French ex-foreign minister Roland Dumas dies aged 101

French Socialist politician Roland Dumas, who was a long-serving foreign minister under president Francois Mitterrand, died on Wednesday aged 101, two members of his entourage told AFP.

The son of a French Resistance hero shot by the Gestapo during World War II, Dumas was his country's top diplomat from 1984 to 1986 and from 1988 until 1993, and then president of the country's highest judicial body, the Constitutional Council.

"He was a character from a novel. As a lawyer, he was talent and modesty personified. When you met him, you learnt something," fellow lawyer Marcel Ceccaldi told AFP.

Jacques Attali, a former aide to Mitterrand, recounted that even "after seeing his father shot dead by the Nazis, he became a great actor in Franco-German relations."

Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti saluted a man he described as "a great lawyer then a major politician and finally the president of the Constitutional Council."

"He left his mark on the history of the Fifth Republic," the system of government in France established in 1958, he said on X, formerly Twitter.

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