Usually, when she visits a museum, Roselyne Bachelot sets herself a rule: admire "no more than five works" so that she can immerse herself in their contemplation. This Tuesday, the brand new Minister of Culture had to do violence. To start the first day of her new life, even before her first Council of Ministers, she runs at full speed, duly wearing her mask, the empty rooms of the Louvre on this day of weekly closure, accompanied by the president and director of the museum , Jean-Luc Martinez. Arriving on foot from her nearby department, crazy in a cream suit, she slips having wanted to come on Monday. "But I was told: You can't go before 8 p.m. until you've been appointed!" "
Suffice to say that the new tenant on rue de Valois, who was the first government to pass power on Monday evening, is in the starting blocks. Didn't she say, however, that she never wanted to return to politics? “I always said that I no longer wanted to be a minister. But I added in codicil: unless Culture is offered to me, ”she says.
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His friend Jean Castex - who gave his name to Emmanuel Macron, when the president was considering entrusting the post to academician Marc Lambron - had him in mind. When he called her over the weekend to offer to join the government, she was hardly thrilled. But as soon as he clarified that it was to enter rue de Valois, she immediately said yes.
"The Prime Minister knows that I am solid, that I have nerves, that I know what is the service of the State", congratulates the one who chained the ministerial posts. And to dress up the non-political profiles for the winter: “Often, civil society believes that a minister, it parades in a golden office while the administration manages the chores. But that's not it at all! "
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"Action, action, action!" She promises, delighted that culture is at the heart of the President of the Republic's reconstruction plan. "Culture, which has often been a pleasure," regrets the septuagenarian who intends to weigh his cheek and his popularity to win his arbitrations. This week, she has scheduled meetings with major operators in the cultural sector before leaving on Friday for her first trip to the regions. Since her appointment, she has already had Jack Lang, who calls for a "Cultural New Deal", three times on the phone.
When Emmanuel Macron called her too, Tuesday morning, to ask her if she needed something, she replied: "Of your confidence. Already, she argues that she would like to ease the health constraints that weigh on cultural establishments. "People are starving," enraged the woman who defined herself as the "minister of artists". Like them, she says she feels "a necessary stage fright, amplified by the challenge entrusted by Emmanuel Macron".
Not enough to prevent her from putting on her ministerial costume as if she had never left it. She responds with a smile to the staff who timidly come to give her "Madam Minister". While inquiring about the number of visitors who had come to the Louvre the day before for the first day of its reopening and about health security measures, Roselyne did Bachelot. "I could wear this, do you think it would suit me?" She asked the president and director of the Louvre on seeing the coronation of the coronation of Louis XV.
In André Malraux's armchair
"I forbid you to photograph me! »She laughs in front of ...« the Raft of the Medusa », of Géricault. Seeing the immense "Death of Sardanapalus", by Delacroix, representing a naked woman about to be slaughtered, she exclaims: "We should show it to the minister responsible for equality between women and men (Editor's note: Elisabeth Moreno) . "Then, going around a bronze of Mercury and ostensibly looking at her buttocks:" It is better on that side! "
Behind humor, his signature, Roselyne Bachelot does not hide a touch of emotion. When she returned to her new office on Monday, tears came to her eyes. "When I was a little girl, André Malraux came to my parents and I hid under the dining room table and I listened to all these extraordinary people," she confides. Memories that came back to her “big breath” when she saw the armchair formerly occupied by its illustrious predecessor. "It was a powerful emotion," she breathes in an enigmatic smile, worthy of "the Mona Lisa".
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