Having gone, as usual, through the secretary to get an appointment, Victor Habert-Dassault had breakfast with his grandfather in the private mansion on the Champs-Elysées roundabout, immense rooms whose colors, once sumptuous, slowly fade. The young man knows the palace like the back of his hand, it is there that his family, in the sumptuous ballroom of the Duke of Morny with Napoleon III gilding, celebrates Christmas, birthdays and weddings. Large tables, to which two representatives of the group are invited, confusing cousinship and the conduct of the empire in a singular alloy. In the basement, the founder Marcel Dassault had a cinema built, 80 white leather seats surround a stage on which Chantal Goya gave concerts when one of the little ones blew out her candles.
Above the refrains, on the floors, the holding company is busy preparing its Rafale. But this morning in winter 2018, the time for ditties is over for the young lawyer who is delighted to see his grandfather again. In a bad mood, despite his daily ginger juice, the nonagenarian is hardly moved. On the contrary. Strap-on session, during which he is harassed, scolded, he would have accomplished nothing, he would waste his youth, would waste his talents. The interview is brief, the lawyer stunned. Two months later, April 2018, celebration of the patriarch’s birthday. Victor, black curls and charcoal eyes, has prepared a text, his response to the blower. To his grandfather, he expresses admiration and gratitude, then he evokes his demands, his impatience, hardness as discipline, finely woven words, between which we can guess the infernal curse of this clan where the fathers always hurt the son. This time, Serge Dassault cries. We toast, we speak loudly, we quickly forget. The following weeks, the very old man asks Victor for the written document, but he plays for time, dreading reading it cold. In May, he died sitting at his desk. “In this family where even having a first name is considered megalomania”, Victor Habert-Dassault dates his political ambitions from that day. They will take shape around a dead person.
“Anyone named Dassault would have been elected”
March 2021, his uncle Olivier, the eldest of Serge’s children, the third Dassault generation, is killed in a helicopter accident. He was the only one not to occupy an office at the Champs-Eysées roundabout, preferring Avenue Montaigne and the distance from his powerful father. After mass at the Invalides, the crowd gathers at the Passy cemetery. Marie-Hélène Habert, the deceased’s sister, the only daughter of four siblings, questions her widow: who is she thinking of to succeed her as deputy for Oise, the dynasty’s favorite constituency? Natacha Dassault believes that Victor, Marie-Hélène’s son, the skillful editor of the tribute, would have the shoulders. However, since parliamentary fiefdoms cannot be inherited without an election, it is necessary to maneuver.
Olivier Dassault had no substitute and his faithful campaign manager, history and geography professor Olivier Paccaud, has been serving in the Senate since 2017. However, he is consulted, he knows the 153 municipalities around Beauvais like the back of his hand. Bad choice, he doesn’t want the nephew, he proposes a local candidate, an entrenched right-wing mayor. The deceased’s wife urges him, she goes to the Senate, accompanied by a lawyer, to persuade him. For his part, Victor Habert-Dassault hesitates. How to succeed the one who was elected and re-elected since 1988 – apart from a defeat in 1997? How to find your place? “We have to extend an incredible, immense story, it takes a lifetime to assimilate a story like that,” confides the thirty-year-old. He was 19 years old when he found the first volume of the Memoirs of General de Gaulle dedicated, on November 11, 1954, to his great-grandfather in these terms: “To Marcel Dassault, in testimony of my high consideration for the part he plays in the ‘standing’ of France.” The words electrified him: “Our DNA is nestled in the heart of the soul of France, and draws its strength from the love of our country.” It obliges, it crushes. The family presses him, he procrastinates. And ask for a meeting with Nicolas Sarkozy. Who receives it the next day and knows how to find the words.
Here he is put into orbit, weighed down by the four assistants, the premises and even his uncle’s driver. It is only the blue-white-red tie that his aunt offers him as a talisman that he refuses. The transmission works. He obtained 58% of the votes. Was his election celebrated by those close to him? Not by everyone, as the clan is riddled with arguments, those that thrive when parents stir them up. “Anyone named Dassault would have been elected,” grumbles Laurent Dassault, Olivier’s brother, at odds with his widow, whom he accuses of no longer inviting him to birthday parties in the Passy cemetery. A lie according to the lively Natacha, who assures to invite him to the lunch which follows the tribute with white roses. She adds, however, that she asks him not to make a scene there.
A fall observed as far as the United States
Concord is not the norm for the clan, and this point is not unrelated to their taste for mandates. For the Dassaults, the election has the obvious advantage of defending their ideas in Parliament – liberal and conservative – and it also allows them to experience the narcissistic comfort of suffrage at the ballot box. “Olivier loved his constituency, he needed this love, the recognition that politics offered allowed him to prove that he was not ‘just’ a Dassault”, analyzes his widow. Paradoxical reparation among the heirs of the fifth fortune in France. Did Victor Habert-Dassault, taking up the family torch, feel this same desire? In 2022, he was re-elected with 32% of the votes. Then beaten, despite the support of the left, last June.
