But, fully six points above that of his Socialist opponent, Ségolène Royal, it was the highest for a Gaullist candidate apart from Mr Chirac's run-off score against the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002 since Georges Pompidou in 1969.
It is not surprising that Democrats are eagerly comparing him to George Mitchell, the Senate majority leader who destroyed the first Bush administration in the battle of the two Georges.
Georges, Brighton Ha ha, yes.
Neither of the Georges is much given to candour, H.W. because of his WASP-y reserve and W. because he's not a pontificator.
The Massachusetts House of Representatives contains a conspicuous symbol of this: the "Sacred Cod", a 200-year-old fish of solid pine, hanging from its ceiling.Despite this totem, in the late 1980s cod fisheries in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank collapsed.
And by using the global positioning satellite network, vessels' positions can be monitored automatically, as is already the case around the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and the Georges Bank off the coast of Maine.
That brings me to the second person to describe Japanese policy as a game-changer yesterday; Didier St Georges of Carmignac Gestion, the French fund management group.
Celtic Biotech, based in Dublin, is running a series of tests using this molecule on cancer patients at the Georges Pompidou European Hospital in Paris.
These included the Georges Bank off the east coast of America and Canada, where disastrous overfishing for cod threatened the collapse of stocks.On average, the number of species in the 44 sites increased by 23%.
If it does, France could see Communist ministers back in government for the first time since 1984.Since Mr Hue, a former male nurse and one-time judo champion, took over the party from Georges Marchais three years ago, the Communists have shed much of their old Stalinism.
The economy has grown strongly, by 7.3% in 1998 and 8.3% in 1999.But growth is largely confined to tourism, telecoms and construction, which boomed after Hurricane Georges in 1998.
