Death of Claude Allègre, former Minister of National Education under Lionel Jospin

Claude Allègre died this Saturday January 4, 2025 in Paris, at the age of 87. He suffered a major heart attack in 2013 and had since suffered health problems and his condition deteriorated last September, his son told AFP.

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Claude Allègre: “All my life I have been in opposition”

A tumultuous lease in National Education

This trained geochemist, rewarded with several prestigious prizes for his work, occupied rue de Grenelle from 1997 to 2000, where he experienced a tumultuous tenure, notably because of a projection in which he promised to “degrease the mammoth” of National Education.

A sentence “never uttered publicly”, resulting from an “off with a journalist”, “but that’s what remained”, regrets his son Laurent. Claude 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.

Leading figure of climate skepticism

A member of the Socialist Party from 1973, before joining Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, Claude Allègre was also known for controversial positions on climate change, to the point of becoming a leading figure in France for climate skepticism.

Ulcerated by the attacks relayed by the ex-minister in his best-seller, “The Climate Imposture”, more than 600 climatologists wrote in the spring of 2010 to their supervisory minister to denounce the “denigration” and “false accusations” made by a non-climate scientist.

Born on March 31, 1937 to a professor father and a schoolteacher mother, Claude Allègre, with a good-natured personality but also sometimes “abrupt” and “stubborn” according to his son, never renounced his positions on the subject. “It’s a shame to only keep that, everyone fell on him excessively,” laments his son.

The current Prime Minister, François Bayrou, paid tribute to him in a message posted on “He loved the transmission by the school of which he had a high idea. Courage was his mark”.