He repeats it over and over again. Since his appointment last Wednesday, it has been impossible not to see Michel Barnier in the words “Montagnard” or “Peasant”. “I have the calm of the old troops and the mountain dwellers”, he reassured a few days ago, to the Tribune du Dimanche. “Don’t be impatient… I am a peasant, a mountain dweller, one step after another”, he replied on the subject of the date of the formation of the government.
Adjectives or language elements that are not new. Thirty years ago, when Michel Barnier was questioned before the Senate as Minister of the Environment, he already spoke of his “good sense as a mountain farmer” and claimed to be a “mountain dweller” on several occasions. The same in 2004, when discussing EU enlargement: “In these last few metres before the summit, as a good mountain dweller, I have full confidence in the Irish presidency, which has patiently guided us to this altitude”, he said when he was Minister of Foreign Affairs. Nine years later, “he is sober, a mountain dweller”, Barnier assumes in a portrait drawn up by Libération.
In short, Michel Barnier has been repeating for decades that he is a mountaineer. And it works, since the adjective is attached to his name year after year in the media.
An industrial father, a committed Catholic mother
A metaphor that can sometimes have a boomerang effect, since his opponents who would nickname him “the idiot of the Alps”, believed the Swiss press in 2017. Expressions that directly refer to the departments where he grew up: Isère, where he was born, then Savoie, where he grew up between Albertville and Bourg-Saint-Maurice. However, Michel Barnier’s career seems far from that of a mountain dweller or a farmer.
His father, now deceased, was the boss of a small local business and his mother, also deceased, was a committed Catholic and feminist, who had founded the League against road violence of Haute-Savoie after a personal tragedy.
Studies in Lyon then in a prestigious school in Paris
He quickly headed to Lyon for high school, then to Paris to continue his studies and join the École supérieure de commerce de Paris alongside Jean-Pierre Raffarin, a prestigious school considered the world’s oldest business and management school, from which he graduated at the age of 21.
At 20, still a student, he gave his first television interview, as a member of the high committee for youth, sport and leisure, created by the president a few months earlier. Because Barnier had been interested in politics since he was 14.
Co-president of the organizing committee for the 1992 Winter Olympics
Michel Barnier then devoted himself to politics, where he quickly rose through the ranks. A year after finishing his studies, he was put in charge of a mission in a ministerial office, then became the youngest general councillor in France at the age of 22, being elected in Savoie. At the same time, he held a series of councillor positions in ministries in Paris, until he was elected at the age of 27, the youngest member of parliament, still in Savoie. Enough to keep a link with his mountain.
A link with the mountains that he would strengthen by co-chairing the organizing committee for the Winter Olympics in Albertville, from 1982 to their organization in 1992. A project that came to fruition around a “fondue or raclette” in Val d’Isère with Jean-Claude Killy, he tells l’Équipe.
A career spent mainly between Paris and Brussels
From 1993, he held a series of positions that took him away from Savoy: minister, senator, European commissioner, MEP, Vice-President of the European Commission and then Brexit negotiator. In 31 years, only four years were not occupied by national or European positions.
Years notably occupied by a position at the Council of State and as vice-president of a holding company bringing together a group of companies in the field of biology or as special advisor for defense and security policy to the European Commission.
He maintains his connection with the mountains and Savoie, in the media, by posing in particular for Paris Match in his village of Saint-Martin-de-Belleville, on the occasion of the 2021 LR primary, or by posting different photos of the village on the days when he goes there to vote, he confided in 2021 to a journalist following him as part of the primary campaign.
As for the link with the farming world that he claims, Michel Barnier was of course Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries for two years between 2007 and 2009. Regarding origins, the Geneanet blog only finds professions linked to the farming world among certain ancestors several generations ago, mainly on the maternal side. Enough to qualify as a farmer?
