Pierre Moscovici, a French future | EUROtoday

The guide is addressed to his son, Joseph, to whom he doesn’t need “nothing to hide”. At 66, Pierre Moscovici, who has chaired the Court of Auditors for 3 years, tells his story in a high quality and distinctive guide, Our finest years (Gallimard, 370 pages, 24 euros). A reminiscence train in order to not let it proceed “the terrible culture of silence” that his mother and father, Ashkenazi Jews lastingly marked by the warfare, had imposed on their youngsters.

The one who defines himself as “son of a metic” evokes at size the tutelary determine of his father, an excellent mental, a “monument”. Serge Moscovici arrived in Paris from Romania in 1948, after having witnessed pogroms, an expertise which “disconnects the nerves of life”. The son dwells much less on his mom, a famend psychoanalyst, formidable and rebellious, than “the wounds of war did not leave one in peace”. Two mother and father who needed one other life for his or her youngsters: “Not knowing this feeling of being strangers in [leur] own country, but on the contrary that[ils] can[ent] go to the heart of French society.” It sums : “We did it, largely for them. »

He recounts his Trotskyist youth, his studies at Nanterre, then at Sciences Po and the ENA. He smokes Craven A’s, has long curly hair and “a tender look behind the dark circles”. In the night, he goes out to Bains Douches or to Castel, and he “love it”. Although he accomplished all of the phases of the proper cursus honorum (deputy, minister, deputy after which European commissioner), he remained removed from supreme energy. Long perceived as a dandy dilettante, who most popular the cafes of Saint-Germain-des-Prés to late conferences, the individual involved acknowledges that he has at all times lived in a break up means: absorbed by politics (which he nonetheless occurs to have in the present day to dream at evening), and continuously looking for to flee from it. “Not a day in my life have I had the obsession to run for the presidency of the Republic”he swears, arguing that he was not able to “give up all privacy”.

Our finest years retraces forty years of historical past of a left which was misplaced, forgetting that it was primarily used to combat in opposition to inequalities. “You know, Lionel, “worker” isn’t a foul phrase”, had slipped Pierre Mauroy to Lionel Jospin, throughout the 2002 marketing campaign, which ended as we all know. Left “cannot be solely an addition of libertarian reforms on a societal level or liberal ones on an economic level”, admits the social democrat and ardent European. The former Minister of the Economy provides a harsh evaluation of the five-year time period ” missed “ by François Hollande, a “massive political failure”. He describes the previous president as each a being “funny, lively, pleasant”but additionally of nice ” hardness “, “deeply individualistic”. He was a “respectable statesman”however one “often pusillanimous and clumsy political leader”whereas many anticipated it to be the alternative.

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