Politicians from around the world have paid tribute to the former French president Jacques Chirac who has died at the age of 86.

“President Jacques Chirac died this morning surrounded by his family, peacefully,” his son-in-law Frédéric Salat-Baroux announced. The road near his Paris home was protected by police in the afternoon, as the French parliament observed a minute’s silence.

The country’s president, Emmanuel Macron, in a speech from the Elysée, paid tribute to Chirac, calling him “a great Frenchman”. He said Chirac was “a familiar face: whether we shared his ideas or not”. He said that he brought the country together.

He that Chirac championed a “proud and independent France” on the world stage and “protected France from extremism and hate”.

The Elysée Palace will be open to the public on Thursday evening so people can write in condolence books. There will be a day of national mourning on Monday.

Richard Ferrand, the head of the lower house, said Chirac was larger than life and likened him to a literary character. “In Chirac, France has lost a hero from Alexandre Dumas: charmer, fighter and much deeper than he wanted to appear.”

Ferrrand said: “The French people have lost an indefatigable republican, visionary, attentive to the great debates of his time ... Jacques Chirac is part of the history of France. A France in his image: spirited, complex, often full of contradictions, always driven by a tireless republican passion.”

The French Green politician David Cormand said that what stood out about Chirac on the French right was that he “refused” any linking up with the far right, a critique of how later leaders on the centre-right increasingly courted far-right voters.

In 2002, Chirac was re-elected president with 82% of the vote after the Front National’s Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked the nation by getting into the final round run-off. Chirac won because much of the leftwing electorate voted for him in order to stop the far-right leader. The left later complained that Chirac did not adjust his politics to take into account that leftwing vote. Cormand called Chirac the “last Gaullist”.

The former socialist president François Hollande hailed Chirac as a “fighter” who “knew how to create a real link with the French people”.

Paris’s socialist mayor, Anne Hidalgo, said the city was “grieving”. The European commission president and former Luxembourg premier, Jean-Claude Juncker, was “moved and devastated” to learn of Chirac’s death, a spokeswoman said, adding that Europe was losing a “great statesman”.

Twice elected head of state in 1995 and 2002, his 12 years in the Élysée Palace made him France’s second-longest-serving postwar president after his socialist predecessor François Mitterrand, with one of the longest political careers in Europe.

Chirac with German chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1997. Photograph: Reuters

On the international stage, Chirac will be best remembered for angering the US with his public opposition to the 2003 war in Iraq. This stance, which saw France turn away from its US and UK allies, won him approval ratings of 90% at home.

Marine Le Pen, head of the far-right National Rally (formerly the Front National) and daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, paid tribute to Chirac for his stance on Iraq, saying he was “capable of opposing madness and the war in Iraq”.

Tony Blair, who was infuriated with Chirac at the time of the Iraq war, hailed him on Thursday as “a towering figure in French and European politics over many decades”.

Vladimir Putin heaped praise on Chirac as a “wise and far-sighted statesman” and also singled out “his intellect and huge knowledge”, the Kremlin said. Angela Merkel said he was “an outstanding partner and friend to us Germans”.

During his lifetime Chirac was attacked by the French left for failing to address deep social divisions, unemployment and debt, but was hailed for reconciling the nation with its history by acknowledging that France as a whole was responsible for the roundup of some 76,000 Jews sent to Nazi death camps during the second world war.

Called a “weathervane” for shifting his political ideas so often, he was seen as a master of the art of electoral campaigning and hand shaking. He was an instinctive conservative but with an appeal that extended beyond the right. Chirac also served two stints as prime minister in 1974-76 and 1986-88 and was mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995.

It was his time at the helm of the French capital that resulted, once he had lost his presidential immunity, in a conviction for embezzlement and misuse of public funds. When he left office, he became the first former French president convicted of a crime – receiving a suspended prison sentence after being found guilty of embezzling public funds as Paris mayor in order to illegally finance the rightwing party he led.

Chirac had rarely been seen in public in recent years and was long known to have been suffering from ill health.