2023-09-08 22:04:57
Jacques Julliard, in Paris, in January 1996. LOUIS MONIER
Editorialist very present in the written press for more than half a century, the historian and essayist Jacques Julliard died on September 8 at the age of 90.
Born on March 4, 1933 – the same day that Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated as President of the United States – in Brénod, on the Hauteville plateau in Haut-Bugey (Ain), Jacques Julliard came from a family of wine merchants, of peasant ancestry and with a long-standing political commitment. His great-grandfather, Jean-François Julliard (1828-1899) was mayor of the town from the collapse of the Second Empire (1871-1881), and later his son Marius, close to Paul Painlevé, would be a radical general councilor (1904-1919 ). Jacques’ father, Marcien (1896-1960), continued the tradition of his family, becoming general councilor and mayor of the town, from the Liberation to the birth of the Fifth Republic.
No wonder that from childhood, the young man, brought up in the cult of the radical Edouard Herriot, was passionate about parliamentary debates thanks to the Official newspaper, which his father receives. He is enthusiastic about the word and the project of Pierre Mendès France, even if the Gaullian discourse on “greatness” also fascinates him. This gives him two reasons to decry the structural weaknesses of the Fourth Republic, which the constitutionalists Georges Vedel (1910-2002) and Maurice Duverger (1917-2014) point to, advocating a presidential regime in response.
Torn between his mother’s Catholicism and his father’s anticlerical agnosticism, the young man, who left the Bichat college in Nantua (Ain) for the Lycée du Parc in Lyon, maintained a lukewarm Catholicism thanks to the chaplain of the khâgne where he prepared for the Ecole Normale Supérieure, a close friend of the Jesuit Father Henri de Lubac, champion of spiritual resistance to Nazism, close to Jacques Maritain and for a time banned from teaching for « modernisme ». On these bases, Jacques Julliard forged a personal Catholicism which would keep him on the fringes of both cliques and assignments.
Activism
Logically, his first union commitment took him in 1954 to the National Union of Students of France (UNEF), which demanded a “pre-salary” for students, the same year he joined rue d’Ulm as a Germanist. The following year, he joined the journal Esprit and is part of the delegation of normaliens who meets in the summer, in Algeria, some of the future leaders of the National Liberation Front (FLN). Soon, in the wake of the jurist François Borella (1932-2017), charged with undermining state security in May 1957, he approached socialist students, including Michel Rocard, and the CFTC minority led by the philosopher and medievalist Paul Vignaux (1904-1987), champion of the deconfessionalization of the Christian central. He formed a lasting bond with these men and joined the “Reconstruction” tendency of the CFTC. From now on, Jacques Julliard will unfailingly combine a research career and union involvement.
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