2023-12-29 19:01:48
Jacques Delors was a man of the left. He was also Catholic. A “left-wing Catholic”, in short. And such was his “luck” when he chaired the European Commission from 1985 to 1995, he told the journalist Alain Duhamel, in an interview given a few years after the end of his mandate: “For the heads of government at the time, I had one foot in Christian democracy, and one foot in social democracy. And therefore, I understood both well […] It is the thought of Emmanuel Mounier, the personalist thought, which inspired me, which nourished me and which continues to be the thread of my reflections.”
Jacques Delors was one of the last – undoubtedly the most eminent – representatives of this Catholic social movement. Certainly, it could be tendentious to analyze the entirety of his actions in terms of his faith; However, this is the reading that many of those close to him – and admirers – make of him. “Jacques Delors constantly asked himself the question of his usefulness, and responded to requests: he saw himself as a Servant, in the image of Christ, analyzes Jérôme Vignon, his historical collaborator, notably at the Ministry of the Economy and at the European Commission. It was Jacques Chaban-Delmas who came to pick it up from the planning office; Pierre Massé who wished it to the European Commission!”
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“Landfill Christianity”
The man, as a good Catholic, was attached to the central role and virtues of the family. When he was Minister of the Economy and Finance, it was he who initiated the turning point in François Mitterrand’s rigor, in March 1983. “He considered that there was no national sovereignty without budgetary rigor. Above all, he considered that there was no national sovereignty without budgetary rigor. , he had this sense of the common good, and of the Truth: this is a common point that we, the ‘social cathos’, have”, explains Dominique Potier, socialist, Catholic deputy, from Meurthe-et-Moselle. In Brussels, he works for dialogue with religious leaders, considering it “indispensable for the invention of a true European, democratic and secular citizenship”, as the historian Denis Pelletier recalled in the newspaper The world. In 1994, while he was a favorite in the polls, Jacques Delors refused to compete in the presidential election the following year, convinced that he would not have a majority to carry out his reforms. “Perhaps he could have considered that it was not his vocation?”, asks Jérôme Vignon.
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Employed in his youth at the Banque de France, Jacques Delors was an autodidact in politics. It was in popular education and Christian trade unionism that he learned his lessons. At La Vie nouvelle, a movement stemming from Catholic scouting, close to the community personalism of Emmanuel Mounier, where he deepened his religious commitment with his wife. There, he took over as editor-in-chief of Cahiers 60, a magazine whose mission was to develop political training for the most disadvantaged. At the CFTC, too, where he participated largely, under the patronage of Paul Vignaux, in the deconfessionalization of the union in 1964, and its shift towards socialist ideas leading to the CFDT.
“He was an activist… who was also Catholic, just like me,” François Bayrou confided to L’Express. But, we are not ‘Catholic activists’. It is not a clerical commitment. We do not exhibit not our conviction. We express it when we are put on notice”, concludes the boss of MoDem, who always felt close to Delors in the importance he gave to the “spiritual dimension” of his commitment, of his understanding of the world. “Jacques Delors had a practice marked by the absence of ostentation, which was part of pluralist French society and sensitive secularism in the socialist world. It is a Christianity of burial”, adds Jérôme Vignon. “If the grain of wheat that falls into the ground does not die, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit”: such was his favorite parable from the Gospel. The work of Jacques Delors was prolific; However, he was the last great French “left-wing Catholic”.
“Left-wing Catholics assume less of their Christian identity”
Today, there remains a small handful of representatives of this movement. Dominique Potier is a special case at the Palais Bourbon. The socialist deputy for Meurthe-et-Moselle, admirer of the former president of the European Commission, is one of the last in politics to claim personalism. “Politically, the seed can produce a baobab; but here, it has been dormant for a while,” he quips. In 2013, he founded the “Civic Spirit” reflection circle, to create a link between the “Delors Generation” and that of “Laudato Si”, the 2015 encyclical from Pope Francis on the climate crisis. “The important thing is that the thread is not broken. Social Christianity is certainly not the future of my political family, but without it, the left would be missing something: a deepening, and a broadening of his electoral base,” he says. Last August, her phone rang: Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille, was on the line. She passes her father to him. The latter tells him that he agrees to sponsor his think tank. The socialist deputy perceives the vitality of his current there.
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For others, Jacques Delors died, and the left-wing Catholics forty years before him. “Mitterrand’s success in 1981 was based on the shift of the Catholic west of France to the left. It was, in a way, the end of left-wing Catholics,” analyzes Patrice Obert, the former president of Les Poissons. Roses, a left-wing Catholic think tank that its leaders failed to transform into a PS movement. “For the left, the religious question has no meaning because religion must wither away: that is the meaning of history. And we no longer have a place in the panorama,” he whispers. . The left-wing parties still include some Catholics. Marine Tondelier, the boss of EELV, is one of them – there are many among the Greens – even if she affirmed, in a portrait of Christian testimony, that “religion should not be a fact” nor “a political object”. François Ruffin, the “non-believer Christian” surrounded by Christian activists, too, and even published a book of dialogue with Bishop Olivier Leborgne.
“Left-wing Catholics assume less of their Christian identity, because they are in environments where secularism is often understood as the impossibility of expressing one’s faith in the political sphere. Unlike the right, which promotes a discourse on “values “Christian roots” or the “Judeo-Christian roots” of France, constituting a more favorable breeding ground for the expression of one’s faith”, explains Timothée de Rauglaudre, journalist specializing in religious issues, and author of the book Les Moissonneurs (Ed Escargot, 2022 ). Throughout his political career, Jacques Delors, deeply secular in his political action, was allergic to the idea that a party could claim any religion. A left-wing Catholic, he let the grain of wheat die. And it bore a lot of fruit.
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