March 2020. As a beautiful and icy spring is announced, France enters confinement. The first round of municipal elections has just taken place. The LRM candidate for mayor of Paris, Agnès Buzyn, whose lists came third with 17% of the vote, has become a doctor again. She found a base at the military hospital in Percy, in the Hauts-de-Seine, as reinforcements in the Covid-19 unit. In order not to expose the rest of her family, she joined the studio of one of her sons in the evening, who had left to confine himself to the South.
Target of social networks, criticized for its management of the beginnings of the health crisis and its hasty departure from the government, on February 15, it is not well. And takes refuge in work. By “fear of forgetting”, the former health minister has undertaken to write a retrospective diary of the crisis. She peels through her diaries, her SMS, her emails, her Telegram loops, and undertakes to retrace, as precisely as possible, the three most “testing” of his life. Alone every evening, after the hospital, she writes. “This diary saved me from depression”, she says today.
This document of more than 600 pages – which constitutes part of the file at the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR) – begins at the end of 2019 and ends in the summer of 2021. Agnès Buzyn planned to publish a watered down version. Her friends who saw her ” at the bottom of the hole “ after the municipal authorities advised him against it: “By exposing yourself again, you’ll give way to criticism, take care of yourself!” » A Parisian publisher told her banco on principle, provided that she evades nothing and does not seek to protect anyone. “I don’t want to attack anyone, it’s not my style, she dodged. I care about my reputation.
“But you no longer have a reputation!” »retorted the editor, who finally gave up publishing a softened version of the newspaper.
An “ocean” file
The former minister walks on a thread, torn between her loyalty to Emmanuel Macron and Edouard Philippe, who appointed her to the government in 2017, and the wish not to be the only scapegoat for the crisis due to Covid-19 , which caused 150,000 deaths in France. The deputy of Paris Gilles Le Gendre (Renaissance), remained close to her, praises her « force » and his « fair-play ». “Agnès is first and foremost a doctor, a scientist, he recalls. To invite such a rational figure into politics, at a time when the latter is increasingly confused with reason, was an excellent idea. But also a risk of which she now finds herself alone to bear the consequences. »
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