The historian and editorialist Jacques Julliard died at 90

2023-09-08 11:51:22

The announcement of his death, the circumstances of which have not been specified, sparked numerous reactions within the political class, all sensitivities combined.

The historian and editorialist Jacques Julliard died at the age of 90, it was announced on Friday Marianne et Le Figarotwo newspapers for which the intellectual, a figure of the second left, worked.

“Our editorialist Jacques Julliard, theoretician and lover of the French left, has died,” announced on X (ex-Twitter) Natacha Polony, editorial director of Marianne magazine.

“Dear Jacques, you offered Marianne your humanity, your immense culture, your intelligence. Thank you with all my heart,” she added.

“Journalist, academic, historian, trade unionist… From his various positions of observation of society and the political world, Jacques Julliard will have devoted most of his existence to the analysis of the left”, also notes the website by Marianne.

Great Republican voice

For Le Figaro, where Jacques Julliard wrote a monthly column, “he left his mark on French intellectual life.”

The announcement of his death, the circumstances of which have not been specified, sparked numerous reactions within the political class, all sensibilities combined, and the journalistic community.

“A great republican, humanist and socialist voice has just died out. (…) The press has lost one of its finest writers, the left one of its most fertile intellectuals,” greeted the former President François Hollande in a press release.

Pillar of the “New Observer”

Born on March 4, 1933 in Brénod, in Ain, into a family of local notables, Jacques Julliard evolved in a republican environment with a radical tradition. An academic and trade unionist, he has been an activist since the 1970s within the Socialist Party, where he counted Michel Rocard among his political friends.

He distinguished himself there in particular for his project of ideological modernization of the PS, that of the second left, opposed to the first, the mitterrandist. At the same time, from the end of the 1960s, he became one of the pillars of the Nouvel Observateur alongside by Jean Daniel, founder of the left-wing magazine.

He ended up leaving the publication after 32 years of collaboration to join the weekly Marianne in 2010, where he became a columnist. At the age of 84, in 2017, he decided to also write a monthly column for Le Figaro. He had a son in 1963, Jean-François, appointed director of Canard Enchaîné in 2023.