He was one of the last great left-wing intellectuals. The historian and editorialist Jacques Julliard died at the age of 90, it was announced on Friday Marianne And Le Figaro, two newspapers for which the intellectual worked. “Our columnist Jacques Julliard, theoretician and lover of the French left, has died”, announced on X Natacha Polony, editorial director of the magazine Marianne. “Dear Jacques, you offered Marianne your humanity, your immense culture, your intelligence. Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” she added.
“Journalist, academic, historian, trade unionist… From his various observation posts in society and the political world, Jacques Julliard will have devoted most of his life to the analysis of the left”, also notes the website of Marianne. For Le Figarowhere Jacques Julliard wrote a monthly column, “he will have left his mark on French intellectual life”.
Socialist activist
The announcement of his death, the circumstances of which have not been specified, sparked numerous reactions within the political class, all sensibilities combined, and the journalistic community. “A great republican, humanist and socialist voice has just died out. (…) The press is losing one of its finest feathers, the left one of its most fertile intellectuals,” greeted former President François Hollande in a press release.
Born on March 4, 1933 in Brénod, in Ain, into a family of local notables, Jacques Julliard evolved in a republican environment with a radical tradition. An academic and trade unionist, he has been an activist since the 1970s within the Socialist Party, where he counted Michel Rocard among his political friends. He stands out in particular for his project of ideological modernization of the PS, that of the second left, opposed to the first, the mitterrandist.
At the same time, from the end of the 1960s, he became one of the pillars of New Observer alongside Jean Daniel, founder of the left-wing magazine. He ended up leaving the publication after 32 years of collaboration to join the weekly Marianne where he became an editorialist. At the age of 84, in 2017, he decided to also write a monthly column for Le Figaro. He had a son in 1963, Jean-François, appointed director of Chained Duck in 2023.