In Marseille, the “Gaudin book” closes with out in style fervor | EUROtoday

A cardinal and bishops, a prince, a former President of the Republic and the spouse of the present host of the Elysée. Parliamentarians in shut ranks and battalions of native elected officers, with their tricolor scarves in proof. The funeral mass of Jean-Claude Gaudin, former mayor of Marseille and ex-vice-president of the Senate, celebrated Thursday, May 23 within the Sainte-Marie-Majeure cathedral, often known as La Major, resembled him completely. A abstract of the lifetime of a politician of remarkable longevity, fervent Catholic and lover, to the purpose of obsession, of electoral video games.

The solely factor lacking, on this sunny afternoon, was the favored fervor, which, in the identical place, had accompanied the funerals of Bernard Tapie, in 2021, or these, extra distant, of Gaston Defferre, in 1986. There had been 1,500 folks, official gauge, together with 700 friends, who crammed La Major. But the cathedral sq. remained surprisingly depopulated when the funeral convoy left for the Mazargues cemetery (8^e) the place Jean-Claude Gaudin, who died Monday May 20 on the age of 84, is now buried within the household vault.

This absence of what the previous mayor referred to as the “people of Marseille”gives the look that after the change of June 2020, a web page has definitively been turned in France's second metropolis. “With Jean-Claude, we are at the same time burying a political life that has been established for a very long time”noticed, as he left the cathedral, the previous deputy (Les Républicains, LR) for Bouches-du-Rhône Guy Teissier, 79 years previous, one other veteran of the Marseille proper.

Jean-Claude Gaudin knew completely nicely the trail which leads from the city corridor, on the Old Port, to La Major cathedral. Barely 5 hundred meters that he took recurrently to attend a mass, go to confession, or just chat with sure prelates who had turn out to be his associates. Three days after his demise from a cardiac arrest in his residence in Saint-Zacharie, within the Var, the funeral procession symbolically adopted the identical path. He stopped in entrance of the city corridor in order that the elected official “can see the windows of his office one last time”, his family members stated. Then, he walked the remaining half kilometer, alongside this coastal facade reworked throughout his 4 mandates, to the sq. of the cathedral with its Byzantine decorations.

The former metropolis councilor dreamed of a funeral within the small church of Mazargues, his native district within the south of Marseille, the place he nonetheless resided in the home constructed by his father. But the concern of getting to kind friends on the entrance led his associates to suppose greater.

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