Appointed by former Prime Minister Lionel Jospin as Minister of National Education in 1997, Claude Allègre, who died this Saturday at the age of 87, was known for his unfiltered positions, symbolized by a statement that remained in memories: “we must degrease the mammoth”.
A colorful language all its own. Claude Allègre, who died on Saturday January 4, 2025, occupied rue de Grenelle from 1997 to 2000, when Lionel Jospin, to whom he was close, was Prime Minister.
A long-time member of the Socialist Party, before joining Nicolas Sarkozy around 2007, this trained geochemist created controversy after the failed dissolution of the National Assembly in 1997, a time when President Jacques Chirac had to live with a Prime Minister left.
A sentence that cost him his place
In a desire to “debureaucratize” National Education, employing more than a million teaching and administrative staff, the minister declared when announcing his program on June 24 that he wanted to “defat the mammoth”. He then repeated the words of his right-wing predecessor Alain Juppé, denouncing the “bad fat” of public education.
Given the lively controversy in the teaching world regarding this declaration, Claude Allègre tried to temper the situation by specifying that “we must not make a prehistoric error. In my language, this is the central administration of National Education. The teachers have nothing to do with it.”
However, this attempt was in vain, since at the start of the school year in September 1997, the minister had multiplied the “blunders” by making an amalgamation of various figures (maternity leave, secondments, internships, illnesses, etc.) to denounce teacher absenteeism. A sentence “never uttered publicly”, resulting from an “off with a journalist”, “but that’s what remained”, regrets his son Laurent, as reported by AFP. Mr. Allègre was then replaced at the ministry by Jack Lang, which caused a temporary cooling of his relations with his friend and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, whom he had known during his studies.
Consequently, in 2000, three years after his appointment, Claude Allègre had to leave the government, let go by his friend Lionel Jospin following strong strike movements. The one who will have created 70,000 additional jobs will have left a particularly striking political legacy in everyone’s minds.
