Charles Pasqua, French politician and businessman, 1927-2015

Like all successful power brokers, Charles Pasqua made as many enemies as friends.

For the right, he was the last French politician to hold aloft the Gaullist ideal of defending the sovereign authority of the republic. The former interior minister and senator, who has died aged 88, was among the first to decry the dangers he saw to France as a society in immigration and globalisation.

To those on the left, Pasqua was a corrupt authoritarian adept at manipulating people and events, with questionable methods and dubious Corsican friends. This led to a procession of court appearances in recent years on charges of pocketing money and peddling influence — but those were not wont to stick and he avoided prison. Secrets gathered during his two ministerial spells provided useful protection.

Of jowled face and gravelly voice, Pasqua was a larger than life figure who offered brash epithets, from “you have to terrorise the terrorists” to “promises bind only those who receive them”. He enjoyed playing the tough flic as minister as well as a cigar smoking bon viveur.

He turned the wealthy Paris suburb of Haut-de-Seine into his fiefdom, distributing godfatherly patronage to beneficiaries including an ambitious Nicolas Sarkozy, at whose first marriage he was a witness. If stripped of his French patriotism he could well resemble a Chicago political boss of the 1930s. His interests extended deep into the dictatorships of former African colonies.

Born on April 18 1927 of Corsican parentage in the Provençal perfume town of Grasse, where his father was a policeman and his mother worked as a fragrance producer, he left school aged 15 to join the resistance. After the second world war he obtained a law degree in Marseille and talked himself into a salesman’s job at Ricard, rising to be the drinks company’s second-in-command.

Amid a scandal over Bokassa diamonds, his acolytes defaced election posters by putting fake gems in Giscard’s eyes

Pasqua cut his teeth in politics in 1959 at the height of the Algerian colonial struggle when he helped create an informal Gaullist police force, the Service d’Action Civique — a mixture of off-duty police, militants, intelligence operatives and underworld figures.

He came to the fore during the May 1968 student revolt, using SAC operatives to mobilise a big patriotic demonstration that helped restore the authority of President Charles de Gaulle. This led to Pasqua’s election to parliament, where he groomed a youthful Jacques Chirac for office, torpedoing the liberal minded President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s 1981 quest for a second term.

Capitalising on a scandal that was embroiling Mr Giscard in an offer of diamonds from Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa, ruler of the Central African Republic, Pasqua got his acolytes to deface Giscard posters to devastating effect by putting fake gems in his eyes.

Mr Chirac and his followers won the parliamentary election of 1986, leading to a cohabitation in which he served as prime minister under the Socialist President François Mitterrand. He rewarded Pasqua with the powerful home affairs portfolio, in the face of a presidential objection to “that devil”.

Pasqua tightened the rules on citizenship and immigration, which undercut demands from the hard-right National Front. But he was damaged six months into office by the strong-arm tactics he encouraged in the police, which led to the death of a student protester.

Disillusioned with Mr Chirac’s 1988 failure to oust Mitterrand, he switched his support to Édouard Balladur, who gave him back his interior job five years later. Pasqua bitterly opposed the Maastricht treaty on the single currency and became convinced Gaullism had veered off course. He founded a new nationalist party to fight the European parliamentary elections in 1999 and was briefly successful. Thereafter he remained a curmudgeonly presence in the Senate, surrendering his seat in 2011.

He had the satisfaction of seeing Mr Sarkozy win the presidency in 2007 by profiting from favoured Pasqua themes. His last public appearance came in May at the inaugural congress of Les Républicains, Mr Sarkozy’s new party for an intended presidential return.

Pasqua’s only child, Pierre-Philippe, died in February and he is survived by his wife Jeanne Joly. His two volumes of autobiography were ironically entitled Ce que je sais . . . (“What I know”).

Not the least of the undivulged secrets is how he secured the release of a US journalist and two French diplomats, held hostage in Lebanon, just three days before the second round of the 1988 election. Much of the Fifth Republic’s dirty linen, with all its drawing on the Corsican underworld and shady arms dealers to resolve affairs of state, is likely to be buried with him.

Robert Graham