Charles Pasqua

Charles Pasqua (born April 18, 1927, Grasse, France—died June 29, 2015, Suresnes) was a French businessman and politician who served as the interior minister of France (1986–88; 1993–95).

Pasqua was born to Corsican parents. His father, a policeman, was a member of the Resistance during World War II, as was an uncle who was deported by the Nazis in 1942. By age 15 Pasqua was a courier for the local Resistance network. He began law studies but never completed them. Instead, he held various jobs—wine trader, private detective, and eventually sales director for the pastis producer Ricard (later Pernod Ricard).

By the late 1940s Pasqua was an active militant in Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s Rally of the French People (Rassemblement du Peuple Français; RPF), a mass movement that briefly functioned as a political party. In 1958, during the Algerian War (1954–62), Pasqua created the Civic Action Service (Service d’Action Civique; SAC) to protect Gaullist personalities from terrorist bombings and attacks by far-right French Algerians who opposed Algerian independence.

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Pasqua served in the National Assembly as a deputy for the Hauts-de-Seine département from 1968 to 1976. When Prime Minister Jacques Chirac resigned in 1976, Pasqua became his main ally within the newly formed neo-Gaullist party Rally for the Republic (Rassemblement pour la République; RPR). A brilliant campaigner and political strategist, Pasqua helped Chirac win the crucial job of mayor of Paris in 1977. He then masterminded a series of political attacks against Pres. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing that cost the latter the presidency in the 1981 elections. Once Giscard was out of office, Chirac was established as the natural leader of the right. Pasqua had been elected a senator representing the Hauts-de-Seine département in 1977, but he gave up his seat in 1986 when Chirac became prime minister and duly appointed Pasqua as his interior minister. When Chirac lost to socialist François Mitterrand in the 1988 presidential elections, however, Pasqua accused Chirac of abandoning Gaullist doctrine and even tried to have him removed as leader of the RPR. Pasqua returned to the French Senate during 1988–93. In 1993 he backed Édouard Balladur rather than Chirac for the post of prime minister; after gaining that post, Balladur appointed Pasqua as his interior minister.

Even with his reputation as a tough law-and-order advocate whose main concern was the stemming of illegal Arab immigration and Islamic activism, Pasqua nevertheless moved comfortably among the more traditional politicians, including President Mitterrand, and was thus a key factor in the so-called cohabitation government (a power-sharing arrangement between the socialist president and the conservative prime minister). During Pasqua’s tenure the international assassin Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (commonly known as Carlos the Jackal) was imprisoned, and the French government scored victories against Algerian and Kurdish terrorists. By the end of 1994 Pasqua topped the polls as one of France’s most popular politicians.

In the May 1995 presidential elections, with the goal of gaining the office of prime minister, Pasqua supported Balladur, who ran under a conservative splinter group of the RPR. When Chirac won the presidency, Pasqua was ousted from his position; he reentered the Senate that year. Pasqua left the RPR in 1998 and the following year founded the Rally for France (Rassemblement pour la France). In 1999 he left the Senate and entered the European Parliament, where he remained until 2004. He was reelected to the Senate that year.

Although he denied any wrongdoing, Pasqua was implicated in various political scandals. Notably, he was accused of receiving favours from Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime under the United Nations oil-for-food program (1996–2003). In 2009 Pasqua was convicted of profiting from illegal arms sales to Angola in the 1990s and was sentenced to a year in prison. In 2010 he was found guilty of having embezzled funds from an agency controlled by the interior ministry during his second term as interior minister; the one-year prison sentence for that conviction was suspended, however.

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