This close friend of the former socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin died on January 4 at the age of 87.
The former Minister of National Education under Lionel Jospin from 1997 to 2000 Claude Allègre died this Saturday, January 4, his son announced to AFP. The one who joined Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008 after a political life with the Socialist Party, marked by climate skeptic positions at the turn of the 2000s and 2010, was 87 years old. “Honor to Claude Allègre”Prime Minister François Bayou quickly reacted on social networks, describing his successor on rue de Grenelle as a «esprit original», and “great scientist” and a “man of combat, who did not fear the one against all”. “He loved the transmission by the school of which he had a high idea. Courage was his mark.adds the president of MoDem.
“He had his slip-ups and his excesses, but Claude Allègre was a great scientist who made French research shine”writes for his part the former Macronist minister Clément Beaune on “a courageous minister in a large left-wing government”. “Politics also needs bold and iconoclastic characters”believes the former member of Parliament for Paris. His distant successor in national education Jean-Michel Blanquer, with whom he shares the same distrust on the part of the teaching body, has similarly made “tribute” to the deceased. “I had the chance to work with him on international university issues: visionary.” While distancing himself from some of “his beliefs (particularly on the climate)”, the former minister portrays Claude Allègre in “great servant of France”.
The French discovered Claude Allègre in June 1997 when his old friend Lionel Jospin, Prime Minister of Cohabitation, entrusted him with the Ministry of National Education. With his bull neck and his narrowed eyes under thick eyebrows, the director of the Institute of Physics of the Globe (IPG) in Paris, CNRS gold medalist, emerged from the shadows at 60 years old. A geochemist, he had developed techniques that made it possible to date the history of rocks. These discoveries earned him the Crafoord Prize in 1986. Issued by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, it rewards work in scientific disciplines that are not eligible for the Nobel Prize.
Updated at 6:37 p.m. with the reaction of François Bayrou at 7:02 p.m. with that of Clément Beaune then at 8:02 p.m. with that of Jean-Michel Blanquer.
France
