The former Minister of Defense and Culture, François Léotard, died at the age of 81, announced on Twitter, this Tuesday April 25, Emmanuel Macron.
“With his disappearance, we lose a free spirit, a man of books and commitment,” wrote the French president. “His native Var, the France he defended, the Republic he loved are experiencing a great loss today,” he added.
“The Southern Region, its region, bows to the memory of François Léotard” who was also “four times deputy of Var and mayor of Fréjus for 20 years”, for his part affirmed the president of this region. Renaud Muselier paying homage to “a man of states and territories”.
He “could no longer support” the political world
Former boss of the late UDF from 1996 to 1998, François Léotard had been minister during the two cohabitations under François Mitterrand: of Culture (1986-88) in the government of Jacques Chirac, then of Defense (1993-95) in the government of Edouard Balladur.
“A man of conviction and commitment, the armies remember him as a man deeply attached to the sovereignty and independence of France”, said the Minister of the Armed Forces Sébastien Lecornu.
Precocious and suspicious, athletic and stressed, this politician in whom many saw a potential presidential candidate had left politics in the 2000s. Stricken with “weariness”, François Léotard will then explain that he “no longer supported” the political world, his “prostitutional” aspect, made of “flattery” and “lie”, that he had to find “his own language”.
Electoral failures and legal troubles – sentencing in 2004 to ten months in prison suspended for money laundering and illicit financing of a party – had also weakened him.