Jordan Bardella's book, a marketing object powered by Vincent Bolloré

The president of the National Rally, Jordan Bardella, in Denmark, September 28, 2024. INGRID RIIS / AFP

This is the risk when you write an autobiography at 29 years old: unless you mention schoolyard arguments and two mandates crossed like a shadow, you quickly find your pen in the void. When reading What I'm looking for(Fayard, 324 pages) the book by Jordan Bardella published Saturday November 9, we understand the mountains of precautions taken by the National Rally (RN) to maintain secrecy around its content: its fans will not learn much- something they don't already know, and who seeks to understand the political thinking of Jordan Bardella will have lost 22.90 euros. “I can already hear my detractors. They will judge this book to be mediocre, poor and uninteresting.writes the president of the RN in conclusion, as if to defuse possible criticism to be attributed to the supposed activism of the press, one of the guiding threads of the work.

Barely political, even less literary, this marketing object is propelled as Christmas approaches by the conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré, who has got his hands on everything that allows a book to be sold: a powerful publishing house, a group media and the Relay distribution network. “Neither an essay nor a program”warns Jordan Bardella from the outset, the book is intended “the reflection of [son] existence ». But the 324 pages are devoid of any introspection, revelation or new anecdotes on the short life of a man already scrutinized by the press and subject of an in-depth biography (The Great Substituteby Pierre-Stéphane Fort, Studiofact Editions, 240 pages, 20 euros), published in May.

The first third, rewritten during the summer, unfolds the sequence of the European elections (June 9) and the early legislative elections (June 30 and July 7). The young man is only parting the curtain on these weeks when he prepared to be prime minister – we have just learned that he planned to install his ally Eric Ciotti in the ministry of the armed forces. Who, being young, managed to escape military service.

Zemmourist rhetoric

His Italian roots and his childhood in a city of Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis) ultimately occupy only a small part of the work. The MEP fails to question the contradictions between the conditions for the successful integration of his Italian parents and grandparents – residence permit, housing offered by the State, naturalization – and the program he defends at the head of the RN. He dwells on the difficulties of daily life in his city – which is, however, not a cutthroat -, but also recognizes the facilities he benefited from to escape from this environment: schooling in the private Catholic, protective family environment.

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