DISAPPEARANCE – Figure of the UDF, he was also Minister of Culture from 1986 to 1988. He died at the age of 81. Emmanuel Macron lamented on Twitter the loss of a “free spirit”.
Published update
“François Léotard served the State and carried a great idea of culture“. On Twitter, Emmanuel Macron announced on Tuesday the death of the former Minister of Culture and then of Defense in the governments of cohabitation under François Mitterrand. The one who was also mayor of Fréjus and deputy of Var, but especially a figure of the UDFpassed away at the age of 81.
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Born March 26, 1942 in Cannes into a family of seven children, François Léotard was Minister of Culture and Communication from 1986 to 1988 in the government of Jacques Chirac, then Minister of Defense and Minister of State from 1993 to 1995. in that of Édouard Balladur. He was also president of the Republican Party, then of the UDF from 1996 to 1998.
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He got involved in politics partly to clear his father’s honor: mayor of Fréjus from 1959 to 1971, he had been strongly criticized following the rupture of the Malpasset dam which had caused 423 deaths in 1959. At 22 years, François Léotard entered the seminary but gave up after a year and left for Lebanon as a cooperator. Upon his return, he joined the ENA, where he founded the first CFDT union section. Having joined the Giscardian right, he was elected mayor of Fréjus (1977-97) then UDF deputy for Var.
Tributes from the political class
“With his passing, we lose a free spirit, a man of books and commitment. His native Var, the France he defended, the Republic he loved are experiencing a great loss today.“, lamented the President of the Republic.
In a tweet, Nicolas Sarkozy expressed the “sadness to see one of the most brilliant figures of (his) generation leave too soon“.
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“The South region, his region, bows to the memory of François Léotardwrote the president of the PACA region Renaud Muselier on Twitter. He was a man of states and territories“.
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The mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi described him as “formidable defender of the liberal right“.
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Throughout his political career, François Léotard worked hard to follow the liberal model, in force across the Channel and across the Atlantic in the 1980s, and to advocate a break with the statist tradition of Gaullism and socialism. . He will take in his wake Alain Madelin, Gérard Longuet, Jacques Douffiagues or Claude Malhuret, a small group then nicknamed the “band to leo“. In 1995, he supported Edouard Balladur in the race for the Élysée.
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For his successor at the Ministry of the Armed Forces Sébastien Lecornu, François Léotard was a “man of conviction and commitment“. “The armies remember him as a man deeply attached to the sovereignty and independence of France.“, he writes.
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Legal disputes
Precocious and suspicious, sporty and stressed, this political hussar, in whom many saw a potential presidential candidate, had left politics in the 2000s. Struck by “weariness», François Léotard will then explain that he «could no longer bear“the political world, its aspect”prostitutional“, made of “flattery” and of “lie“, which he had to find “his own language“. After having put away his ambitions, he assured that he would have liked to be a lighthouse keeper…
François Léotard also experienced setbacks with the law. In 2021, he was given a two-year suspended prison sentence and a fine of 100,000 euros for “complicity in misuse of corporate assets» as part of the financial component of theKarachi case. In 2004, he had already been given a ten-month suspended prison sentence for “illegal political party financing and money laundering“.