“There is something unreal in writing these lines…” – L’Express

There is something unreal about writing these lines when you are no more. Because it was you who taught me to write during our companionship. Write speeches, not only through demanding mastery of content, but through the diligent study of rhetoric and prosody; words that ring and fly. Write a city that, through so many projects, Confluence, Gerland, the banks of the Rhône or the Carré de Soie, you have transformed like no other since your model Edouard Herriot. Write your destiny, you who, son of a cleaning lady and a metalworker, stock market worker, have climbed the floors of the social elevator one by one at the same time as those of political responsibilities.

Many, comrades of your first electoral campaigns, will know better than me about your major role in the metamorphosis of Lyon and its conurbation. I know, having experienced it closely with others, your essential place in the election of Emmanuel Macron as President of the Republic. I simply wish to bear witness here to what I learned alongside you over these eight years, you the experienced elected official who became a statesman, me the activist in my twenties from Brittany.

You taught me work ethic. You often told me about your laborious mornings, when as a child you accompanied your father to the factory, learning your lessons at six in the morning before going to school. This sense of effort has never left you. How many Sundays on the TGV, how many evenings in the secret of Beauvau to review, remodel, find the right word during long proofreading sessions? How many diligent hours also spent writing the program that you were going to present to the Lyonnais and which should not suffer from any imprecision? Political leaders are unfortunately unloved by their fellow citizens. I challenge anyone to endure even one month of the pace you endured as Minister or Mayor of Lyon.

You taught me to face reality. “See what you see” as Péguy writes. Not that you reject the authors and the ideology: my loved ones still remember the nights cut short by Fourier, Proudhon or Saint-Simon, the reading of which was vigorously recommended to me. But you have always enjoined me to add to the learning of letters and ideas, that of the street and the field. This iron rule was a shock to the somewhat naive literary person that I was at the time. Suddenly, the certainties of those who, having read books, think they know better than others were shattered by the leaflets in La Duchère, the markets in Vénissieux, the door to door in the towers of Gerland, the public meetings in the communes of the Mont d’Or or the confrontations with the so-called revolutionary trade unionists of the ENS. Suddenly, security, immigration, ghettoization, all these difficulties foreign to the peri-urban middle class kid of the 2000s that I was, burst forth in a harsh light. The President of the Republic mentioned it in his funeral eulogy: to your Lyon colleagues, Arthur, Jean-Marie, Najet and all the others, you often recounted the questioning of a voter who, five years after your arrival at the National Assembly asked you: “What have you changed in my life?” Not a day goes by without this question that obsessed you haunting me. Not a day goes by without me saying to myself, as you mischievously proclaimed to those who hold responsibilities without really exercising them: “We have to do things.”

You taught me the Grande Prairie spirit. For you, the Eddy Mitchell enthusiast, politics could not be reduced to a story of offices, waltz of initials, compilation of indicators and addition of lines of spreadsheets. We had to think big, leave the padded comfort of palaces, hotels and town halls. Rubbing shoulders with the world. Intellectual world: you were the friend of the economists, sociologists, geographers, urban planners and heads of think tanks who mourn you today. Cultural world: who knows, for example, that without you, Nuits Sonores, one of the largest electronic music festivals in France, would never have seen the light of day? World of business and diplomacy: I remember with emotion the missions abroad where business leaders, academics and artists rallied around you in Tokyo, Canton, Montreal or Boston, both to attract investors and to find some inspiration for the City of Gauls.

You instilled in me the tenacious self-sacrifice of the minority. The tributes paid to you showed it: you were a unifier. Freemason and friend of Catholics, socialist reformer and inventor of the plural left with the Greens, capable of bringing together in the same majority a Sarkozy and a communist, you respected everyone, whatever their background, opinions or beliefs. But bringing together never meant diluting yourself. You were one of those men who were sure of their convictions, who never gave up, who always believed in them. Of these leaders who preferred to cross the desert for years rather than sacrifice their values ​​on the altar of ambitions, positions and immediacy.

History has given you credit for this. Were you alone, with a few others, to think that you could conquer Lyon in 2001 after a series of failures? Now, at the dawn of the century, not only had you become Mayor, but also President of an urban area that was not promised to you. Did you seem isolated in the Socialist Party in your defense of economic freedom and consideration of the subject of republican authority? The party of Jaurès and Blum paid a high price for not having listened to you. Were you perceived, including in Lyon, as a sweet dreamer when you joined Emmanuel Macron in 2015? Not only was he elected, but he became the first president of the Fifth Republic re-elected outside of cohabitation. Each time, the same pattern: a strong, often minority vision, crazy energy deployed against all odds – I still remember with emotion your meetings all over France in support of candidate Macron. And in the end, success. Ad augusta per angusta (“the heavenly ways through narrow ways”) you said to the podium of the National Assembly. On the condition of assuming one’s rebellious part.

Finally and above all, you taught me that politics is a work of flesh and heart. An art of loving. Loving the cause you serve: you loved your city with a boundless, even devouring, passion, it was your strength and, seen from Paris, your unfathomable fragility. From this love that one day you fixed in the slogan “loving Lyon” came a constant requirement. Your employees know this, from whom you expect diligent sacrifices and total involvement. But you were forged from the iron of leaders who never ask of others what they do not apply to themselves. Thus we learned to love Lyon with you, in the sometimes rough enthusiasm of shared effort.

Loving those with whom you serve. Your opposition called you a friend of the powerful. Above all, I walked alongside a man who knew how to weave bonds of tenderness with activists that time has never erased. I remember Abdelkader, Norbert, François, Danielle, so many faces seen at your funeral, anonymous to many, never to you.

Simply loving people, you who were able to travel back and forth to Lyon to inaugurate a friend’s solidarity thrift store in your 9th arrondissement, you who evoked with emotion the memory of your comrades who left too soon. Loving people, whom Lyonnais of all stripes, from all backgrounds and from all conditions will continue to call “Gégé”, as an affectionate sign of recognition. As if you were part of their family.

René Char, one of your great poets, said of inheritance that it was not preceded by any will. Thousands of women and men are already seizing your legacy, Minister. In Lyon, those who cross the Confluence district, walk on the banks of the Saône or in one of the urban parks that you have imagined, I am sure think of you when saying how beautiful their city is. In France, the moderates of all you are grateful for having been able to speak the truth bluntly, for having passed laws to protect them and for having believed before the others that a confluence of republicans was not only desirable but possible .

And then there are us. All these women and men that you, the teacher of life as well as of letters, have trained and forged. All with their own destinies and unique journeys. So diverse. But linked I believe by this unique alloy of work, determination and love that you instilled in us and that we will never forget to carry. Like a viaticum.

Thank you for everything, Minister. We will continue to “do stuff”.