Roland Dumas, a former French foreign minister, agile political fixer and star defense lawyer whose taste for living large proved his undoing, died on July 3 in Paris. He was 101.
The office of President Emmanuel Macron of France announced his death in a statement, which did not specify a cause.
A longtime confidant of François Mitterrand, the Socialist former president, Mr. Dumas was one of the highest-profile officials in France for two decades. His career stretched from the French Resistance to the summit of power, taking in epoch-making treaties, secretive negotiations with world leaders, numerous extramarital affairs, expensive art — works by Picasso, Braque and Chagall hung in his sumptuous apartment on the Île Saint Louis in Paris — and a notorious pair of $2,700 made-to-measure Berluti shoes that featured in a 2001 corruption trial.
Mr. Dumas avoided jail, but his conviction, which was eventually overturned, ended his career. He had already been forced to resign from the presidency of the Constitutional Council, France’s highest appeals body. Christine Deviers-Joncour, a former lingerie model who had given him the shoes while they were having an affair, was not so lucky: She published a memoir called “The Whore of the Republic” (“La Putain de la République,” 1998) and spent five months in prison.
Late in life, Mr. Dumas resurfaced in compromising roles — associating with right-wing extremists, defending an African autocrat, Laurent Gbagbo — that only heightened his notoriety and his alienation from a Socialist establishment of which he had once been a pillar.
Mr. Dumas, with typical insouciance, didn’t care. “Chaos makes me feel younger,” he told Le Monde in 2011 for profile headlined “The Amoralist.” He often compared himself to Talleyrand, Napoleon’s cynical foreign minister.
Like Talleyrand, Mr. Dumas was proud of his lack of ideology, and though he insisted that he had an affinity for socialism because of his lower-middle-class roots, he did not let it get in the way of a lifestyle that for decades was the delight of gossip magazines like Paris Match. To his French critics he epitomized what was derisively called “the caviar left.”
As Mr. Mitterrand’s foreign minister from 1984 to 1986 and from 1988 to 1993, he was guided by an overarching principle: as he put it in his 2011 memoir, “Coups et Blessures” (“Blows and Wounds”), to “bend one’s will to that of the other” — in his case, his boss.
Hostile to Israeli policy, sympathetic to the Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat and suspicious of the United States, Mr. Dumas was in the classic mold of an Arab-sympathizing French diplomat. Before he joined the government, he had been a lawyer for Mohammed Oudeh, the mastermind of the deadly attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
On Africa, Mr. Dumas unquestioningly assumed France’s rights of interference in its affairs as a former colonial power. He quoted with approval what he said was Mr. Mitterrand’s dictum: “What good does it do to change out these leaders? The new one you put in place, he’ll do exactly what the old one did.”
Mr. Dumas was “of an agility and ingeniousness without equal,” the journalist Jean Lacouture wrote in his biography of Mr. Mitterrand, “a negotiator in all senses of the term, joyous, light-footed, audacious, polyglot and polyvalent, barely hindered by ordinary concepts of morality, and who had the good taste not to fall for the same women as his boss.”
Mr. Mitterrand said of him: “I have two lawyers: Badinter for the law,” referring to Robert Badinter, the upright jurist who abolished the death penalty in France, “and Dumas for everything that’s twisted.”
Mr. Dumas’s signature achievement as foreign minister was to help create the Maastricht Treaty, the 1992 foundational document for the modern European Union, which established the idea of European citizenship and provided for the introduction of a European currency.
But like Mr. Mitterrand, Mr. Dumas was skeptical of many aspects of European integration, failing to foresee the rapid collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, believing in the fixed European relationships and borders established after World War II, and, for much of his life, harboring hostility for Germany and Germans.
He traced this sentiment to what he often said was the pivotal event of his life, the firing-squad shooting of his father, a member of the Resistance, by the Germans on March 26, 1944, when Mr. Dumas was 21 and himself in the French underground.
“From that sprang the hatred which pursued me for many years when I encountered Germans,” he wrote in his autobiography, “whether they were young and arrogant, or white-haired war cripples.”
Roland Dumas was born on Aug. 23, 1922, in Limoges, in central France, the son of Georges Dumas, a local official in the French finance ministry, and Elisabeth (Lecanuet) Dumas.
He joined the Resistance in 1941, in Lyon, where he had gone to attend university, and in 1942 he organized a demonstration against a concert by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. The demonstrators were rounded up by the French police, but Mr. Dumas managed to escape captivity and rejoin the underground.
After the war he studied at Sciences Po, the elite French university, and, on a scholarship, the London School of Economics. From 1949 to 1955, he worked as a financial journalist while earning a law degree at the University of Paris and studying at the École des Langues Orientales.
Important political cases soon came his way as a freshly minted lawyer. His silver tongue won acquittal for Georges Guingouin, a celebrated Resistance leader and communist who was accused of covering up his men’s abuses (they had shot several farmers in a postwar purge), and for a high-ranking defense official, Jean Mons, who was accused of leaking official secrets.
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 party founded by Mr. Mitterrand. In 1958, he and Mr. Mitterrand were among the few to oppose Charles de Gaulle’s ascension to the French presidency.
Gaullism and its sequels dominated French politics for the next two decades, and Mr. Dumas, in and out of Parliament, had to content himself with making his fortune as a lawyer — he settled the estates of numerous celebrated artists, including Picasso — marrying rich (including Anne-Marie Lillet, a scion of the Lillet apéritif family), and cementing his alliance with Mr. Mitterrand.
Their turn finally came in 1981, when Mr. Mitterrand was elected president of France and installed Mr. Dumas as foreign minister. His memoirs make clear that he was as entranced by the trappings of power as he was by the opportunity to practice policy.
“Unquestionably one of the most beautiful salons in the republic,” Mr. Dumas wrote at the outset of his tenure, describing his gilded office at the Quai d’Orsay, seat of the French Foreign Ministry. “I sat myself down, not without pride, behind the desk known as the ‘Vergennes,’ after the foreign minister of Louis XVI.”
He served as foreign minister until 1993. Two years later, Mr. Mitterrand appointed him to the Constitutional Council, the summit of a French political career.
In the meantime he had become involved with Ms. Deviers-Joncour, whom the state oil company, Elf-Aquitaine, hoping to curry favor with Mr. Dumas, had hired as a “lobbyist,” showering her with favors to the tune of nearly $9 million, including a luxurious Left Bank apartment. She used the money to give Mr. Dumas valuable ancient artifacts, expensive meals and the custom Berluti shoes, among other things.
Mr. Dumas later suggested that he was unclear about the source of all this spending. That argument was eventually adopted by an appeals court, which threw out his six-month prison sentence in 2003, to the outrage of critics across the political spectrum, who saw France’s protective old-boy network in action.
By then Mr. Dumas had jettisoned any concerns he might have had about his public image, associating with the self-described “humorist” and antisemite Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, propagating conspiracy theories about the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and undertaking the quixotic defense of Mr. Gbagbo, who refused to leave the presidency of the Ivory Coast after losing an election in 2010.
He is survived by Ms. Lillet, his second wife (they were separated but never divorced); a daughter, Delphine Dumas; and two sons, Damien and David. A first marriage ended in divorce.
“In shadow or in daylight, his finesse and diplomatic clairvoyance allowed him to undertake the most delicate missions, secret or official, on behalf of French interests,” Mr. Macron’s office said in its statement, which also acknowledged the “multiple scandals that spattered his career.”
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