction, which was finally overturned, ended his profession. He had already been pressured to resign from the presidency of the Constitutional Council, France’s highest appeals physique. Christine Deviers-Joncour, a former lingerie mannequin who had given him the sneakers whereas they had been having an affair, was not so fortunate: She revealed a memoir referred to as “The Whore of the Republic” (“La Putain de la République,” 1998) and spent 5 months in jail.
Late in life, Mr. Dumas resurfaced in compromising roles — associating with right-wing extremists, defending an African autocrat, Laurent Gbagbo — that solely heightened his notoriety and his alienation from a Socialist institution of which he had as soon as been a pillar.
Mr. Dumas, with typical insouciance, didn’t care. “Chaos makes me really feel youthful,” he informed Le Monde in 2011 for profile headlined “The Amoralist.” He usually in contrast himself to Talleyrand, Napoleon’s cynical overseas minister.
Like Talleyrand, Mr. Dumas was pleased with his lack of ideology, and although he insisted that he had an affinity for socialism due to his lower-middle-class roots, he didn’t let it get in the way in which of a way of life that for many years was the delight of gossip magazines like Paris Match. To his French critics he epitomized what was derisively referred to as “the caviar left.”
As Mr. Mitterrand’s overseas minister from 1984 to 1986 and from 1988 to 1993, he was guided by an overarching precept: as he put it in his 2011 memoir, “Coups et Blessures” (“Blows and Wounds”), to “bend one’s will to that of the opposite” — in his case, his boss.
Hostile to Israeli coverage, sympathetic to the Palestine Liberation Group chief Yasir Arafat and suspicious of america, Mr. Dumas was within the traditional mildew of an Arab-sympathizing French diplomat. Earlier than he joined the federal government, he had been a lawyer for Mohammed Oudeh, the mastermind of the lethal assault on Israeli athletes on the 1972 Munich Olympics.
On Africa, Mr. Dumas unquestioningly assumed France’s rights of interference in its affairs as a former colonial energy. He quoted with approval what he stated was Mr. Mitterrand’s dictum: “What good does it do to vary out these leaders? The brand new one you place in place, he’ll do precisely what the outdated one did.”
Mr. Dumas was “of an agility and ingeniousness the ultimate,” the journalist Jean Lacouture wrote in his biography of Mr. Mitterrand, “a negotiator in all senses of the time period, joyous, light-footed, audacious, polyglot and polyvalent, barely hindered by abnormal ideas of morality, and who had the nice style to not fall for a similar ladies as his boss.”
Mr. Mitterrand stated of him: “I’ve two attorneys: Badinter for the legislation,” referring to Robert Badinter, the upright jurist who abolished the demise penalty in France, “and Dumas for all the things that’s twisted.”
Mr. Dumas’s signature achievement as overseas minister was to assist create the Maastricht Treaty, the 1992 foundational doc for the fashionable European Union, which established the thought of European citizenship and supplied for the introduction of a European foreign money.
However like Mr. Mitterrand, Mr. Dumas was skeptical of many features of European integration, failing to foresee the fast collapse of Soviet hegemony in Japanese Europe, believing within the mounted European relationships and borders established after World Struggle II, and, for a lot of his life, harboring hostility for Germany and Germans.
He traced this sentiment to what he usually stated was the pivotal occasion of his life, the firing-squad taking pictures of his father, a member of the Resistance, by the Germans on March 26, 1944, when Mr. Dumas was 21 and himself within the French underground.
“From that sprang the hatred which pursued me for a few years once I encountered Germans,” he wrote in his autobiography, “whether or not they had been younger and smug, or white-haired struggle cripples.”
Roland Dumas was born on Aug. 23, 1922, in Limoges, in central France, the son of Georges Dumas, an area official within the French finance ministry, and Elisabeth (Lecanuet) Dumas.
He joined the Resistance in 1941, in Lyon, the place he had gone to attend college, and in 1942 he organized an illustration towards a live performance by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. The demonstrators had been rounded up by the French police, however Mr. Dumas managed to flee captivity and rejoin the underground.
After the struggle he studied at Sciences Po, the elite French college, and, on a scholarship, the London Faculty of Economics. From 1949 to 1955, he labored as a monetary journalist whereas incomes a legislation diploma on the College of Paris and finding out on the École des Langues Orientales.
Necessary political instances quickly got here his manner as a freshly minted lawyer. His silver tongue received acquittal for Georges Guingouin, a celebrated Resistance chief and communist who was accused of protecting up his males’s abuses (they’d shot a number of farmers in a postwar purge), and for a high-ranking protection official, Jean Mons, who was accused of leaking official secrets and techniques.
Aided by his father’s stature as a Resistance hero, Mr. Dumas was elected to the French Parliament in 1956 on the ticket of a small, left-leaning celebration based by Mr. Mitterrand. In 1958, he and Mr. Mitterrand had been among the many few to oppose Charles de Gaulle’s ascension to the French presidency.
Gaullism and its sequels dominated French politics for the following twenty years, and Mr. Dumas, out and in of Parliament, needed to content material himself with making his fortune as a lawyer — he settled the estates of quite a few celebrated artists, together with Picasso — marrying wealthy (together with Anne-Marie Lillet, a scion of the Lillet apéritif household), and cementing his alliance with Mr. Mitterrand.
Their flip lastly got here in 1981, when Mr. Mitterrand was elected president of France and put in Mr. Dumas as overseas minister. His memoirs clarify that he was as entranced by the trimmings of energy as he was by the chance to follow coverage.
“Unquestionably one of the vital stunning salons within the republic,” Mr. Dumas wrote on the outset of his tenure, describing his gilded workplace on the Quai d’Orsay, seat of the French Overseas Ministry. “I sat myself down, not with out satisfaction, behind the desk generally known as the ‘Vergennes,’ after the overseas minister of Louis XVI.”
He served as overseas minister till 1993. Two years later, Mr. Mitterrand appointed him to the Constitutional Council, the summit of a French political profession.
Within the meantime he had grow to be concerned with Ms. Deviers-Joncour, whom the state oil firm, Elf-Aquitaine, hoping to curry favor with Mr. Dumas, had employed as a “lobbyist,” showering her with favors to the tune of practically $9 million, together with an opulent Left Financial institution condominium. She used the cash to provide Mr. Dumas invaluable historic artifacts, costly meals and the customized Berluti sneakers, amongst different issues.
Mr. Dumas later recommended that he was unclear in regards to the supply of all this spending. That argument was finally adopted by an appeals court docket, which threw out his six-month jail sentence in 2003, to the outrage of critics throughout the political spectrum, who noticed France’s protecting old-boy community in motion.
By then Mr. Dumas had jettisoned any considerations he may need had about his public picture, associating with the self-described “humorist” and antisemite Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, propagating conspiracy theories in regards to the terror assaults of Sept. 11, 2001, and endeavor the quixotic protection of Mr. Gbagbo, who refused to leave the presidency of the Ivory Coast after shedding an election in 2010.
He’s survived by Ms. Lillet, his second spouse (they had been separated however by no means divorced); a daughter, Delphine Dumas; and two sons, Damien and David. A primary marriage led to divorce.
“In shadow or in daylight, his finesse and diplomatic clairvoyance allowed him to undertake probably the most delicate missions, secret or official, on behalf of French pursuits,” Mr. Macron’s workplace stated in its assertion, which additionally acknowledged the “a number of scandals that spattered his profession.”