经济学人下载:法国前总统雅克·希拉克(4)

A product of France's elite schools, including ena, he was better linked in the public mind with his love of rural Corrèze, where his grandfathers came from: its paysans, its cattle, its cheeses. Compared with his brash successor, Nicolas Sarkozy, he seemed a model of understatement, one of the last French presidents who seemed to embody the nation.作为法国精英学校(包括法国国家行政学院)的产物，在公众心目中他与对科雷塞乡村的热爱有着更好的联系，科雷塞乡村是他祖辈的故土：那里有农民，牛，和奶酪。和他的傲慢的继承者尼古拉·萨尔科齐相比，他似乎是个低调的典范。最后一位拥抱这个国家的法国总统。By 2010 he was France's most admired political figure. His ineffectual latter years belied formidable willpower and political talent, which earned him the nickname, as Prime Minister Georges Pompidou’s troubleshooter in the 1960s, of "the bulldozer". He could charm, too. In 1968 he negotiated a truce with the leaders of protests that had taken France to the brink of chaos. Unlike previous generations of public figures, he was personally untouched by the controversies of the second world war.到2010年，希拉克是最受法国人钦佩的政治人物。他晚年的无能掩盖了他强大的意志力和政治才能，这为他赢得了“推土机”的绰号，在20世纪60年代，他曾是英国首相乔治·蓬皮杜的排解纠纷者。他也有魅力。1968年，他和把法国带到混乱边缘的抗议的领导者达成了停战协议。不像之前的公共人物，他个人没有受到二战的争议的影响。

Perhaps thanks to that, he lanced a historical boil. In a speech in 1995, just two months after taking office, he ended decades of blame-dodging by accepting that France—not just the Vichy regime— bore moral responsibility for the Nazi deportation of 76,000 Jews, most of whom perished. In remarks that seem unremarkable now, he said the "homeland of the Enlightenment...committed the irreparable". He left France with many burdens. But not that one.也许正是因为这一点，他打破了一项历史记录。在1995年的一个演讲里，就在他上任两个月之后，他结束了几十年的推卸责任，他接受了法国-不仅仅是维希政权- 对纳粹驱逐76000名犹太人负有道德责任，其中大部分人丧生。在那些现在看来平淡无奇的话里，他说了“启蒙运动的故乡...犯下了不可挽回的罪行”。他给法国留下了很多负担。但是在这一方面没有。