The prefect of Indre-et-Loire holds up the frame for a second as one would a sports trophy. “Long live the press! Long live the free press”, proclaims Marie Lajus. Two sentences that you don’t often hear from the mouth of a prefect. Above all, the glass frame contains an article, published in thee Chained Duck Wednesday, December 14. “A prefect sacrificed in the name of Leonardo da Vinci”, can we read in bold. On December 7, the senior official was replaced in the Council of Ministers. A dismissal without a new assignment. Extremely rare. This December 16, Marie Lajus celebrates her farewell party at the prefecture. Many associations and officials from the department – and not only – made the trip. But very few elected officials from Indre-et-Loire, is surprised Christophe Monteiro, director of a social center in Soyaux, in Charente, where the 51-year-old prefect was previously stationed. Rumor has it they killed him.
Christophe Monteiro appreciates Marie Lajus since she helped him to develop his center, by accompanying him so that he set up a twinning with the international city of the comic strip of Angoulême, by managing so that he obtain a post of ombudsman for equality between women and men. “Madame Lajus is a prefect who is open and close to the population, turned towards the poorest. She left only good memories in Charente. So I found the situation unfair, I told myself that we could not remain without doing anything”, relates the association, also elected on the list of the mayor LR of Soyaux. Neither one nor two, he decided to launch a petition to support the prefect, then a forum, published in The world of December 26. “We affirm our support for the prefect Marie Lajus and, through her, for those who work for the respect of the law”, is it this time titled.
“It can annoy elected officials”
Catherine Champrenault, the former attorney general of Paris, the PS president of the association of mayors of Ariège, where the senior civil servant was also prefect, or even PS senator Nicole Bonnefoy, author of a letter from the December 19, are signatories. Amazement of the small world of the prefectural, who does not know that the person concerned is not at the origin of the operation. “From the memory of a prefect, it’s unheard of. The reflex is to say to yourself that Marie Lajus is burning her vessels. She is not about to find a position in the territorial”, analyzes a prefect who knows her, and remains a little surprised by the sequence of events: “Conflicts between the elected officials, even the strong man of the department, and the prefect, there are everywhere. What could have happened that justifies going until the dismissal? It’s a bit of a mystery.”
Marie Lajus learned of her eviction by telephone on December 6. “Negative feedback” from elected officials from Indre-et-Loire, means Pierre Bousquet de Florian, the director of cabinet of Gérald Darmanin, himself prefect. The end of a course hitherto faultless for this graduate of the ENS and Sciences Po, after a khâgne at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris. In 1997, the student who was planning to take the ENA competition while giving French lessons in prison and in migrant workers’ homes, suddenly changed course. She enters and leaves major in the police commissioner competition, a path she chooses with the conviction that social assistance also involves security, say her friends. An atypical profile often recalled by Marie Lajus, at the risk of annoying her interlocutors. “I know Marie, she has a certain stiffness and at the same time she has a knack for reminding people very regularly that she is normal. This can annoy the elected representatives of the territories, who only hate two things, it is that they are explains life and that graduate Parisians take them for bounty”, notes our prefect.
Anti-Sarkozy note for Terra Nova
Because Marie Lajus also had a career marked initially by an establishment in the Paris region. From 2006 to 2009, she was responsible for communication at the Paris police headquarters, headed by Michel Gaudin, close to Nicolas Sarkozy. Then she joined the mayor of Paris, from 2009 to 2012, as director of prevention and protection. In the Administration, one of his direct colleagues is none other than Elisabeth Borne, then director general for urban planning. According to a source familiar with the matter, the Prime Minister did not wish to intervene and left the Interior to manage the affair.
In the capital, Marie Lajus is in contact with political networks, with whom she frequently exchanges to the point of co-signing with the PS deputy Jean-Jacques Urvoas, under the pseudonym of “Marie Nadel”, a note on security for the foundation. Terra Nova, close to socialist circles, then led by the Strauss-Kahnien Olivier Ferrand. The text, entitled “changing security policy”, is a charge against the Sarkozy years. He criticizes the “robust” and “security incantations”, the “policy of figures pursued since 2002”, the “simplism” of the “police-justice opposition” and the “myth” of “lax judges”. Among his thirty-eight proposals, some stand firmly with the Sarkozyist tropism, such as the creation of priority security zones, which will be effective in the summer of 2012, the abolition of prison sentences for minors, “except serious attacks on persons” or the limitation of the “number of brigades specialized in “punch” interventions.
