Paul Bausset died Saturday afternoon at the age of 103. The life of this great gentleman was particularly rich from a professional and political point of view. This pure-bred Maximois served as mayor of the Cité du Préconil for eighteen years, from 1977 to 1995.
Paul Bausset was born on January 3, 1921 in Sainte-Maxime – “ in the office I currently occupy ” – underlines with humor his grandson Olivier Bausset (1).
Pharmacist and sea lover
He studied pharmacist and first opened a medical analysis laboratory in Saint-Tropez then a pharmacy in Sainte-Maxime.
The pharmacy that bears his name still exists and today it is his granddaughter Claire who is at its head, after taking over from her mother Sylvie.
Paul Bausset married Carmen, whom everyone nicknamed “Mimi”, in 1949 after seducing her at a ball in Saint-Tropez. A year later, their only son, Jean-Paul, was born.
It was at the age of 50 that Maximois entered politics. “I had fifty and a quarter of a century in pharmacy behind me, so I decided to invest in my city that I love so much. he emphasized during an interview in our columns on the occasion of his 100th birthday. He will initially be Aymeric Simon-Lorière’s first deputy.
In 1977, Paul Bausset took the reins of Sainte-Maxime under the RPR label.
He will serve three mandates during which the general interest will take precedence over particular interests. These eighteen years of mandate will be marked by several achievements: the Les Pins Pignons I and II subdivisions on plots acquired free of charge, the Myrtes botanical garden on land handed over by a developer, the protection of the Pointe des Sardinaux, with the aid from the Department, when it was threatened by a real estate project that the Maximois did not want.
But what he was most proud of was the acquisition of the current Town Hall. Former silkworm farm transformed into a hotel, the chief magistrate found that the building had the appearance of a public building “when the owners wanted to sell it to Château Gaumont, I preempted” he liked to recall.
The other large part of his life was devoted to the sea and boats. The base of the Sainte-Maxime nautical club also bears his name. We owe him the creation of the sailing school in 1967.
“At the time, I said to myself that we had to create something to highlight this Mediterranean which is the wealth of Sainte-Maxime, just as we create ski slopes in the mountains” he said before adding: “My son loved the sea so I put it together for him.”
Above all, Paul Bausset was the very first in France, through the CNSM, to introduce sailing to schoolchildren, even before the Breton clubs!