Tugdual Denis is deputy director of
“
Current values
”
.
Already author of
"
The truth about the Fillon mystery
"
(Plon, 2020), he publishes
"
The truth about Édouard Philippe
"
(Robert Laffont, September 2021, 252 p., € 19).
FIGAROVOX. - Why did you write about the former Prime Minister and current mayor of Le Havre?
Tugdual DENIS. -
Due to a huge paradox: the French designate him as their favorite politician in opinion polls, without anyone knowing very well who he is.
Being Prime Minister is both an exposed job, and a task that prevents you from being yourself.
In the service of a president, you are not expected to give your opinion on diplomacy (for example: should the sanctions against Russia be relaxed?), The armies, the
growing
cancel culture
and many others topics…
And then as a right-wing journalist, I had a deep question: can Édouard Philippe still claim to be from that camp? He had just written, with his friend Gilles Boyer, an ambitious book (
Impressions et lines clair,
JC Lattès, 2021) on our institutions but without a line on Islam, integration, immigration. I vaguely felt that it was someone who liked order, but I had to go further by knowing what was his personal program, on sovereign matters.
Finally, to be frank, I also made this book for a few less rational reasons.
I was able to rub shoulders with Matignon Édouard Philippe and part of his entourage, and, if the points of disagreement with the line of “Current values” were numerous, the relationship was always cordial.
Quite dense with some of his relatives.
So I started to dig.
To go to Le Havre.
To multiply the dinners there with him.
Leave, come back.
I quickly understood that there was "material for" ... I did not particularly want this to stop.
We don't get bored, with Édouard Philippe.
We can even have the impression of progressing.
One Tuesday morning, my phone rings.
A number that I didn't know.
It was Édouard Philippe.
Tugdual Denis
Your personal stories to both seem to intersect throughout your story. Did you recognize yourself in him?
There are two times when our personal itineraries really collided.
The first, at the end of 2019, when he takes my maternal grandfather to Viet Nam.
His name is Colonel Jacques Allaire, survived Dien Bien Phu where he was parachuted twice then taken prisoner, and deported at the end of the battle in May 1954.
As an anecdote, I had met Philippe in Matignon the day before his departure for Hanoi, without knowing that he was taking my grandfather on his plane the next day. Subsequently, it was a fruitful starting point in our discussions to evoke the emotional wounds of veterans, his passion for the army and military songs, but also the French history of decolonization.
The second time concerns a small journalistic trauma that the editorial staff of “Current values” experienced at the time of the Obono affair, at the end of August 2020. For several days, after the publication of a somewhat wobbly fiction starring the melenchonist deputy Danièle Obono in the time of inter-African slavery, France of Twitter and the political media spheres accused us of being racist and of “propagating hatred”. All jumped on this blunder to express the gigantic resentment they harbored towards us.
Although I suspected it, I realized how much hate the newspaper I work for could cause.
I felt like I was getting stuck in a relational swamp;
the nights of jumping into sleep being even worse than the days of insults.
One Tuesday morning, my phone rings.
A number that I didn't know.
It was Édouard Philippe.
I stammered three words and then we spoke.
"Current Values" is not his favorite reading, but he hates packs and this era without presumption of innocence, greedy for lawsuits.
That day, it struck me as less conventional than I suspected.
Édouard Philippe seems surrounded by many friends and faithful. Who are they and how do they support it?
He is often criticized for working with a clan, but we must admit that he has a hell of a bunch of friends. People he has known since his studies and with whom he has managed, for some, to combine friendship and political career.
Benoît Ribadeau-Dumas is one of them. Major at the ENA of their Marc Bloch class. They stayed close to the point of each being a godfather to one of their children. When Philippe becomes Prime Minister, he imposes “BRD” as chief of staff. Two pals at the top of the state meet up who end meetings with a look and endless days with a laugh or a beer. God knows however if they are different: BRD comes from a big family of the beautiful Parisian districts and he believes in God. In the book, Edouard Philippe gives him this definitive compliment: “If one day I die, I will entrust my children to him without any problem. They will be educated very differently than they are now, but they will be very well educated. ”
You also have his advisers Gilles Boyer or Charles Hufnagel.
They are friends from afar, who themselves worked individually with him, or together without Edouard Philippe, before joining him at Matignon.
This results in relationships of a rather rare intensity in this environment.
Very few journalists include Le Havre in their portraits of Édouard Philippe.
