There is no compromise with the bike, even an electric one. To give up riding one even once in the rain is to abdicate, to deny oneself, the first step towards defeat. This is how Lucie Castets comments, with a big, red smile, on her 3,700 kilometres cycled in one year. With disarming freshness, and a single silent mobile phone placed on the table, the still candidate of the New Popular Front at Matignon exposes herself, without filter or fuss, in a café in the 11th arrondissement. Now accosted in the street, she noted that, on the first day of school, her son’s nursery school teacher had not told her that she had seen her on television all summer, including once, on 23 August, walking towards the office of the President of the Republic to order him to appoint her as head of government. “The only right-wing teacher in Paris”, she supposes, her clear eyes crinkled with laughter.
Naïve and cerebral, the ENA graduate begins the story of her Warholian summer, a vortex that leaves her exhausted in this September, and convinced that the story is not over. “I am placing myself in the potential of future elections,” says the one to whom some at the NFP are also dangling a candidacy for mayor of Paris. In the meantime, let’s go back to July 22, a call from Olivier Faure, first secretary of the PS asking her if he can “test” her name, she certain that he has a list of candidates, he does not call her back all day, she writes text messages to her group of girlfriends, with whom she goes to Italy every year. Not forgetting to make the registrations for their flight on Saturday. Is she hoping on this lunar day, the last before the crazy change, that destiny will turn around? Does she think that the evenings spent on terraces with her wife, a writer and screenwriter who has finished her second novel, the jokes told one after the other, choking on laughter before they fall (one of her specialties, to the point that Emmanuel Grégoire, first deputy mayor of Paris, made it the theme of his speech when he married her two years ago), the recipes she concocts, the canoe-kayak speed races she wins and the spy series she devoured from her sofa are long gone? Does she realize that one cannot have been propelled into the crazy light of a chaotic political season and then return to one’s career as financial director of the City of Paris, 600 people under one’s command, office 6E.011?
She claims to only realize it now, this strange week when she has not returned to work, while the President of the Republic is charging septuagenarian LR Michel Barnier with forming a government. She said goodbye to her team by email, it bothers her. She has sometimes, furtively, thought about this impossible return to the past, confiding on August 11 to a close friend: “I will not be able to stay in office”, she chases away nostalgia, the united left is counting on her, we do not whine in the face of History. On July 23, her name is remembered, all the bigwigs of the NFP call her, first morning show, a bit mechanical, on France Inter, a whirlwind of requests. On the 27th, the plane takes off without her, who will not be able to organize the summer collective screening of the film Gladiator by Ridley Scott. Leave filed with the City of Paris, courteous message from Anne Hidalgo, and here she goes, bravado.
Patatras, she discovers that she is alone. “Everyone thought that there were 50 experts ready to make me work, an army, but there was nothing, the next day the parties did not think so.” Dropped in the open countryside. She has to launch trips, respond to the press, dig up a program a little better put together than the one negotiated in extremis by the four parties of the NFP. But everyone has run away, “tired of having fought each other for 15 days in a windowless room”, she comments, indulgent. She calls them one by one, she hears herself answer that they are exhausted, on vacation, far away, and understands having to invent this off-the-ground job: applying for the post of Prime Minister. The good student never giving up, she activates her network of ENA graduates, sets up a group of specialists, Lucas Chancel will work on taxation, Michaël Zemmour on pensions. She swallows notes, she organizes, she orders, meetings in the evening in her living room, video calls every day. Arnaud Bontemps, with whom she launched the association “Our Public Services” three years ago, improvises as a volunteer chief of staff.
A Green Party executive then said that he would need an operating budget, he sent a figure, a sum “higher”, she said, than the 51,000 euros per month revealed by Marianne. The treasurer of the Greens is refining the copy, with a breakdown of expenses by party and four full-time salaries. “We have not activated this option,” says Lucie Castets, who has not received a cent from the NFP, receiving her salary during her holidays, her train tickets were reimbursed. Around her, a core of about ten people are brainstorming, developing a government project, without referring to the bigwigs of the NFP, whom she does not warn of what she is going to say or do. And who do not care much, as if her only mission was to occupy the summer ground while waiting for the professionals to return to the controls. When she needs advice on communication, she phones Gaspard Gantzer, former advisor to François Hollande, as she does others. She never turns to the party teams.
She consults, thinks, works, she talks with the elected MoDem Jean-Paul Mattei, whose project to tax superdividends she approves, she speaks with Stéphane Lenormand, head of the Liot group in the Assembly, with Charles de Courson again. “The accusation of sectarianism against me is a caricature, I would have set up agreements.” She seems to sincerely believe that these few interlocutors from August would have kept their word in October in the Assembly, if she had been chosen. In the process, she plans to converse with all the former Prime Ministers. Dominique de Villepin explains his views on the Middle East to her, she would have liked him as her Minister of Foreign Affairs; Bernard Cazeneuve also takes the time, “an elegant, very correct conversation”, she says. On the other hand, Gabriel Attal’s chief of staff declines when all the others ignore him. She continues on, solid, diligent, working hard, truly convinced that at the NFP “no one has an interest in the union exploding”.
