Historian, editorialist, journalist, essayist, writer… Jacques Julliard was unclassifiable. The 90-year-old intellectual died, we learned this Friday, September 8 Figaro and Point. “Our editorialist Jacques Julliard, theoretician and lover of the French left, has died.also announced on Twitter (renamed 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 heart”, she added.
Figure from the second left, the man also worked at New observer and since 2017 has been a columnist at Figaro where he wrote about political and intellectual life.
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 loses one of its finest writers, the left one of its most fertile intellectuals. notably greeted former President François Hollande in a press release.
Born in 1933 in Brénod, a town in Ain, Jacques Julliard, from an early age, evolved in the political world. His father, mayor of his native village, was an agnostic radical, a republican attached to freedom of conscience. His mother, a staunch Catholic. During his literary studies in Lyon and then at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he obtained his aggregation in history. And will be deeply marked by his readings of Marx, Proudhon, Pascal or Kant. He will then frequent the review Spirit and will launch into student unionism at Unef then at the CFTC with anti-colonialist positions.
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.
From “New obs” to “Figaro” via “Marianne”
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 thirty-two years of collaboration to join the weekly in 2010 Marianne where he became an editorialist. At the age of 84, in 2017, he decided to also write a monthly column for Le Figaro.
More recently, although still claiming to be on the left, the intellectual had made a change of heart, going so far as to contribute to the breaking of certain dikes in the face of the ideas of the extreme right under the pretext of attacking “the aberrant drift” of “wokism”.
He had a son in 1963, Jean-François, appointed director of Chained duck in 2023.
Update : at 11:33 a.m., with more context and reactions from Natacha Polony and François Hollande.