Former Minister of National Education Claude Allègre died Saturday in Paris at the age of 87, his son announced to AFP.
Claude Allègre, who suffered a major heart attack in 2013, had since suffered from health problems and his condition deteriorated last September, the same source said.
This trained geochemist, rewarded with several prestigious prizes for his work, occupied rue de Grenelle from 1997 to 2000, where he experienced a tumultuous tenure, notably because of a projection in which he promised to “degrease the mammoth” of National Education. A phrase “never uttered publicly”, resulting from an “off with a journalist”, “but that’s what remained”, regrets his son Laurent. Claude Allègre was then replaced at the ministry by Jack Lang, which caused a temporary cooling of his relations with his friend and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, whom he had known during his studies.
A member of the Socialist Party from 1973, before joining Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, Claude Allègre was also known for controversial positions on climate change, to the point of becoming a leading figure in France for climate skepticism. Ulcerated by the attacks relayed by the ex-minister in his best-seller, “The Climate Imposture”, more than 600 climatologists wrote in the spring of 2010 to their supervisory minister to denounce the “denigration” and “false accusations” made by a non-climate scientist.
Born on March 31, 1937 to a father who was a professor and a mother who was a schoolteacher, Mr. Allègre, with a good-natured personality but also sometimes “abrupt” and “stubborn” according to his son, never renounced his positions on the subject. “It’s a shame to only keep that, everyone fell on him excessively,” laments his son
