Valéry Giscard d'Estaing promised to bring "change" to France. So far, at least, he is delivering. In a carefully staged show of disdain for the pomp of the Gaullist years, he walked rather than rode to his inauguration at the Elysée Palace, wore a business suit instead of tails, talked for a few minutes about a "new era" instead of delivering an oration about the glories of the past. Over the next few days he announced the first of several measures to "relax" French political life. He decreed an end to widespread wiretapping by government snoopers, promised greater freedom for the French press, and placed a ban on sales of arms to unspecified regimes at odds with France's "liberal mission." Said Giscard: "France is a liberal country, and must set its sights further on going in that direction."
The precise nature of Giscard's liberalizing will become clear during the next few weeks, when he reveals his plans to deal with France's serious inflation (now 18%) and bring about his heralded "transformation of French society." But to judge by the Cabinet that Giscard trotted out in a chatty, informal television presentation, it was clear that he is unafraid of a wrenching break with the Gaullist past. After 16 years in power, De Gaulle's self-proclaimed heirs had come to view the government as their own; Gaullists held ten of the 16 Cabinet posts in the late Georges Pompidou's government. But Giscard named a renegade Gaullist, former Interior Minister Jacques Chirac, as his Premier; although the new President needs Gaullist support to get his programs approved by the National Assembly, he added injury to insult by giving only four of the remaining 15 portfolios to orthodox Gaullists.
As he had promised, Giscard brought a woman into his Cabinet. Simone Veil, 46, a prominent Paris jurist, was named Minister of Health. Three posts went to members of Giscard's small Independent Republican Party. No fewer than eight posts went either to nonpolitical civil servants or to leaders of the small center parties that made indispensable contributions to Giscard's wafer-thin margin of victory. One of them was Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, 50, publisher of the weekly L 'Express and self-styled French new frontiersman, who after many years of unsuccessfully striving to project himself as a Gallic John Kennedy, has at last found a national role; as Giscard's Minister of Reform, a new post, he will have a chance to try out his long-advocated proposals for giving more power and authority to local and regional government. Jean Lecanuet, 54, another centrist leader with somewhat more real political clout than J.J. S.-S., was given the sensitive Justice Ministry. Giscard is likely to lean most heavily on three ministers with whom he has strong personal ties: