Twenty-two years after French voters cast him out of the Elysee Palace, former President Valery Giscard d'Estaing won his place in history on Friday by offering the European Union its first constitution.

His intellect still as razor-sharp and his manner at least as patrician as when he ruled France in the 1970s, Mr Giscard scored a personal triumph by uniting disparate national and political interests behind a draft that proposes a major, if incomplete, overhaul of the way the EU does business.

Among the innovations are a full-time president of the European Council of national leaders and an EU foreign minister, more decision-making by majority voting and a greatly simplified legislative and legal system.

Cast in the role of Europe's Benjamin Franklin at the grand age of 77, Mr Giscard towered from start to finish over the 16-month-long constitutional debate in the Convention on the Future of Europe which opened in February 2002.

He provided moments of bitter controversy, such as when he declared that EU candidate Turkey was not part of Europe and should never join the bloc, or when he published his personal proposals for reshaping EU institutions without consulting his colleagues on the Convention's steering presidium.

He also supplied lighter moments. When federalists angrily demanded more rapid progress on integration last summer, Mr Giscard placed an onyx Chinese tortoise with a dragon's head, Wu Kei, on his rostrum as a symbol of his stately but steady method.

The dome-headed statesman savoured victory without undue modesty on Friday, telling the final session of the 105-member forum: "Our tortoise mascot has come a long way, and as they say where it comes from, slowly but surely it has reached its goal."

To critics who argued he was too old to rekindle enthusiasm among young people for European integration, Mr Giscard replied that Franklin, one of the fathers of the US constitution, was 81 when the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia to draft it in 1787.

Despite early negative publicity over an unsuccessful bid for a princely salary for his role, Mr Giscard convinced EU leaders and parliamentarians alike that he had the political skills, legal expertise and mental agility to fulfil the task.

His most outspoken critic in the Convention, Austrian Greens member Andreas Voggenhuber, paid tribute to him at the end.

"In the end, you were not the Jupiter of this Convention, delivering his own baby. You have been a midwife to this Convention - the sort of task that Socrates would have required... You have indeed earned my respect," he said.

And another Austrian delegate, Hannes Fahnleitner, told the final session: "We men, who all behave like little Giscards at home - authoritarian, obsessed with our goals, determined - should learn a lesson from the great Giscard as to how to behave in future to get things done."

Mr Giscard faced the daunting task of steering national and European parliamentarians, representatives of member states, candidates and the European Commission towards consensus on issues that have eluded a solution for half a century.

Federalists accused him of being a pawn of the big member states, determined to increase their power, while Eurosceptics such as Danish Euro-MP member Jens-Peter Bonde accused him of centralising ever more powers to Brussels.

Mr Giscard swatted critics on both ends of the spectrum with equal aplomb. He cautioned those impatient to extend majority voting to foreign policy that if that had applied during the Iraq crisis, it would have torn the EU asunder.

Mr Giscard's personal history made him a natural candidate to take on the task of drafting a first European constitution.

One of a dozen big names linked to the rebuilding of Europe after World War Two, he helped lay the foundations for the euro by co-founding the European Monetary System in 1979 to stabilise European currencies by linking their exchange rates.

He also initiated the regular summits of EU leaders, known in EU parlance as the European Council, as well as the direct election of the European Parliament by voters.

Born in the German city of Koblenz under French occupation of the Rhineland in 1926, he saw European unity as a matter of peace or war, like others of his generation.

Mr Giscard was profoundly influenced in the 1950s by Jean Monnet, the French official who was one of the EU's founding fathers. It was in Monnet's Paris office that he first met a "young and brilliant" German called Helmut Schmidt.

Two decades later, the French and West German leaders together helped launch the European Monetary System that paved the way for today's single currency, the euro.

When French voters turned their backs on him in 1981, partly because of his reputation for arrogance, Mr Giscard responded by turning his back on them. He ended a melodramatic farewell television address by walking out of the studio as the camera lingered on his empty chair.

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