A young man who sold communist newspapers on the streets of Paris and signed a Soviet-backed petition against nuclear weapons somehow became France's ultimate conservative icon, a president who resumed nuclear testing, opposed the Iraq War, and was eventually convicted of corruption and parodied as a superhero called Super Liar.

This biographical profile explores how Jacques Chirac, president from 1995 to 2007, became the defining figure of modern France through sheer political survival and endless contradiction. We trace the restless energy of his early years, the patronage machine he built as mayor of Paris, and the Gaullist doctrine that made his swerving consistency make sense.

• His radical youth selling L'Humanite and his odd detours into Sanskrit, sailing, and a Missouri brewery
• How becoming mayor of an office abolis ...