The articles are generally written from Paris, while this bombed, wounded, revived, popular, bourgeois, industrious, graphic port city offers superb material.
Tugdual Denis
Did the city of Le Havre contribute to his construction as a politician?
It has always been clear that for me the city of Le Havre would be one of the characters in the book. This still surprises me: very few journalists include Le Havre in their portraits of Édouard Philippe. The articles are generally written from Paris, while this bombed, wounded, revived, popular, bourgeois, industrious, graphic port city offers superb material.
It extends the Philippe paradox, often described as a Parisian technocrat, and arrogant. If he lends his side to these criticisms, he nevertheless remains the mayor of this incomparable city, to which the Seine estuary offers new light every day. The first time I came to Le Havre to see Édouard Philippe, we spent 7:30 am walking around, after he, like a surveyor, began by describing his city to me from the panoramic room of the town hall on the 18th floor.
I also went back there alone, to see his boxing teacher, in the Montgaillard district.
His name is Madjid Nassah and I think he is more to the right than Édouard Philippe.
The kind of educator who refuses to send back “big brothers” to the neighborhoods, to say their prayers in the training room and that the neighborhood youth are badly polite with the “Mireilles” who have lived there ever since. fifty years.
Édouard Philippe does not speak either after the beheading of the teacher Samuel Paty, or after the attack on the cathedral of Nice… How do you explain it?
He has a good first argument: “
You don't react to this kind of drama with a simple Tweet. It's like people who offer their condolences to their friends by posting a message on their Facebook page.
" Very well. But that's not enough if we leave it there. In the book, Edouard Philippe recognizes the obvious: “
Obscurantism, today, is not Catholic, and very present in Islam.
"
However, I believe he is so obsessed with the unity of the country that he comes to outsource issues that fracture him.
It doesn't please anyone to talk about our incredible failure on immigration and assimilation issues.
His personal image must also count: he is a presidential candidate in the construction phase, defining his own political equation.
But let's face one point: I bombarded him with questions about matters relating to our identity, and he didn't kick me out of his office!
“No matter how much
I wear a beard, I don't think there is anything drastic about me,
” he says in your book.
Does Édouard Philippe have the will to become a new unifying Chirac?
This sentence, he pronounces it during a lunch in Matignon at the beginning of the quinquennium, at the time when I worked at the "Point".
Three years later, during our discussions in Le Havre, I found another Edouard Philippe in front of me.
He gained in certainty what he lost in arrogance.
Less on the defensive.
And, while he will never be far enough on the right for the die-hard fillonist that I am, then he may be more comfortable with the concepts of his original political family.
At the start of the quinquennium, when Edouard Philippe pronounces this sentence, he has just become Prime Minister of a former minister of François Hollande… Now he is released. Autonomous. In the book, he says he is about to retire at 65, assures that he wants to lead, if one day he exercises power, structural reforms and “
pretty wild stuff
”, considers that our immigration is not “
under control
” and proclaims his disgust at seeing History falsified by those who rewrite it with contemporary codes. He takes this example in particular: "
Isn't the Third Republic a Republic on the pretext that women did not have the right to vote?"
" No, of course...
Edouard Philippe and Emmanuel Macron are, in a way, incompatible.
Tugdual Denis
On September 12, Edouard Philippe declared his support for Emmanuel Macron for 2022. Is this a sincere commitment? What differentiates the mayor of Le Havre from the President of the Republic?
This is not the subject on which Édouard Philippe is the most talkative and yet it transpires, I believe, throughout the book: Emmanuel Macron and him are very different.
And now everyone in their hallway.
One candidate for re-election, the other for his succession.
This only binds me but I assume it without difficulty: I would even say that they are in a certain way incompatible. An advisor to Emmanuel Macron recently told me: “
Basically, I think the president was bored with Edouard Philippe.
"For his part, the mayor of Le Havre criticizes in the book all recent Presidents of the Republic, the current one included, for having"
melted a caramel
", forgetting to differentiate between chairing and governing, and wanting pre-empt everything.
Of course, as long as Emmanuel Macron will compete for 2022, Édouard Philippe will not oppose it.
But I have the conviction that he is living his own life.
Does he only have a choice?
As he himself says: he is not destined to remain number 2 all his life.
At one point, your status requires you.
It is up to him to see if he is at his own level.
The truth about Édouard Philippe
, Tugdual Denis, Robert Laffont, 272 p., € 19 Robert Laffont