“This simplism finally borders on blindness when it (the right, editor’s note) continues to think that the massive dispatch of CRS and mobile gendarmes in operations punch can make it possible to restore peace durably and to dismantle in depth the trafficking”, write Marie Lajus and Jean-Jacques Urvoas. A commitment that will earn the senior official to be described as “new thinker of the left in terms of security” by Pointin November 2012.
social fiber
That month, she was named prefect by Manuel Valls, the Minister of the Interior. A post of “junior” prefect, equal opportunities, in Marseille, at first. In 2015, she obtained her first position as number one in a department, in Ariège, before landing in Charente in 2018, then in Indre-et-Loire, in 2020. Each time, Marie Lajus insists on its attachment to “social action”, such as welcoming travellers, which it highlights when drawing up its balance sheet in Indre-et-Loire. A profile that we would make him pay for today, believes Christophe Monteiro, who also evokes an ounce of “sexism”: “She is a prefect invested in the question of people in difficulty, and it is something that does not please obviously not”. Questioned by BFMTV on January 2, Gérald Darmanin justified his eviction with a circumlocution: “A representative of the Republic must be absolutely unassailable and respectable. When I consider that this is not the case, I take my responsibilities as head of administration”.
In the article brandished on December 16, The chained Duck recounts a funny story of town planning law: the prefect alerted the elected officials of the territory to the impossibility of setting up a start-up incubator, known as “Da Vinci Labs”, in the park of a listed castle in Reugny, north-east of Tours. The area, wooded, is indeed unbuildable. The entrepreneur behind the project, Xavier Aubry, was ready to invest 10 million euros. The prefectural position makes local elected officials furious. Contacted, Jean-Gérard Paumier, the president of the Departmental Council, sometimes presented as one of the spearheads of the revolt against Marie Lajus, referred us to his statement at the congress of the association of mayors of Indre-et-Loire , December 7, that is to say… the day of the dismissal of the prefect, ratified the day before. That day, the departmental elected official stifles the “requirements” of the “services” of the “representative of the State” which “stifle major projects” and “take away” the government from a pact of confidence with the territories. “The local elected representatives of Touraine expect fewer obstacles and constraints from State services”, he concludes.
“Proximity to the mayor of Tours”
A friend of Marie Lajus considers that if Paumier was able to become the public spokesperson for the recriminations against the prefect, he is not the only elected official to have activated. In the sights of those close to the senior official, the LREM deputy Daniel Labaronne, whose relations were notoriously strained with the normalienne, as well as the real strongman of the department, Philippe Briand. 291st fortune in France with a professional heritage estimated at 400 million euros thanks to Arche, his property administration holding company, Philippe Briand was Secretary of State, UMP deputy then president of the Association for financing the Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012. He supported the former president until the 2016 primary, and also rubbed shoulders with Gérald Darmanin for five years in the National Assembly. He has been mayor of Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire, a town of 17,000 inhabitants northwest of Tours, since 1989. Neither Daniel Labaronne nor Philippe Briand responded to the request from the Express.
A source in Beauvau agrees to say more about the reasons for the dismissal of Marie Lajus. Three criticisms are mentioned. On the one hand, “raises” from elected officials “from the majority, but also some from the right and the left” who consider themselves “badly treated”, not received or whose messages remain unanswered, while their “great proximity with the mayor of Tours (inserted in Europe Écologie-Les Verts, NDLR) questions”. In addition, adds this source, “the Jewish cult complained, no one from the prefectural body at a religious holiday. If she does not go, she could send someone. Does she go to the other ceremonies? other cults said nothing”. Finally, “there was a very violent attack on firefighters in Tours”, on October 21, 2022, “she refused to condemn publicly”.
Suspected of being too leftist
Information taken, the prefecture condemned, on Twitter, October 23, 2022, the aggression of the firefighters, in these terms: “The prefect of Indre-et-Loire condemns in the strongest terms the aggression of which were victims the firefighters in the exercise of their mission. It salutes the action of the police officers who allowed the arrest of the perpetrators and trusts Justice for the consequences of this one”. No refusal to condemn, therefore, but a two-day delay which may have annoyed already hostile elected officials. As for the absence to a Jewish holiday, a friend of the prefect familiar with the file confirms, while explaining that the case law was the same for all religions during the covid period: “It was decided that the prefect would not go to religious holidays during the Covid restriction period”.
There remains the argument of the “double weight, two measures” policy, which seems to him, more consistent. “When you are a bit in the political sights of the government, suspected of being too left-wing, for example, you have to be even more careful about who you appear with, with whom you show complicity”, explains a seasoned prefect . Marie Lajus would have paid dearly for not having taken sufficient care. The government too, in a way, which makes the situation even more grotesque: if she is today devoid of assignment, the high-ranking civil servant is nonetheless paid, each month, out of the deniers of the Ministry of Interior.