When, on August 31, LFI launched its call for the dismissal of the President of the Republic, having warned her in advance for form’s sake, she was annoyed, the rebels ignored it. “We had a very frank explanation of the text by telephone with Manuel Bompard”, specifies the thirty-year-old. The summer passed thus, sacrificial, “I don’t have much to lose, except perhaps the life that I loved”. And then, gratifying consolations: “In all the party universities, left-wing activists have a strong demand for unity.” Certainly, but their leaders? Raphaël Glucksmann for example? A friend, “we talk to each other, he is a little evanescent”. Indeed, he is preparing to affirm his solitary escape at the beginning of October, far from the LFI tutelage. And Anne Hidalgo, her former boss? “She wished me all the success possible.” Does Lucie Castets even understand the selfishness, calculations and trickery of politics? A member of the Socialist Party from 2009 to 2013, she left it, and was in an ineligible position on Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol’s Normandy PS list in the 2015 regional elections. Twice, she declined an investiture – pink, always – in the 2022 and 2024 legislative elections. The third constituency of Calvados, in Lisieux, was promised to her last June. Two hours to give her answer. Thanks but no thanks, no question of beating the “Our Public Services” collective for a hypothetical seat at the Palais-Bourbon, she then added that she did not identify with any party, in the European elections, she voted Green.
When, at the end of July, she informed her parents in Caen that her name had been pulled out of the hat with four bumps, her father, a psychiatrist, told her that he thought what she was doing was “brilliant”, but that he would have “preferred it to be done by someone else”. She sometimes shared this opinion, “it depends on the day”. A return to her happy childhood, a psychotherapist mother, an education focused on freedom and the realm of possibilities, “many torments have turned into peace after being digested”. Her long years on the couch had unified her, a daily thought for her analyst who retired last winter and gave her no sign of life this summer. A student at the ENA, she did her internship as a prefect in Montauban in 2012, her parents visited her there, they went to the market, and met the prefect. Lucie Castets made the introductions: “Mr. Prefect, let me introduce you to my parents.” Short polite chat, dispersion. His mother calling out to him, mocking the formal introduction, this “Mr. Prefect”, mumbled one Sunday morning between the fruit and vegetable stalls, a bit ridiculous, no? She associates, devilishly spontaneous, this memory with her meeting, on August 23, with Emmanuel Macron, who did not impress her at all. “A big oral exam at the ENA”, she concludes.
Without malice, she believes she has done the exercise well, experienced in competitive exams, that very French hurdle race. Preparatory class at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand, here she is in 2005 at Sciences Po, hardworking and good comrade, sharing notes and handouts with her classmates who are already campaigning like crazy. We know she is left-wing, nothing more, feminist, nothing more. It is the time of the demonstrations against the First Employment Contract, wanted by Villepin Prime Minister, and the school is boiling. Marie Toussaint, head of the Sciences Po environmentalists, harangues the students, while Manon Aubry, president of the UNEF, where Gabriel Attal campaigns, electrifies the lecture halls. She keeps her distance. She passed the ENA competition on the first try, where she finds her cousin Armel, son of teachers from Lyon, two years older than her. Still no obvious political commitment, we know she is left-wing, classically. She comes out ranked 20th, not in “the boot”, that of the first fifteen who choose one of the three major professions of the civil service. Her brother Simon, three years her senior, assures that she did not feel any irritation, her classmates remember her, “black, bitter”, remaining frozen on rue de l’Observatoire, attending the presentation of the positions offered to the best. A bruise, the first. All agree on her concern for the general interest and praise her enthusiasm to join the senior civil service and the Treasury. “She likes figures, they make the world go round, they support her convictions”, explains Simon Castets. She assures that she refused a position in Arnaud Montebourg’s office, then, twice, another in Michel Sapin’s office. The two former ministers were shocked when they read these lines taken from her Wikipedia page, they each called their chief of staff at the time, and no one remembers ever having thought of recruiting this young graduate of the ENA.
At Tracfin, she works well, very well, “a strong, dynamic, ambitious personality” praises one of her former directors, specifying however that the nature of her functions did not give her access to the content of the anti-money laundering files. 2019, she suddenly resigns, having trouble accepting that an internal mission was sold to a private audit firm. And then she cannot consider working under the orders of one of her former comrades from the ENA, who becomes her boss, a former employee of the Darmanin firm, who herself came out in the boot. Recruited in 2020 to Anne Hidalgo’s office, she deploys there, and three years later is appointed the first woman to head up financial affairs.
Then came the summer of 2024, the vertigo, the lonely campaign, and one day in September, in the rain, Michel Barnier was appointed Prime Minister. She asked to be placed on leave, the formalities have not yet been sorted out. She does not want to talk about the details of her resignation – the entourage of the mayor of Paris opened the door wide for her. It was suggested to her that she ask to be reinstated at Bercy, at the Treasury, it would be a good hiding place, she would be paid there and she would have nothing to do, too politically exposed. The proposal outrages her, she plans to look for work in the non-profit sector, a large NGO would appeal to her. Oxfam for example. Only the position of general director there is occupied by Cécile Duflot. Damned politics.