When Marine Le Pen’s party offers him an alliance, and Eric Ciotti, a friend of his uncle, insists on following him into the union of the rights, he refuses. He recognizes the RN’s expertise in speaking to the working classes, but he condemns the history of the party, which he considers to be in contradiction with the values of his great-grandfather, deported to Buchenwald. He talks about it to his aunt, would Olivier have accepted the votes of the RN? No alliance, the widow confirms. Therefore, the campaign opposing him to his rival Claire Marais-Beuil is absurd. He makes a series of blunders, greedily hounded by the local press, his car parked in two disabled spaces, fleeing the camera.Special correspondent by hiding in a florist’s shop, declining the debates offered by the France 3 antenna and, above all, firing his driver after speeding. The decision earned him a condemnation by the industrial tribunal. Victor Habert-Dassault confides that the employee worried him, he would have played tricks on him. Opposite, the doctor, sixty-year-old and frontist, roams the farms and the party halls, putting up with being escorted by American television and a reporter from New York Times, his victory will also be announced live by the Bloomberg agency. We pinch ourselves, but the political fall of Dassault excites even the United States.
Disappointment with Nicolas Sarkozy, romance with François Hollande
Since then, the representative of the fourth generation has been preparing his return to Beauvais, where he kept a rental apartment. He will present himself in the next election, realizing how difficult the task will be, the RN having blown six of the seven constituencies in the department, but, he says, thoughtfully, “I must extend the story in the Oise”. It is impossible to conclude with a defeat a reign started by great-grandfather Marcel, elected from 1955 to his death in 1986, continued by uncle Olivier, and extended, in Essonne, by grandfather Serge , mayor of Corbeil-Essonnes then senator, whose last municipal election was, in 2009, invalidated by the Council of State.
In the family, everyone is passionate about politics, the local, and the very big, the national and the international. “For my grandfather, the budget of France was as important as that of his company,” observes Victor Habert-Dassault, who must be pleased that his ancestor is no longer in this world. And then “you have to be good with your clients, and the clients are the presidents in place”, recalls an intimate friend. The planes carry the nuclear bomb, the second component of French deterrence, and the aeronautical group can only sell its Rafale or Falcon through heads of state, hence the importance of a sustained conversation, initiated by Marcel. With Chirac, it was fusion, mutual adoration. With Sarkozy, warm and disappointing. “He only stayed five minutes at our wedding,” says Natacha Dassault, and above all he failed to export the family jewels. Under Hollande, against all expectations, the idyll. The president elected in 2012 may well be “socialist”, as Serge Dassault says, when, barely elected, he demands the head of Etienne Mougeotte, fervent support of Sarkozy and boss of the Figaro, owned by Dassault since 2004, he obtains it during the day. Business is business, if the left leads, we serve it. It was a good thing for him, because Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian fulfilled the aircraft manufacturer’s expectations, with the order book exploding.
With Emmanuel Macron, the links are courteous, nothing more. The president certainly did his ENA exit training at the Oise prefecture with the prefect Michel Jau, but little brings him closer to the family. Strangely, Olivier Dassault spoke to him informally, but he did not have his mobile number, dictating his messages to Nicolas Bays, socialist deputy then LREM from 2012 to 2017, who transmitted them to him on his behalf. The process is astonishing. Subsequently, Marcel Dassault’s grandson wrote his messages alone, finally having access to the presidential number. When the MP dies, Emmanuel Macron telephones his widow, “a long, sweet moment”, she remembers, then Brigitte Macron takes over, having lunch at the Champs-Elysées roundabout, where she is received by Marie-Hélène , Thierry and Laurent Dassault. “She is charming, very attentive, very pleasant,” enthuses the latter, whom the president invited on an official trip to India in January 2024.
The Dassaults are received at all the dinners around a foreign head of state with whom their company does business, but, apart from these good regards, the relationship remains distant. At the Champs-Elysées roundabout, we are pleased that the Palais expects nothing from Figaro, counting a single phone call during the entire Macron presidency. It was last June, an advisor very close to the president expressed his disagreement with the positioning of Alexis Brézet, head of the editorial staff, considered favorable to Marine Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election. The conversation did not last, the roundabout saw others and less friendly ones. In the ballroom of the Duke of Morny, while the government of Michel Barnier falls, a craftsman erases the doors, one by one he erases the stains staining the whiteness. The Dassaults remain. Politicians pass. They always compose.
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