“You are crying because you are a man.” For a moment, the audience widened their eyes, strained their ears. When an enarque speaks of an enarque, when a State Councilor evokes a State Councillor, no one spontaneously takes out their handkerchief. When a friend talks about a friend, it’s different. This Thursday evening, in Paris, in the Hotel de Salm which is also the palace of the Legion of Honor, Edouard Philippe decorates Benoît Ribadeau-Dumas, his chief of staff during the three years spent at Matignon.
When an enarque talks about an enarque, you don’t expect to laugh once, twice, five times either. The jokes fuse. The former Prime Minister salutes “a double name that slaps. If you are only half-Dumas, you are the four musketeers all to yourself. The moral integrity of Athos, the taste of good Porthos wines , the perfect elegance of Aramis. And the panache of d’Artagnan!” There will be a lot of talk about “panache”, even in charity.
We can laugh at everything, even René Char and his verses among the most arid – “Understand who will be able, apart from Benoît…” – arouse hilarity. Even the Council of State, to which they both belong, provokes jokes: “You leave the Parodi room and the examination of a few sharp files in the middle of the afternoon to rush to see a perfect American turnip in you stuffing himself with candy. Don’t deny, I was there.” Or again: “You become deputy secretary general. That is to say that you manage the members. A whole program.”
In the room, the ministers came in number, those of yesterday, those of today, Gérald Darmanin, Bruno Le Maire, Olivier Véran, Olivier Dussopt, Charlotte Caubel, Nicole Belloubet, Jacqueline Gourault, Sibeth Ndiaye. In front of one of them crossed very recently, Edouard Philippe did not go there by four paths, he wants to take a single path: yes, he will embark on the presidential battle, that we do not come and talk to him about primaries and other annoyances. We don’t joke about certain things.
Alexis Kohler crossed the Seine, the secretary general of the Elysée sees around him the most eminent representatives of the State civil service, Marc Guillaume, Claire Landais, Renaud Denoix de Saint Marc. Several bosses have moved, Arthur Sadoun, Alexandre Bompard, Jean-François Cirelli, Xavier Niel. The family, the friends, Gilles Boyer, Charles Hufnagel, Thierry Solère, Frédéric Mion, they came, they are all there (the former head of government Jean-Pierre Raffarin is excused).
“You have served France admirably”
In front of such a gratin, Edouard Philippe does not want to make an oven. This speech, he worked on it for a long time, he begins it with tremolos in his voice. As tradition dictates, he addresses those whom he never addresses. Studies, administrative justice, industry… And then: “On May 15, 2017, the state was him.” The time has come to evoke the experience of power at the top, almost at the top. A phone call made in May 2017 to the friend to ask him if – which seemed “crazy” even to Edouard Philippe – he would agree to run his firm in case… “If this crazy idea was confirmed, you were his only chance it will turn into reasonable action. I don’t think you believed me.”
However, you have to believe what you hear in the media. Edouard Philippe is appointed Prime Minister. But Ribadeau avoids watching it each time the head of government takes part in television programs, his work monopolizes him, “laughing and knowing, deep down inside you, that what you were experiencing was unique and that, as on the evening of our lives we would still talk about it, we might as well do what is necessary to be proud of it”.
There is the Legion of Honor, and there is the arm of the same name. At a time when justice seeks noise from those who had to manage the Covid crisis, Edouard Philippe, placed under the status of witness assisted by the Court of Justice of the Republic in October 2022, pays a vibrant tribute to the work accomplished in a situation like no other: “I who was there, I can say it better than anyone and I am happy to affirm it here, you have served France admirably.”
Romain Gary and Charles Péguy take up a lot of space, although Bruce Springsteen also makes a brief appearance. The first inspires this reflection: “Like him, you love your mother, whom I know is in competition, and quite well placed, to obtain the disputed prize for the most Catholic of Jewish mothers.” The second unites the two men in their literary impulses. Political news is only the subject of a glance: “He who looks at the Horizon [NDLR : nom du parti lancé en 2021 par le maire du Havre] cannot be insensitive to him who aims for the firmament.”
“A lot connects you to him”
The applause fuses, stretches, drags on. The recipient’s turn to take the floor to prolong this two-voiced eulogy of the friendship that power could have broken, that Matignon has made indestructible. Benoît Ribadeau-Dumas speaks to his five children since at this moment, they can only listen to their father, a habit that gets lost with age. Choose your wife or your husband, choose your friends, choose your leaders, love your country, serve it, have many children too: the point is removed. Alexis Kohler, overtaken by an emergency, left the room, the humor remained there. Benoît Ribadeau-Dumas warns this “dear Alexis”: “When you get out of your prison [l’Elysée]I’ll invite you into my house, I’ll put some sneakers on you and I’ll throw a lot of plates in the air, like you did to me for three years!”
“The shit flies in squadrons”, would have philosophized Jacques Chirac. But it is thirty-six hours later that the late president is the hero of the day. An esplanade bearing his name is inaugurated in Le Havre, in the extension of the Nelson Mandela esplanade. After the clash of words on Thursday, the weight of photos on Saturday. The presence of Claude Chirac is worth all the speeches. The event should have taken place on April 1, it cannot be invented, twenty-one years to the day after a visit by the former President of the Republic then campaigning for his second seven-year term, but the pension crisis had led to its postponement.
In Edouard Philippe’s tribute to Jacques Chirac, Alexandre Dumas is still there, the ode to “panache” too. The political lesson is elsewhere, the president of Horizons insists on the way in which “the man with the corona” succeeded in “embodiing France and the French”, like Clemenceau moreover, also summoned. Then humility is put forward, through Malraux: “Being a king is stupid; what matters is to make a kingdom.” Extensive program…
Claude Chirac approaches the microphone. And his words do not fall on deaf ears: “Even if two generations separate you from Jacques Chirac, a lot connects you to him.” She quotes Antoine Rufenacht, who led the campaign for the future president and was mayor of Le Havre for fifteen years, Alain Juppé, Gaullism. She lists “the essential qualities which are yours and which were essential for Jacques Chirac, loyalty, sense of state, distance from the foam of things”, finally underlines “the special place you occupy in the hearts of all French people”. Behind the desk, the sea is not far from overflowing…
This Saturday, he obviously did not venture to do so. Edouard Philippe is privately one of the best imitators of Jacques Chirac. That’s good, it’s time to copy it until 2027.