There are deaths that change a president, and funerals that tell a lot about public life. The funeral of Gérard Collomb took place on Wednesday, and it was Edouard Philippe who spoke just before Emmanuel Macron. He was his leader in government and he met the mayor of Lyon “for the first time” twice. Edouard Philippe, the piece added, was not part of the 2017 campaign, he only got to know Gérard Collomb when the latter became Minister of the Interior. The two men then had a relationship made of ups and downs, to say the least.
And he met him again after the exercise of power, when Gérard Collomb moved away from Macronie and then was overtaken by illness. As we know, the mayor of Lyon was not the last to encourage his counterpart from Le Havre when the latter launched, against the wishes of the Head of State, his Horizons party – as if one and the other agreed that nothing should be expected from the 2017 Walkers.
Edouard Philippe therefore spoke at the request of Caroline Collomb, while Emmanuel Macron’s intervention had not been spontaneously accepted, having previously been the subject of family discussions. Time passes, politics hurts: the late mayor of Lyon was therefore closer to one, distant from the other.
Yes, there are deaths that change a president. For Emmanuel Macron there was that of soldiers Cédric de Pierrepont and Alain Bertoncello, killed in 2019 during a hostage release operation in Burkina Faso decided by the head of state, who will say in his tribute speech: “It’s not a sacrifice, no. It’s the very meaning of commitment. The tragic part of the mission. And you knew it.” From his hand, says Corinne Lhaïk (President Burglar), the one who had given the order to take action added: “And with you, I knew it.” There was the assassination of Samuel Paty, with this ceremony at the Sorbonne, which will see Emmanuel Macron deliver a speech “in apnea” as the emotion had overwhelmed him.
The death of Gérard Collomb is the first of another kind that this young – certainly less and less – president is confronted with. It is a national figure of Macronie who is leaving, and this departure marks a break in the presidency. “We are starting to bury grunts, people are moving away, our party is becoming a political movement like any other,” observes a member of the inner circle.
For the president, death is a mirror
Saturday evening, as soon as he was informed of the death of Gérard Collomb, Emmanuel Macron sent an SMS to the writer Marc Lambron, friend of the Lyonnais: “We will miss him sorely.” On Wednesday, in Saint John’s Cathedral, the president fought against ghosts. He recalled “the fantastic epic of 2016-2017” and the happy times of the conquest of power. The companions of the time were there, even Alexis Kohler, the secretary general of the Elysée who rarely leaves his office, had made the trip. Then he recalled the first day to better chase away the shadow of the last days, with the tears of Gérard Collomb during the investiture ceremony of May 14, 2017: “It is up to us, to me, to be today today gripped by grief, inconsolable.” The voice at this moment became knotted, inevitably. Emmanuel Macron, who has always relied more on himself than on others, had also just made a statement that he does not often repeat: “Without having crossed your path, I would not be where I am.”
If he praised “the courage of those who are right too early”, he passed over in silence, as one generally does in these kinds of circumstances, the sadder end of the story, of their story. Because Gérard Collomb had distanced himself, overcome by bitterness, only remembering the head of state on rare occasions – “I demand copyright”, he wrote to him after the speech des Mureaux on separatism. The very image of the president had become blurry in his mind, “after a while you don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong.” Death is a mirror, and what Emmanuel Macron saw this Wednesday does not only bring back happy images. Death, and the time of remorse.