Patrick Devedjian, disappearance of a free spirit from the right

He himself made the information public on Twitter, early Thursday evening. “I am affected by the epidemic, therefore able to bear witness directly to the exceptional work of the doctors and all the nursing staff. Tired but stabilized thanks to them, I go back up the hill and send them a very big thank you for their constant help to all the patients. But the state of the president (LR) of Hauts-de-Seine, Patrick Devedjian, 75, who also suffered for many years from cardiac fragility, worsened the next day. The Covid-19 finally won it on the night of Saturday to Sunday at Antony's hospital.

I am affected by the epidemic, therefore able to bear witness directly to the exceptional work of the doctors and all the nursing staff. Tired but stabilized thanks to them, I go back up the hill and send them a very big thank you for their constant help to all the patients.

Endgame for a man who, on the right, had neither the background nor the classic profile of the elected officials on board. Long before campaigning alongside Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, it was within the extreme right group Occident that the young Devedjian, studying law in 1963, made his debut. Before being excluded from it a few years later.

"Occident, it was for him a chance meeting in the Latin Quarter, eludes the senator (LR) Gérard Longuet, who militated there with him. He has never been an extremist in thought. He was very anti-communist, but he realized later that it was better to be with Raymond Aron than with Jean-Marie Le Pen ”. Devedjian had also collaborated with the prestigious intellectual within the magazine Contrepoint, which he co-founded in 1970, before joining Jaques Chirac at the UDR and then at the RPR. He later became one of Nicolas Sarkozy's most loyal supporters.

A lawyer by training - he prides himself on having never lost a single one of the trials in which he defended Chirac -, Devedjian then chained the mandates. He became mayor of Antony in 1983, the year in which many “Pasqua boys” took power in the Hauts-de-Seine, then several times a deputy. A political figure known to be fierce, he became minister during Jacques Chirac's second term, in local liberties and then in industry.

His dream of being appointed Keeper of the Seals showered by Sarkozy

When Sarkozy was elected to the Elysee Palace in 2007, he dreamed of being appointed to justice - but Rachida Dati was nominated for the post. "It remained an injury to him," said a member of the government at the time. Bitter to be left on the edge of the button by a Sarkozy whom he ardently supported, he had made a very noticed exit by criticizing the opening to personalities on the left: "I am to go very far in the opening, very far, including to the Sarkozysts! The former head of state paid tribute to him this Sunday, confiding his "infinite sadness" and saluting the "panache" of a man "passionate, whole, sincere, committed".

Patrick Devedjian was a passionate, whole, sincere, committed man. He embodied politics as I like him, with feelings, convictions, panache. I am proud to have had him by my side. I want to express to my loved ones my deep emotion and my infinite sadness. NS

“He was a free, intelligent and funny man. The most brilliant of us, ”underlines the boss of the LR federation of Hauts-de-Seine, Philippe Juvin. "Very fine, cultivated, with a taste for provocation," says Brice Hortefeux, who sat several times with him on the Council of Ministers. Like Valérie Pécresse, current president of the Ile-de-France region: “His uniqueness was his culture, he was passionate about history. He said that those who did not know the story risked that it would start again. The son of an Armenian immigrant who fled the genocide, he will be an ardent activist for the recognition of this crime by France.

Humanist late

If he had started with the supporters of a hard and nationalist right, he had become over the years a "humanist" figure of the UMP, then of LR, notably strongly criticizing the debate on the place of Islam in France in 2011. "With time and the patina of political action, he had acquired a very humanist vision of society," says senator (LR) Roger Karoutchi.

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As a kid, Patrick Devedjian dreamed of being an archaeologist. But it was above all for the French masters of painting - another paternal legacy - that he later became passionate. For Nicolas Poussin for example, "intellectual painter", according to him. He leaves behind four children. At Liberation, who painted his portrait in 1998, he made this comment: "Four, to carry my coffin. "