AFP
Last farewell of Marseillais to former mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin
The funeral of Jean-Claude Gaudin, mayor of Marseille for a quarter of a century, began Thursday afternoon in the Marseille city, in front of an audience of personalities who came to pay tribute to this figure of the French right, including Brigitte Macron and Nicolas Sarkozy The mass began around 3:30 p.m. in the cathedral of the Major, full, located not far from the Old Port, facing the sea. No crowd in front of the building but some 200 people were gathered. Inside, the mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi (Horizons) or Prince Albert II of Monaco were seated in the first rows. The government was represented by the Minister of Ecological Transition, Christophe Béchu, and Marseillaise Sabrina Agresti-Roubache, Secretary of State for the City. The procession left at the beginning of the afternoon from its native district, Mazargues , in the south of France’s second city. The hearse, filled with wreaths of flowers, and flanked by eight other cars, stopped for a few moments in front of the Mazargues church square as the bells tolled the death knell, before leaving amid applause. He then made a brief stop in front of the town hall where, in the words of the current left-wing mayor Benoît Payan, he “devoted himself” to Marseille from 1995 to 2020. Then the procession headed towards the cathedral where Jean was present -Pierre Papin, Ballon d’or 1991, the president of the Senate, Gérard Larcher, or the president of OM, Pablo Longoria and the president of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, Renaud Muselier.Jean-Claude Gaudin “was not only the voice and face of Marseille, he was a figure of French democracy” and “a figure of the great regionalist movement”, declared François Bayrou, president of MoDem. Born to a mason father and a mother who worked in a rope factory, Jean-Claude Gaudin became a professor of history and geography in a private college, then was also a senator and minister, but above all mayor of Marseille. He suffered a heart attack Monday morning, at the age of 84, in his second home in Saint-Zacharie in Var. The ceremony in tribute to this fervent Catholic was chaired by Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline, Archbishop of Marseille. It will be followed by a burial in the Mazargues cemetery, where the former businessman Bernard Tapie, who died in 2021, rests. – Abandonment – As of Wednesday, the majority of elderly people had come to pay their respects in front of the body of the deceased in its living room decorated with a library furnished and decorated with paintings representing various Marseille churches, as well as the landscapes of the nearby coves, where Jean-Claude Gaudin had a shed. In the evening, some 200 people participated, with serious faces, in a vigil of prayers around the coffin in the church of Mazargues where he was baptized, in the presence of his successor as town hall and Cardinal Aveline. “He was a remarkable man, we will miss him very much (…) I think that he put his life for the citizens, before his own,” explained Lulu Crimon, a resident of the neighborhood. But his opponents accuse him of having abandoned the deprived neighborhoods of the north of Marseille and letting part of the buildings fall into disrepair. schools, which today benefit from a historic renovation plan. His last mandate was marked by the tragedy of rue d’Aubagne, on November 5, 2018, when two unsanitary buildings in a popular district of the center – including one property of the City – collapsed. Eight people died buried. The town hall had been accused of having ignored the alerts. The shock wave revealed the extent of substandard housing in a city where 40,000 people live in slums. “It haunts me every day, in 24 years I have never experienced such a tragedy,” Jean later confided. -Claude Gaudin.Less than two years after the collapse of rue d’Aubagne, while its potential heirs on the right were divided, some having joined Emmanuel Macron, a left-ecologists-civil society coalition had won the town hall after municipal elections with twists and turns.faa-sia-dac/san/ber
