Unlike his “friend”, the King of France Henry IV, François Bayrou did not convert to Catholicism at the dawn of his 40th birthday. The Christian faith of the new Prime Minister has always constituted an essential pillar of his life and of his political commitment. François Bayrou and his wife Élisabeth gave a Catholic education to their six children – Hélène, Marie, Dominique, Calixte, Agnès and André – some of whom even have a more traditionalist practice of religion than their father. “François Bayrou’s wife is very pious and very involved in the local church,” testifies a Béarnais ecclesiastic. The happy grandfather of 28 grandchildren takes a very critical view of environmental movements which advocate the cessation of procreation and deplores a “slip of transcendence” younger generations. A self-proclaimed Christian Democrat, Bayrou believes that in a world for which God died, there remains a quest for the absolute which is embodied today at a horizontal level in the “fight for the planet”.
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In Pau, François Bayrou frequents the churches of Saint-Martin and Saint-Jacques, close to the town hall. The Prime Minister goes to mass every Sunday. A local clergyman recounts “that he does not try to show himself there, often preferring to place himself at the back of the church, and generally leaving the premises before the end of the service”. He surrendered “once or twice” in a church on the outskirts of the city. “His arrival went very well, one might even think that he is a normal man” testifies the priest, amused. Finally, the Bayrou family got into the habit of going regularly to Lourdes, for the celebrations of the Assumption, or even on foot, on pilgrimage, by no other path than the one named after Henri IV.
Faith also manifests itself in one's personal relationships. This week, when former socialist senator André Vallini had just lost a loved one, François Bayrou sent him a long message of support tinged with religious veneer. A gesture that Vallini, who says he has “in common faith” with the president of MoDem, deeply appreciated.
François Bayrou is very reserved on the subject of the end of life
Faithful to a conception of man which remains imbued with the idea of God, François Bayrou has always considered that humanity should remain at the heart of any political conception. Thus since his beginnings, religious references have punctuated his long political career. During the 2007 presidential campaign, François Bayrou explained that his faith, although intimate, is what “pushes us to want justice and peace for all. » In 2014, at the National Assembly, he confessed: “the foundations of my Christian faith are in love of neighbor, in the search for the common good, in the defense of the dignity of each human being. » In 2015, in the midst of the migration crisis, François Bayrou believes that welcoming refugees is above all “an act of charity”in the same way that he judges that Christian charity must be “the source of our social policy” and that “it is not the State alone that must take responsibility for poverty, but all of us, as a society, as human beings”.
Minister of National Education between 1993 and 1997, in 2018 he assimilated the values of republican education to those found in the Gospel: “live together, respect others and develop an ethical conscience”. In more recent social debates, François Bayrou is very reserved on the subject of the end of life. In May 2023, he clearly takes a position, confident au Figaro : “We have a law to support this passage towards death, but we do not perform a public service to cause death. » And when the idea of charging for access to Notre-Dame is mentioned, the president of the MoDem invokes a “bad idea”, adding that “ there are things which are above questions of money, which belong to the philosophical, spiritual domain.”
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A believer, but secular in his vision of the exercise of power, François Bayrou has never cultivated ambiguity between religion and politics, primarily out of consideration for faith, “because this would risk altering the purity of religious ideals”. Named on Friday the 13th in Matignon, an unlucky day according to superstitions which have their origins in the Bible, there is no doubt that in Matignon, the Christian Prime Minister counts on the Holy Spirit to protect him from disasters.
