Mayor of Lyon for nearly twenty years, successively deputy, senator, president of the metropolis and minister of the interior at the start of Emmanuel Macron’s first five-year term, Gérard Collomb died on Saturday November 25, at the age of 76, from following cancer, which he had chosen to announce publicly. “I am going to fight against the disease with the same energy that I put into the service of Lyon, of our metropolis, when I served as mayor and president”he wrote in a tweet on September 16, 2022, sparking in return hundreds of messages of support, proof of intact notoriety.
Dedicated body and soul to public affairs, Gérard Collomb built his political career with unusual perseverance, long solitary and exposed to the hostility of his own camp, then in the mysteries of power. The classics scholar fought for thirty years before conquering the capital of Gaul.
No doubt he owed this energy to his rural roots. His mother is a domestic worker, her father a furniture repairer for the rich families of the Monts du Lyonnais. Close to the CGT of the Popular Front, his father became a worker in the electrical industry and ended his career as a foreman in Chalon-sur-Saône. It is in this town of Saône-et-Loire that Gérard Collomb was born, on June 20, 1947. The father, who wanted him to be an engineer, gave him Meccano and made him revise his lessons early in the morning, in the concierge’s lodge. factory. This atmosphere of self-sacrifice led the youngest son towards brilliant studies. Admitted to the literary preparatory class (hypokhâgne and khâgne) at the Parc high school in Lyon, Gérard Collomb continued his studies at the faculty and obtained the aggregation of classics in 1969.
Atypical socialist
“A huge hard worker, gifted with a very strong memory. He always worked his files thoroughly before speaking”, remembers Martine Roure, former socialist MEP (1999-2009), friend of the Collomb couple since their studies. Gérard married in 1968. While Geneviève attended evening classes at university, and worked as a typist-invoice during the day, her husband entered politics by joining Démocratie et Université. This student club came from the Convention of Republican Institutions, a party created by François Mitterrand and Charles Hernu, a forerunner of the Socialist Party, refounded at the Epinay Congress in 1971. That year, Gérard Collomb presented himself for the first time at a municipal election, in Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon. First electoral setback, in a town too wealthy for the left, followed by a failure in the legislative elections of 1973.
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