On July 5, 2020, Roselyne Bachelot, then 73 years old, met Emmanuel Macron who confirmed his appointment to the Ministry of Culture: “White shirt without a collar, he looks even younger than in the photos with his blonde locks, his teeth happiness and her ice blue eyes.
This is the tone of "682 Days" (Plon editions, 288 pages, 20.90 euros), between the newspaper, the day-to-day experience of a ministry and the analysis of having tried to carry a world of culture devastated in the midst of a pandemic.
In this work, subtitled “the Ball of the hypocrites”, the ex-minister does not settle any account with the president but testifies to the completely crazy life in a ministry while the epidemic storm is raging.
Solving problems “is emptying the sea with a teaspoon,” she writes.
“682 Days”, the book by Roselyne Bachelot published by Plon.
DR
Her outspokenness of the "Big Heads", a program of which she is a member, often surfaces, when she speaks of a journalist "who must be refrained from slapping", of medical experts assimilated to "a camarilla" or “techno-sanitaro-crazy” – yes, these big pundits who we listened to religiously on TV at the time of the applause of 8 p.m. – and explodes in his piece of bravery the story of the evening of the Césars 2021.
A double left right hook for Anny Duperey
“It always gives us the same scenario: ladies and gentlemen in toilets costing several thousand euros, with their hair, shoes, jewels and make-up by the best professionals in Paris, displaying their well-meaning and accusatory political commitments, scattering their interventions laborious good words concocted by an exhausted gagman, pissed off the minister curled up in his armchair like a boxer knocked out at the corner of the ring, then rushed to Fouquet's, whose working-class restaurant prices are well known.
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She hits back, Roselyne.
A double left right hook for Anny Duperey, guilty of having attacked her and having mistakenly believed that she had left the ceremony: “After the hearing aids, she could convert to advertisements for glasses.
“An uppercut now:” The gags of Blanche Gardin and Laurent Lafitte were announced laboriously by a Marina Foïs who rolled her bulging eyes as if she had been summoned to play the role of the failed and totally devoid of talent host, a role of composition of course…” A last direct: “Laure Calamy stammered in the purest Caesar style of the 1980s.” We go on.
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But “682 Days” cannot be reduced to biting portraits of a cultural world that Roselyne Bachelot venerates – especially opera, opera and theater – and which has not always returned it to her.
Many moving passages, her serious Covid – "It's like an elephant walking on my chest" – or the return of a Klimt painting to the Jewish heirs of the despoiled owner, a fight in which she is engaged wholeheartedly her soul, as a daughter of resistance fighters.
This cheerful book goes from spades to fine analyzes of politics, the real, the invisible, the ministerial arbitrations with a knife in offices where journalists do not have access and where, there too, Roselyne Bachelot does not allow herself to be knock out.
The real hypocrites, for her, are these men, sometimes ministers or shadow advisers, who did not understand that the septuagenarian did not need a hearing aid: "What What is she doing there, Bachelot?
said one at a meeting.
She listens, and she swings.