IIt was proof that in politics, a single sentence can brand you forever. Claude Allègre, the man who wanted to “slim down the mammoth”, died this January 4 at the age of 87. He leaves the trace of an unclassifiable personality, an essential figure of the Jospin years, whose passage to National Education like the positions criticized on the scientific level have never ceased to arouse electric controversies.
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Gold medal from the CNRS in 1994, Crafoord prize for geology in 1986, this geochemist became known to the general public when he arrived at Rue de Grenelle in 1997. Succeeding an ultra-cautious François Bayrou since his unfortunate attempt to reform the the Falloux law, Allègre wants to shake up habits. Barely named, here he announces that he wants to “put an end to the co-management of the ministry by the unions” and, above all, “to slim down the mammoth”. Explosive.
A declaration, followed by others, which will in a few moments make the minister the bête noire of worried teaching unions, while others will celebrate him as a taboo breaker on the bureaucratic structure of National Education. In short, a character that never leaves you indifferent. “Obviously he was clumsy, a bit of a megalomaniac but basically I think he put his finger on the real issues,” defends one of the former members of his cabinet, remembering a “bubbly man” and the evenings wildly spent singing Brassens on rue de Grenelle.
Jospin his “youthful friend”
Claude Allègre, who, before entering the government himself, was special advisor to Lionel Jospin at the same ministry, notably initiated the reform of LMD in higher education in France. After major teacher demonstrations, he was replaced in 2000 by Jack Lang, without giving up speaking out on educational issues. “Without falling into catastrophism, I will simply say that, despite the colossal budgetary effort made in its favor for thirty years, our education system no longer plays its role as an engine of development and influence of our country,” he declared a few years later, in 2011 in The Point.
The man who was nicknamed “Vulcano” within the PS campaigned there for decades. “He was a traveling companion, an intimate friend of Jospin. They shared everything,” says a socialist leader who knew him well. Jospin and Allègre even shared the same room at the Jean-Zay university campus, in Anthony (Hauts-de-Seine). In 2000, he had difficulty digesting the fact that his “friend from his youth” decided to replace him with Jack Lang and in 2007, he refused to publicly support the candidacy of Ségolène Royal, whose “immense talent for self-promotion” and “demagoguery” he mocked. “.
Then, in October, after saying he was “bluffed” by Nicolas Sarkozy's debut, he announced on Jean-Pierre Elkabbach's microphone, on Europe 1, that he was leaving the Socialist Party. He then said he refused the “picrocholine wars” between the different clans of the party to succeed François Hollande. When he suffered a very serious heart attack in 2013 during a scientific conference in Santiago, Chile, the former minister received the support of Lionel Jospin, who expressed his friendship. “They remained close until the end,” reports the aforementioned PS executive.
An iconoclastic man
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This iconoclastic man, columnist at Point and to L’Expressalso animated the public debate with positions deemed climate-sceptical and regularly criticized by the scientific community. His book The climatic imposture, published by Plon, caused an outcry. “Is it more urgent to worry about world hunger? […] or unemployment […] or should we meet in Copenhagen with 120 heads of state to worry about the climate in a century and spend half a billion euros to do so? », he wrote there.
His theses were refuted by the Academy of Sciences. “It is obvious that he used this subject to exist”, denounced the scientific journalist Sylvestre Huet in 2019 to the Point. He had dedicated a book to him whose title sounds like an answer: The imposter is him. Until the end of his life, he left no one indifferent.
