That day in December 2016, Marie-France Garaud was particularly perky: the British had just adopted a timetable for Brexit, and that made her happy. “Look how the English got off their feet*! Ahah! They are more intelligent. We are there, like morons, we accept everything that is intended for us, plus the sauce, and we don’t care.” In her living room overlooking the tumult of the Quai Anatole France, on the banks of the Seine, the octogenarian then launched into one of her favorite diatribes on currency, borders and “everything that has been stripped from us”. The great shift in decline dated, for her, from the departure of de Gaulle, after the disavowal of the lost referendum. A photo of the great man, in black and white, sat on the pedestal table in the small library adjoining the living room. “What do you want? The French are irredeemable, since they dismissed him.” On November 10, 1970, Pompidou announced: “General de Gaulle is dead; France is a widow.” Some wore black for longer. Marie-France Garaud, all her life.
During her career she has not changed her ideas – some would say “obsession”: from the Pompidol cabinets where she started in 1962 to the “no” to the European Constitution in 2005, including the Cochin appeal. or the campaign against Maastricht, Marie-France Garaud has never ceased to be a “sovereignist”, a historical channel. And anti-European. “What we are experiencing is called decadence, you know. There are glorious decadences, but ours lacks momentum,” she once told us. Then, glancing around at the classic paintings which adorned the impressive ceiling height of his molded living room: “On Europe, admit: would we have been stupid and wouldn’t have cared? wouldn’t be seen?” she added, punctuating it with a burst of laughter as tight as a spring.
Some of the most carnivorous witticisms…
Less iconic and much less popular than her friend Simone Veil, Marie-France Garaud nonetheless represents a French story. She readily said that her first childhood memory was the sound of German boots pounding the pavement. Another memory, not much older: while the Germans occupied the Poitevin family building, little Marie-Françoise (her first name) kept watch in front of the woods, on the edge of the property, while her parents buried the hunting rifles quite far and deep enough that the dogs won’t come and dig them up.
In the collective imagination, Marie-France Garaud was undoubtedly one of the greatest cowskins of the Republic. Feared for her low blows, for her merciless maneuvers, admired for her intelligence and her outbursts, she has to her credit some of the most carnivorous witticisms of recent decades. Thus with Jacques Chirac, of whom she was an eminence grise from 1976 to 1979: “I thought he was marble from which we make statues. In reality, he is earthenware from which we make bidets.” For current politics she had little sympathy or indulgence. With a few surprising exceptions. So she sent her congratulations to the socialist Bernard Cazeneuve when he was appointed Prime Minister. “Her way, it resembles what we would have done in the past,” she told me. “We don’t feel out of place.”
Marie-France Garaud had high cheekbones and a posh bun – she: “in a TV movie, they made the actress who played my role have a bun that was too low… it was vulgar!” -, a clear voice and sepia phrasing like Denise Glaser in Discorama. A slice of history. When she was advisor to Pompidou, she invited female political journalists, including Catherine Nay who recounted it in her memoirs, to discuss during her fittings at Chanel, avenue Montaigne. A period.
Always dressed to the nines. “Coquette is a respect, and therefore a distance, that our time no longer knows how to maintain,” she once explained to us. Very conservative, she was not a feminist. His declaration of candidacy for the presidency of the Republic, in 1981, during an interview on TF1, is worth the detour. While the journalist asks her “Who do you ride for, Marie France Garaud?”, the latter responds, interspersing dramatic effects of silence: “I almost want to tell you that you are disobliging me. I don’t ride for someone and, first of all, I’m not a truck.” And the camera zooms in on two smoky eyes who can no longer look furious.
To visitors, Marie-France Garaud liked to relate the maxim that her old accomplice, Pierre Juillet, had chiseled for her one day, and of which she had made a mantra: “You raise your feet for the strings, you lower your head for the knives , and above all you laugh every day And when you don’t know what to laugh about, laugh at yourself, it’s an inexhaustible subject. She said this, then burst out with a frank laugh, a burst of laughter, which reminded us that despite the pussy-bow blouses and the shiny shoes, the lady knew – literally – how to handle the rifle on her Poitevin acres. She said July’s maxim willingly, and even several times per visit in recent years.
Only one day, she told me this other sentence from the same accomplice, which perhaps says even more about her inner workings. It was one day that she was supposed to go to the Élysée to see François Mitterrand. An appointment made at the request of the president. But she had just lost a parent, and in sadness and fatigue, pouring out her words to her eternal accomplice, she asked herself the question of canceling. “Marie-France, hold on.”, he would have whispered to her. And that was enough for him to get back in the saddle. Outfit. Like always. Like her bun.
*she said “pull your feet” to “escape” among other expressions, such as “break the dogs” to “relax the atmosphere”, which is a hunting formula.