“A cormorant attack is worse than a German dive bombardment! I saw fish, thousands of terrified tench, it is intolerable that successive ministers protect these Nazi cormorants!”. October 2014, Charles-Amédée de Courson, deputy of the Marne, corseted elegance of the squire, combed hair and tie tied high, stiff back and this emphasis, at the risk of ridicule. All in his terrified tenches, you have to watch him sit down again, impassive, pretending not to hear the immense laughter hugging the hemicycle; let them make fun of these elected officials of the cities as long as we put an end to these filthy cormorants. It is that the parliamentarian is a hunter. Ah, those late evenings, the mauve hour when the ponds fall asleep, waxed jacket, damp boots, hours smelling the wind, then his rifle adjusted. Boom! In the National Assembly, where he has sat for thirty years, seven terms, record holder of France, he also guns down, sometimes alone, sometimes in a band, a small band until then. One of the 11 UDF deputies to vote for the left-wing censure motion against the Villepin government. Against social benefits in Corsica, against arbitration in favor of Bernard Tapie, president of the commission of inquiry in the Cahuzac affair. 2016, Hollande presidency, the forfeiture of nationality for terrorists, and he, strangled sobs, evoking 1940, his maternal grandfather, one of the 80 parliamentarians who voted against full powers to Marshal Pétain. 2019, Macron presidency, he prophesies the return of the “Vichy regime”, scandalized by “the presumption of guilt” that in his eyes shelters the anti-breakers law.
Charles de Courson has a name, he made himself one. A virtuoso of serious budgeting, an assumed conservative, an ardent defender of fundamental freedoms and the rule of law. In this electric week of March, the deputy of the Freedoms, independents, overseas and territories group (Liot, 20 elected) turned into a magnet. In his wallet, enough to possibly bring down the Borne government, or at least make him make panicked calculations and some dirty nightmares: his cross-partisan censure motion, tabled on March 15, is the only one that all opponents of the pension reform. Funny period, when this fierce centrist, magistrate of the Court of Auditors, 70 years old, two particles in heritage, having never turned on a computer or written a text message, became the face of LFI, mascot of Nupes. Already on February 6, they gave him a standing ovation when he was indignant that the President of the Assembly did not examine his motion calling for a referendum on pension reform. Praised by Mediapart, the little man knows how to do it, without brilliance or vociferation. “He is not feverish, he is serene”, confirms his old friend Hervé Morin, the centrist president of the Normandy region, whom the deputy called on Saturday in the United States, “and he is never afraid”.
Terror of all budget ministers since 1993
Courson booed the pension reform, outraged at the legislative vehicle borrowed, enraged that a minority text could be imposed by a 49.3, without a vote. On all the airwaves, he said it, repeated: “misappropriation of procedure”, “denial of democracy”, “pure madness”, “relentlessness of the president”. Except that his shoulder twitches, hiccups. His friends are worried about it, he ends up every winter in hospital sleep treatment, annual burn-out, December, examination of the finance law, and he, terror of all Budget Ministers since 1993, flushing out the tricks and hasty calculations until exhaustion. He never believed in Emmanuel Macron, always thought that intelligence would not be enough, that the new world was a show. Pessimistic, he sees the debt swelling, public finances swelling. “When we hold our annual meeting of the New Center, it is he who explains the country’s budgetary situation to us, and each time, he announces the apocalypse to us”, smiles Hervé Morin. He believes that this pension reform, “mediocre, unfair”, will not cure anything, worse, that it stirs up resentment, social anger. Tomorrow, Charles de Courson will return to his large house in Vanault-les-Dames, 386 inhabitants. Electricity and plumbing dated 1950, dried flies on the windowsills, on the table, a soup, a fish from the pond, a piece of fruit. He doesn’t care about comfort, about modernity, he looks at his hunting boots, his warm rifle. A member of his family has always sat in the Assembly since the French Revolution. His grandfather, the Marquis de Saint-Fargeau voted in 1793 the death of the king. From him he inherited this stiff back.