Roland Dumas was arrested after organizing a boycott of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra by French students.

Because of this, he became close to François Mitterrand, president of the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance (UDSR) party, himself suspected in the same scandal.

As a member of the renewed Socialist Party (PS) led by Mitterrand, he became deputy for Gironde in 1973, then for Dordogne on the occasion of the "pink wave" of 1981.

In 1974, he acted as defence lawyer for Hilarion Capucci, who was prosecuted in Israel on charges of smuggling weapons into the country for the PLO.

He was the French Foreign Minister during the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, the Gulf War, and the negotiations of the Maastricht Treaty.

In June 2013, during an appearance on the French news channel La Chaîne parlementaire, Dumas claimed that British officials had been preparing for intervention in Syria two years before the start of the Arab Spring.

Dumas' conviction for criticising a public prosecutor in his book was found unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights in 2010, by five votes to two.

[4] In May 2007, Dumas received a 12-month jail sentence (suspended) for funds he mis-appropriated acting as executor of the will of the widow of Alberto Giacometti.

During an interview on BFM-TV, Dumas stated that the prime minister "has personal alliances that mean he has prejudices... Everyone knows he is married to someone really good but who has an influence on him," an apparent reference to Valls' wife, Anne Gravoin, who is Jewish.