Roland Dumas, a former French foreign minister, agile political fixer and star defense lawyer whose taste for living large proved his undoing, died on July 3 in Paris. He was 101.

The office of President Emmanuel Macron of France announced his death in a statement, which did not specify a cause.

A longtime confidant of François Mitterrand, the Socialist former president, Mr. Dumas was one of the highest-profile officials in France for two decades. His career stretched from the French Resistance to the summit of power, taking in epoch-making treaties, secretive negotiations with world leaders, numerous extramarital affairs, expensive art — works by Picasso, Braque and Chagall hung in his sumptuous apartment on the Île Saint Louis in Paris — and a notorious pair of $2,700 made-to-measure Berluti shoes that featured in a 2001 corruption trial.

Mr. Dumas avoided jail, but his conviction, which was eventually overturned, ended his career. He had already been forced to resign from the presidency of the Constitutional Council, France’s highest appeals body. Christine Deviers-Joncour, a former lingerie model who had given him the shoes while they were having an affair, was not so lucky: She published a memoir called “The Whore of the Republic” (“La Putain de la République,” 1998) and spent five months in prison.

Late in life, Mr. Dumas resurfaced in compromising roles — associating with right-wing extremists, defending an African autocrat, Laurent Gbagbo — that only heightened his notoriety and his alienation from a Socialist establishment of which he had once been a pillar.

Mr. Dumas, with typical insouciance, didn’t care. “Chaos makes me feel younger,” he told Le Monde in 2011 for profile headlined “The Amoralist.” He often compared himself to Talleyrand, Napoleon’s cynical foreign minister.