2024-01-05 22:27:50
Republican guards carry the coffin of Jacques Delors during a national tribute ceremony, at Les Invalides, in Paris, January 5, 2024. LUDOVIC MARIN / AFP
A pale winter sun illuminates the facade and arcades of the Hôtel des Invalides, but the courtyard remains in shadow. In the center, placed on the cold paving stones, the coffin, covered with a French flag. Just above, between two galleries, the giant portrait of Jacques Delors, tweed suit and club tie from another age, who died on December 27, at the age of 98.
Emmanuel Macron chaired, on Friday January 5, the national tribute paid to the former minister of François Mitterrand and president of the European Commission, figure of the “second left” and of Europe, of which he was an ardent promoter. A “great Frenchman” and one “honest European man”summed up the President of the Republic in front of his daughter, the socialist mayor of Lille, Martine Aubry, who was involved in the preparation of the ceremony, as was his former chief of staff in Brussels, Pascal Lamy.
In a sober and sensitive eulogy and, for once, rather brief, Emmanuel Macron retraced the “republican meritocracy course” of this grandson of Corrèze peasants, son of a hat maker mother and a father employed by the Bank of France, disabled since the Great War, who repeated: “We must reconcile. » He spoke of the values of this humanist Catholic trained in the personalist school of Emmanuel Mounier, led by “the sense of duty before the taste for power”who gave up running for the presidential election at the end of François Mitterrand’s two seven-year term, in 1995.
The same method on the European scene
The head of state also praised the ” method “ of this social democrat inhabited by the sense of dialogue and negotiation, busy “build bridges”, “beyond political opposition”. He praised the “talents of conciliation” of a man “who has never conformed to habits or expectations”he who had first chosen to get behind the Gaullist Jacques Chaban-Delmas and his “new society” before becoming the apostle of « transcourants » within the Socialist Party, which he joined in 1974.
Read the obituary: Article reserved for our subscribers The death of Jacques Delors, a great European
Jacques Delors, recalled Emmanuel Macron, played a decisive role in the “turning point of rigor” from 1983, while he was at Bercy, contributing to “reconcile the socialism of the government with the market, and the French with the economy”. “A crest path which moves away from facilities and pretenses, which holds the Nation and Europe, economic strength and social justice, the real and the ideal together”he summarized.
The President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, alongside European representatives, during the ceremony paying tribute to Jacques Delors, at the Invalides, in Paris, January 5, 2024. STEPHANIE LECOCQ / AP
A method which was also his on the European scene, of which Jacques Delors was one of the architects, both patient and obstinate. “The face of Europe today, Jacques Delors helped to draw it, line by line”, insisted Mr. Macron. A reference to the legacy left by Mr. Delors at the end of his double mandate in Brussels (from 1985 to 1995), from the single market to the Schengen area of free movement of European citizens, including the genesis of the euro, in the midst of German reunification, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Erasmus student mobility program and cohesion funds for poor regions. The Head of State used the formula chiseled by the former European leader, a guarantee, according to him, of the proper functioning of the European Union: “Competition that stimulates, cooperation that strengthens and solidarity that unites. »
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