(He had not yet divorced his first wife but was saved from bigamy on a technicality; he had not registered his new marriage in Las Vegas with the French consulate.)Medecin had always been attracted to the far right He was an indefatigable defender of apartheid. He insisted that his total earnings were pounds 10,000 a year. After marrying a young Californian, Ilene Graham, in 1979, Medecin spent more and more time in the United States. Medecin fils ignored this metaphorical advice, making provocatively public alliances with local hoodlums.By siphoning off a part of the city’s income with a series of front organisations, he made himself a multi-millionaire but declined to pay taxes. His father once memorably said that it was impossible to run Nice without finding a role for the city’s gangsters but you should “never give them a lift in your car”.

For the many thousands of former Algerian colonists who moved to Nice, Medecin was the man who insulted de Gaulle publicly and went out of his way to make them welcome.He ran Nice along the lines of a newly industrialised nation or an old- style American city hall: machine politics, cronyism, patronage and a non-stop political campaign. With a series of costly leisure and sporting projects, he made the city cosmopolitan, trendy and expansive again after it slid into genteel torpor under the mayorship of his father, Jean, during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1982, in a celebrated pamphlet (never published in France) entitled J’Accuse, Graham Greene, a resident of nearby Antibes, excoriated the deepening corruption of the Cote d’Azur and the political-business- criminal network surrounding Medecin in particular.Even though he skipped to South America in 1990 to avoid charges of tax evasion and pillaging the city’s finances – charges for which he was extradited in 1994 and served one year in prison in France – “Jacquou” remained until his death a hugely popular figure in his home town.The people of Nice – or a majority of the people of Nice – forgave him everything. He counted among his friends Jean-Marie Le Pen, the President of the National Front, and several of the leading figures in the syndicates of organised crime and corrupt business which have tarnished the reputation, and the sky- line, of the Cote d’Azur in the last three decades.
He once said: “I’ve never met a Jew who would refuse a present, even if it was one he didn’t like.” Much the same could have been said of Medecin himself. To others, he was a crook, an embezzler, a womaniser, a fantasist and a racist.

As mayor, or dictator, of Nice for 24 years, he counted among his mortal enemies Charles de Gaulle, Graham Greene and Francois Mitterrand. JACQUES MEDECIN, the disgraced former mayor of Nice who has died in exile in Uruguay at the age of 70, was a lovable rogue Lovable to some, at any rate. Margaret Mary Elliott, historian of science: born London 26 April 1921; Historian and Archivist, UK Atomic Energy Authority 1959-66; Reader in Contemporary History, University of Kent 1966-72; Professor of the History of Science, Oxford University 1973- 86; Fellow of Linacre College 1973-86; FBA 1975; FRS 1988; CBE 1991; married 1944 Donald Gowing (died 1969; two sons); died London 7 November 1998.. They were also among those who felt the pain of her last years most keenly, as Alzheimer’s disease, to her all too manifest distress, gradually undermined her capacity for work. There she enjoyed the informality of a common room in which her warmth was reciprocated and in which contacts with a fellowship that included some of the university’s most eminent scientists made a signal contribution to her work.Members of the college shared her pleasure at the recognition that came in such abundance in her Oxford years, including honorary doctorates from the universities of Leeds, Leicester, Manchester, and Bath, a Festschrift (Science, Politics and the Public Good, 1988, edited by Nicolaas Rupke), and her appointment as CBE in 1991. She was devoted to her two sons, Nicholas and James, fiercely loyal in her friendships (not least with a number of younger scholars to whom she lent unstinting support), and generous in her appreciation of those (Hancock, George Allen, Richard Titmuss, Christopher Hinton, and Rudolf Peierls among them) who won her respect.Of the institutions she graced, none retained her affection more than her Oxford college, Linacre.