2023-08-19 18:01:12
Jean-Louis Georgelin, on the site platform built behind Notre-Dame de Paris, December 21, 2022. CORENTIN FOHLEN / DIVERGENCE
The last time we saw him, he was enthusiastically climbing the stairs leading to the site platform built behind Notre-Dame de Paris. Jean-Louis Georgelin was talking loudly, as usual – yelling would probably be the right word –, smiling: “You saw the flying buttress there, oh yes… The hardest part of this type of work is managing the schedule. »
Since Emmanuel Macron, the day after the fire which took place on April 15, 2019, had given him the mission, the reconstruction of the cathedral was his great work. It was on his shoulders, the retired former Chief of the Armed Forces, with a reputation as a braggart, distrustful of technocracy but completely at ease in its mysteries, that now rested the rickety building. “Isn’t this shit pretty?” » Yes, it’s beautiful, we answered timidly, and we will keep this last image of him, watching with relish the scaffolding of the arrow being put in place. Friday, August 18, in Ariège, on the slopes of Mont Valier, General Jean-Louis Georgelin died as he lived, walking fast and hard during one of those solitary hikes he still loved at age 74 in those Pyrenees where he was born.
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Aspet, in Comminges, is just over an hour away. This is where this practicing Catholic was born on August 30, 1948. The maternal grandparents run the large grocery store in this town of 800 inhabitants. His father is a soldier in Indochina and Algeria. During Indochina, his mother lived “folded” here with her three children. The father will end up captain.
The son made Saint-Cyr, science option, while in Paris others erected barricades, before choosing the infantry. “I am an infantryman. Walking allows you to think », he will insist the first time we meet him to illustrate the fact that he comes to the Notre-Dame site on foot. For a non-commissioned officer’s son to become a five-star general is rare enough to be underlined. Within the army, Jean-Louis Georgelin is a child of social ascent… to the highest level.
Jacques Chirac’s private chief of staff at the Elysée, he will be chief of the army staff until 2010 before becoming Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honor. He will thus rub shoulders with François Hollande. He was then caught up in a controversy with Aurélie Filippetti when he began by refusing to hand over the Legion of Honor to Bob Dylan, before giving in – “So I studied it a lot.he said, amused. I discovered its extraordinary popularity, short listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature. » Then comes Nicolas Sarkozy, who just reproached him, it is said, for singing too loudly at mass – “We do not realize his voice, he apologized, but yes, it’s true, I love to sing in church. »
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