Former French foreign affairs minister Roland Dumas dies at age 101 after scandal-filled career

He died on Wednesday July 3 in Paris at the age of 101. The office of President Emmanuel Macron of France announced his death in a statement, but his cause of death has not been announced.

Dumas was one of the highest-profile officials in France for two decades, and was the foreign affairs minister. He was known to be a longtime confidant of François Mitterrand, the Socialist former president, but before he entered politics he was a journalist and a lawyer.

He worked in his various roles for several decades, but in the 1990s he became involved in the Elf affair scandal which brought a sharp end to his political career.

Dumas was the son of Élisabeth Lecanuet and Georges Dumas and was born in Limoges, a city in southwest-central France, on August 23 1922. He was educated at the local lycée, or secondary school, then attended Roman Catholic college in Lyon, the capital city in France’s Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region.

While studying, he helped the French Resistance, groups who fought the Nazi occupation of France in the 1940s, to hand out ‘Free French’ leaflets. He was also involved in staging a protest against a performance by the Berlin Philharmonic, which got him jailed for three weeks.

He then helped Jewish people to flee France into Switzerland, and was given the Croix de Guerre, a French military decoration given to reward feats of bravery, after liberation.

He then studied to be a lawyer and was admitted to the bar in 1950 and, along with fellow lawyer and future justice minister Robert Badinter. In 1951 he married a former Miss Greece, Théodora Voultepsis, but they divorced three years later. In 1956 he was elected to the national assembly, and after Mitterrand became president in 1981 he was appointed minister of European affairs in 1983 and then foreign minister between 1984 and 1986. He also held the role for a second time between 1988 and 1993. He became a good friend and ally of the president, who once said: “Dumas can do anything once he applies himself.”

In 1995, Mitterrand appointed Dumas to be president of the country’s constitutional council, which has responsibility for ensuring that constitutional principles and rules are upheld across the French system.

He resigned from the role in 2000, however, after being found to be involved in the Elf affair, in which millions of pounds had been discovered missing from the state-owned oil company and were then found to have financed French political parties and improper deals abroad.

A year later, in 2001, he faced a corruption trial due to the scandal. He was sentenced to six months in prison, but he was cleared on appeal two years later.

Dumas is survived by his second wife, Anne-Marie Lillet, who he married in 1961 but separated from in the 1980s, and by their three children; Delphine, David and Damien.