Who really knows Benoît Payan? In the Socialist Party, his former political family which he left, we find him “sympathetic and talented”. But still ? “How do I know him, boasts Patrick Mennucci, with his singing accent. When we experienced the disastrous management of the city of Marseille under Jean-Claude Gaudin, we say that he became what the city needed .” The latest Ifop poll does not contradict the former deputy of Bouches-du-Rhône: Payan walks on water, and no less than 60% of Marseillais say they are satisfied with their mayor. Even his predecessor Jean-Claude Gaudin, who lives peaceful days in the Var, is full of praise for the mayor of 45 springs. At the Élysée also, around Emmanuel Macron, we have long watched with interest, if not greed, this sagacious councilor of the same age as the president.
Back in 2020. The pandemic is still shaking up the country but in Marseille, an earthquake: the right, in charge of the city for 25 years, is swept away by the “Printemps marseillais”, a coalition of the left, with socialists, ecologists, communists and rebels. It is Michèle Rubirola who has been designated head of the list and who settles in the chair of mayor of Marseille. Six months later, another seismic shock: the city councilor throws in the towel, and Benoît Payan replaces her. After an environmentalist woman who has never really had politics in her blood, the people of Marseille find themselves with a socialist, a former member of the MJS, an apparatchik vociferating gossip, in a clean suit to run the city.
“You can’t get rid of her that fast”
“Clever is the right word to describe it”, analyzes an ecologist from Marseille. A qualifier that does not really ooze the compliment. Many accuse him of having worked behind the scenes to push Rubirola out, of having become a mayor “by breaking and entering.” But if the Marseille spring union was made possible, it is also because Benoît Payan knew how to withdraw from the race at the time of the negotiations. The young candidate was paying for his socialist career, and also, like many of his generation, the Hollande five-year term. His time will come, and soon he hopes. Probably sooner than expected. Rubirola has already told him that she doesn’t want to and she even offered him “a switch”, to understand: an exchange of roles during his term of office.
Ecologists are choking, those who still paraded, proud to have won several major French cities. To save the soldier Rubirola, Cécile Duflot therefore asks François Lamy, the former knight of Martine Aubry who has become eco-friendly, to go and support the new mayor in front of her chief of staff, but above all to convince her to stay. She agrees to try the adventure for a year at best, and Lamy then calls Payan. A forty-minute phone call to calm socialist ardor. “You can’t get rid of her so quickly, let her stay and we’ll build the handover,” insists Lamy. Benoît Payan listens, but he already knows the outcome of the case. “Michèle never really wanted to be mayor of Marseille but Benoît convinced her. He had the ability to choose the one he will replace next”, says a loyal member of the band. The day after the telephone exchange, the Marseille spring claims that Lamy cannot become the mayor’s chief of staff, “too many skills” plead some, renewal is needed. Gossips, again, see Payan’s hand there.
The other capital
Benoît Payan has nothing to do with these palace muddles. He has already turned the page, the second he settled into the mayor’s chair. He sighs in annoyance when some ask him if the next municipal election will be the “real” campaign, the one he will do on his behalf. And he sighs even more when asked if he has other ambitions than Marseille. Who does not know that the left, and the socialists especially, are looking for a champion for 2027? “Why the hell would I look to Paris?”, he quips before letting go of a smile from the corner of his lips, bringing François Lamy back to him.
No, it’s only his city that matters to him, and nothing else. Marseille, which he defends body and soul, which he finds “touching”. Marseille, wedged between the Mediterranean and the mountains and that “the people of Paris, up there”, he says, have always looked askance. Marseille, carried by the din of History, built over the centuries by Comorian, Italian, Arab or even Jewish immigrants, who arrived here, with no identity other than that of the Marseillais they were going to build for themselves. Marseille, a little apart from the national narrative. Today, we are only interested in this city for its wanderings – the northern districts, delinquency, etc. – not for its wealth, deplores Payan who is fighting to change the way people look at his city, the second in the country all the same. The other capital.
The idyll with Macron has fizzled
So when Emmanuel Macron invented a Marseille passion, he was pleasantly surprised. Between the two men, the relationship was initially happy – when it was stormy with Jean-Luc Mélenchon. “The president thought about the city, and he listened to me and asked me questions that few people who are not from here have ever asked me”, he confided in 2021 when the head of the State launched the “Marseille en grand” plan, an unprecedented scheme of 15 billion euros, including five from the State, to renovate schools, housing and transport in the city. “They understand each other, they are only a month apart but above all they are from this generation of young politicians who are already a little old in their heads, laughs a connoisseur of the two men. And you just have to listen to them talk to the people: they both have this little pagnolesque side.”
And like any idyll, it fizzled out. Emmanuel Macron has not forgiven Benoît Payan for not giving him back his own coin by supporting him during the presidential election. He had not even come to greet him during the big meeting between the two rounds in Marseille, on April 16, 2022. 5 billion and not a hello, nor support, what cheek! Benoît Payan, he does not forgive the Head of State for having imagined that a check, however unprecedented, required support. “You know, Marseille is not a doormat”, annoyed Benoît Payan the day after the presidential election.
All of this never stopped Benoît Payan from thinking about the country, from looking beyond his city. For a little over a year, the city councilor has been scribbling Moleskine notebooks beyond counting them. A subject, other than Marseille, obsesses him: the fall of the “common”. “What still makes a nation? What do people from Marseilles and people from Brest have in common today? We are living through a deep crisis in the production of collective norms and the sum of individual interests . Take intersectionality: it is the great victory of liberalism”, pleads the one who sometimes finds himself dreaming of a “new Republic”, not the sixth of Jean-Luc Mélenchon nor the Fifth “that we thought for de Gaulle”, another. Payan has ideas and ambition, but he won’t be leaving Marseille anytime soon. No matter, Châteaubriand did not write that it was “the Athens of the Gauls”.