“I thought it was a joke, she’s full of humor Audrey. » If her personal consumption of cheese has always amused those close to her, few imagined that the young woman, who worked as a parliamentary assistant, would make it her new profession. And yet. Two months before confinement, Audrey Emery opened her dairy, in the Saint-Victor district of Marseille. “I think it makes total sense in reality,” now emphasizes her friend Zohra Ziane.
Both met at the town hall of Asnières-sur-Seine, when this town in the inner suburbs of Paris moved to the left in the 2008 municipal elections. Zohra is a young elected official, Audrey is taking her first steps in political communication.
“Educating and explaining what we do with public money is not nothing, it’s transparency,” smiles Audrey, a thousand miles today from the world of cabinets. Under his sure gestures, the (delicious) chocolate cream takes shape in his laboratory at the Laiterie Marseille. By adding milk, sugar, butter, chocolate one by one (we are no longer sure of the order), sourced locally and organically, Audrey happily recounts the ingredients of her professional reconversion.
” To be usefull “
“I feel like a UFO in the world of converted people,” she says. Often, people choose a new profession in search of meaning. This is not the case for Audrey, who was raised in a committed family from a very young age. “To serve a purpose” is an obsession for her. So when the elected official she works for in Asnières wins the 2012 legislative elections, she wants to follow him. Being also a novice at the assembly, he advised him to instead contact the deputy for Château-Neuf-les-Martigues, his hometown. She applied, and her profile, combining local and Parisian knowledge, convinced.
“As a good provincial, the Assembly made me dream,” she confides, her eyes always sparkling at the mention. It is the beating heart of the Republic, where we pass laws and change people’s lives. »
Today chief of staff at Paris City Hall, Michel Gelly-Perbellini remembers their meeting in parliament: “She wanted at all costs to convince me that my MP had to sign an amendment. She came head first, with the obligation of results more than means. We can’t say no to him! » Audrey climbed the ranks, until becoming parliamentary assistant to the vice-president of the assembly Sandrine Mazetier.
“We had a badger problem. »
From the National Assembly, she keeps the memory of Homeric battles, on Hadopi, on the creation of the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office, and also the ban on bee-killing pesticides: “We voted for it at three in the morning. We had a badger problem. Was it categorized as harmful or not? We debated for hours. We didn’t see it coming, we thought we had lined up everything with the hunters, the FNSEA. »
Fatigue wins. “We had to fight even to have a meeting room, it drove me crazy. “. When her MP loses in the 2017 legislative elections, Audrey takes the blame. “It’s very violent. We have two days to clear out, to say goodbye to our workplace, to the office colleagues with whom we have been for five years. »
At the first session of her (short) skills assessment, she arrives devastated. “My job fascinates me,” she said to her interlocutor. I only know how to do that and I only want to do that, but I don’t have the energy for that anymore. » “It resonated with me in terms of values, commitment, reasoned consumption, the relationship with the environment, and immediately it made me realize that they could be transposed to others professions. The range of possibilities was becoming enormous. » The memory of family vacations discovering good small local producers acts like a Proust madeleine. The love of Saint-Nectaire and the Rove bush too.
A year’s training to learn the art of creamery and cheesemaking and here she is, at almost 35 years old, back in the South. With a boutique project, but also the manufacture of her own cheeses and desserts, which she designs by paying milk producers their fair value. “She made a spectacular reconversion,” admits Michel Gelly-Perbellini, who took time to be convinced of the merits of the project: “I wondered if the people of Marseille were going to eat cheese. » “She recreated a whole tribe around her, like at the assembly,” he observes. Audrey couldn’t imagine her reconversion any other way. “I would not have flourished if there had not been this continuity,” she concludes.