2023-04-25 14:07:16
François Léotard, former Minister of Culture between 1986 and 1988, then Minister of Defense between 1993 and 1995, died at the age of 81. His death was announced by Emmanuel Macron on social networks.
“François Léotard served the State and carried a great idea of culture, wrote the President of the Republic on Twitter. With his passing, we lose a free spirit, a man of books and commitment. His native Var, the France he defended, the Republic he loved are experiencing a great loss today. »
The death of the former deputy, elected four times in his Var constituency, was also commented on by Renaud Muselier, the president of the southern region. He hailed the memory of a “statesman and territories”.
A potential president
Former boss of the late UDF from 1996 to 1998, François Léotard had been minister during the two cohabitations under François Mitterrand: of Culture (1986-88) in the government of Jacques Chirac, then of Defense (1993-95) in the government of Edouard Balladur. “A man of conviction and commitment, the armies remember him as a man deeply attached to the sovereignty and independence of France,” said Minister of the Armed Forces Sébastien Lecornu.
Precocious and suspicious, sporty and stressed, this politician in whom many saw a potential presidential candidate had left politics in the 2000s. Struck by “weariness”, François Léotard will then explain that he “no longer supported” the political world, his aspect of “prostitution”, made of “flattery” and “lie”, that he had to find “his own language”.
Electoral failures and legal troubles – sentencing in 2004 to ten months in prison suspended for money laundering and illicit financing of a party in the Karachi affair – had also weakened him.
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