reread the intimate portrait of the “Duke of Aquitaine”, published at the time in “Sud Ouest”

Jacques Chaban-Delmas, the puny child from the Luxembourg gardens, triumphed over illness with energy, adored sport, and never stopped beating all the stages.

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“A child of spun sugar”

The existence of Charles de Gaulle was a fantastic true novel. Mitterrand's life remains partly an enigmatic story. That of Chaban resembles a smiling epic. A lucky man's journey? Yes, provided that we understand that good fortune often lies in the art of seizing it and putting all our energy into wanting to be happy.

“I was a child of spun sugar,” he said to explain how he had overcome, by throwing himself into the practice of sport, the disease of languor which deprived him of most of the games of his tender years. Hence the irresistible desire, later, to skip the steps, to exert himself physically and to conquer all the women until his meeting with Micheline, who understood that this apparently fulfilled man always needed a kiss in the neck or to hold a female hand.

Condemned by doctors at birth, little Delmas hardly left the skirts of his mother, the beautiful Georgette Barroin, who had married in Paris an inventor-engineer from Delahaye, himself the son of an opera singer who became a painter. in Bordeaux building and a Béarnaise from Orthez, Marie Serre. Anemia caused him typhoid and paratyphoid, plus the procession of complicated childhood illnesses. Excessively protected, transported from one chair to another, the child learned to read at the age of 3 and to dream while watching others having fun in the Luxembourg Gardens.

The Boni, his idols

Newspapers fascinated him very early on. “L’Illustration”, then “l’Auto” (later becoming “l’Equipe”) opened the world to him. He admired Lindbergh, the cyclists Antonin Magne and Charles Pélissier, whose victories he still recounted in recent times in detail to his visitors from Ascain or from the small apartment on rue de Lille, in Paris, where he died on Friday evening. . Roland-Garros and the Davis Cup awakened each year in his home surprisingly precise memories of the Musketeers and of champions who are now somewhat forgotten, such as Pierangeli and Jean-Noël Grinda, son-in-law of his friend Michard-Pélissier. The Five Nations Tournament brought other bursts of evocations, notably that of the Boniface brothers, his idols.

“We knew very young the importance of our muscles and our comrades. “.

Politicians are generally monsters of self-centeredness. Jacques Chaban-Delmas has been capable all his life of admiring others. Especially athletes. While the finest intellectual exercise of a young MP or a prospective Prime Minister elicited from him a laconic judgment, such as “he's very good, this little one”, the record of an athlete inspired him to carry out a long expert analysis. , not exempt from lyrical overflow.

The quote from Pierre Mac Orlan could be applied to the late deceased, recently highlighted by Denis Lalanne in a book dedicated to the Boniface brothers: “We knew very young the importance of our muscles and of comrades. » Chaban, as we know, had difficulty accepting the attacks of age. It was said in recent years that he had put too much elegance into the talent of climbing the stairs two at a time to accept that we contemplate the arch of his shoulders or the inadequacy of his knees or that we forget the impeccable drawing of his back muscles or the hardness of maintained abdominals. In reality, immobility took him back to very old childhood sufferings that he had thought he had conquered forever.

Not the arrogance of the wealthy

From the young student journalist before the war, from the financial inspector who snatched his competition by threatening the examiner with the wrath of the Resistance, from the star-endowed general with the nerve who prevented _ with tact and camaraderie_ the communist colonel Rol -Tanguy for being the leader of the Liberation of Paris, everything was said, filmed, commented on. And will be even more so in the coming days. Tomorrow will also flourish the useful reminders about the New Society and, we hope, the imbecile hatred that the Pomidolian tandem Juillet-Garaud and their young collaborator Jacques Chirac dedicated to this first real attempt at “refocusing” our democratic life.

The New Society endured the imbecile hatred of the Juillet-Garaud tandem and the young Jacques Chirac”

Chaban was not a right-wing conservative. He was the minister of Mendès France, the beloved boss of Delors, the discreet mentor of Michel Rocard, who consulted him in 1988 on the composition of his government at the home of Pierre Chancogne, on the way from Matignon to the Élysée. The modesty of his origins, the obligation imposed on him to fight for years against the “Marquette” old guard in Bordeaux while exonerating _ in the name of “peace of hearts and minds” _ the bourgeoisie of its collaborationist errors , his love of markets and vibrant stadiums, his knowledge of popular songs _ he could sing all the verses of “The Bedouin's Daughter” _ his happiness in breathing the smell of the locker rooms, no, definitely, all that had nothing to do with the arrogance of the wealthy.

Political cabals

As if to better relate him to the ordinary human condition, sorrow struck him several times and he concealed it as best he could, with many jokes and an imperturbable smile. Real political cabals, with various initiators, dotted his life. From the age of 40, rumors said he was suffering from metastases, which therefore had a long lifespan! At the time of the affair of the Cherbourg stars, which, as Prime Minister, he let slip towards Israel without firing the war fleet, “so as not to add crime to ridicule”, an old fantasy of Adrien Marquet's supporters arose. from Bordeaux to Paris: Chaban would in fact have been called Cohen and would have concealed his Jewish origins to better deceive good Christians.

Then there was the story of the fatal accident to his second wife, too timely – while he was forming a tender bond with Micheline – not to have been provoked. Finally, there was the revelation of his tax form: Chaban paying his contributions at source, in the form of a tax credit paid on the income from his stock portfolio, it was amusing, and moreover not very inaccurate, to demonstrate that he was not sending a check to the tax collector.

But there is a hierarchy in the avatars befalling promising statesmen. If Jacques Chaban-Delmas never laughed at the aforementioned mischievous nonsense, he liked to joke about his other misfortunes: a very gifted imitator, Thierry Le Luron, making the whole of France laugh by copying a voice that he himself described as “duckish”. » ; a cheeky ambitious man, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, coming to challenge him in his own constituency; catastrophic support, finally, in the middle of the presidential campaign: the televised speech by André Malraux devoured by tics, which scared all the children of France.

Reagan and the calves

“Come on kids, be happy!” »

If, however, it were necessary to provide testimonial proof of the spontaneity of the character, it would be contained in the memory of an exceptional storyteller, which he will leave to those who had the pleasure of following him and listening to him. Any ribald story told in his company and featuring one of his political adversaries or friends was punctuated with a “that doesn’t matter!” “. To recount how he broke sharply with Brezhnev at the time of the Sakharov affair by ordering that the engines of his plane be warmed up at Moscow airport, he mimed with his hand the hasty takeoff of the aircraft and imitated the noise from the reactor: “Rooaarrh…”.

To explain to Ronald Reagan that it was well preserved, he had him feel his calves in an Oval Office which, since then, has seen many others. During that same trip to Washington in 1986, he confided to Bill Casey and a stunned CIA audience that the French Constitution was “elastic” while making the gesture of cocking a slingshot. Speaking to Hosni Mubarak about terrorism, he used the image of a sledgehammer trying to crush a fly, saying “Boom-boom-boom” and “Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz”…

Chaban's political testament is simple, which does not mean that it is not worth pondering. It is in the immutable way he took his leave by saying: “Come on, children, be happy! »