The hidden passions of the brand new Minister of the Interior | EUROtoday

This portrait was written in November 2022 when the senator from Vendée coveted the management of the Les Républicains get together.

Iimagining Bruno Retailleau organizing a Johnny Hallyday live performance is considerably counterintuitive, to say the least. And but! In 2006, the senator from Vendée discovered himself within the Parisian places of work of Jean-Claude Camus, the star's long-standing producer. He got here to grab a date for the little Poupet Festival, which takes place each summer season 500 meters from his dwelling, to the purpose the place he might hear the artists from his backyard. His good friend Philippe Maindron, a humorous man all the time between two loopy tasks, satisfied him to assist him obtain his dream: to stage the “biggest night of his life”. “Camus didn't want to hear about it. He told me: 'You have to come with your banker and an institutional investor,' remembers Maindron. In the morning, the banker let me down, but Bruno kept the appointment. We ended up in front of Camus, we told him a big stupid thing : “The banker is sick.”And Bruno defended the project so well that we went out with our Johnny date!” This is how the pope of French rock played on July 22, 2006 at Poupet, the smallest date of his tour. “My associates are completely loopy,” breathes the boss of the LR senators, who aspires to guide his get together.

He may very well be mistaken for a smart man, below his false airs of a seminarian with skinny rimmed glasses, for a notable from the West numbed within the chloroformed consolation of the Senate. There is in him, it’s true, an unctuous politeness, a modest reserve, a well-combed facet. His associates all describe a person of cause, a “face” misplaced in politics, who carries his pile of books and recordsdata to the seashore. “He has his ritual: he puts them to the right of his towel, patiently notes them, then puts those he has finished to his left. And when he has finished everything, he goes for a swim,” says one. We know much less about his audacity, his voracious passions, his internal flame.

It is his secret gardens that talk better of him. We knew that Philippe de Villiers had noticed this younger rider for the massive present at Puy du Fou. Less so than Bruno Retailleau who had landed a number of occasions in hospital as a result of stunts. As a younger man, he did theatre and arrange his personal music faculty, earlier than throwing himself headlong into the Puy-du-Fou journey as a director, giving up his plans to go to the ENA, a lot to his dad and mom' dismay. There, he grew to become enthusiastic about pyrotechnics, sound techniques, laser lighting… and even shot music movies. One of which with Didier Barbelivien, filmed on the Puy du Fou pond behind an outstanding white child grand piano positioned instantly within the water. Bruno Retailleau's piano: the instrument now sits in the midst of the lounge of the household farm in Saint-Malô-du-Bois, within the Bocage Vendéen, with a Beethoven rating open on the music stand. “This piano is a daily reproach,” breathes the elected consultant from the Loire, pissed off at not having the ability to play extra as a result of lack of time.

His campaign

Culture has been, for so long as he can bear in mind, the driving power behind his political ambition. Nothing predestined him for it. The son of a grain service provider, raised in a modest household, he noticed himself turning into a prefect. To paraphrase the title of a e-book by Édouard Philippe, Retailleau is “a man who reads”. His workplace, a former pigsty with soot-black partitions that he renovated within the late Eighties together with his father, is crammed with books. An insomniac, he generally units his alarm at night time to learn in his den. “For me, books are a sensual object. I annotate them, I underline them. Books, culture, it's a step aside.”he confesses. He fortunately reels off quotes, within the considerably mechanical method of studious folks. André Malraux: “Culture is what answers man when he asks himself what he is doing on earth.” Mona Ozouf: “France is a literary homeland.” Marc Fumaroli, above all, who resonates with him: “Literature is the jurisprudence of human life.” He has learn all of the books by Simone Weil and François Cheng, cites Giono, Bernanos, Péguy or Houellebecq, specifying that he generally reads authors labeled as left-wing. He additionally devours essays by Berénice Levet, Marcel Gauchet, Régis Debray, Christophe Guilluy. He prides himself on having been one of many first to find the conservative essayist Mathieu Bock-Côté, with whom he generally shares a desk with Alain Finkielkraut. “He is one of the rare intellectually constructed French politicians. What is striking when you have lunch or dinner with him is that his first question is not about the political situation but about what you are reading, explains the Canadian sociologist, who emphasizes that this is not support. Our great obsession is to understand the times we live in. The first time I met him was at a conference organized at Fontevraud Abbey in the middle of the 2017 presidential election. The challenge for a politician should be to think about the elections. But for two days, life had stopped. “He speaks to the souls of activists, when others converse to their guts,” says considered one of his supporters.

Because tradition is, for Bruno Retailleau, a method of combating, a campaign. Under his prelate exterior, he hides an actual ideological radicalism. A person of deep-rooted convictions, with a really stiff backbone, he goals of a reckless proper wing carrying a undertaking of “rupture”, of “civilization”. In his marketing campaign to grab the reins of the Republicans, this shut good friend of François Fillon, whom he supported till the top through the presidential battle of 2017, surrounded himself with males with assumed conservative positions, with loud phrases, labeled on the appropriate of the get together, from the European deputy François-Xavier Bellamy to the previous deputy Julien Aubert.

“The right made a double mistake: it fell into managerial pragmatism and it left the cultural field, which is a transmission, to the left, which made it a transgression. It gave it hegemony over ideas, regrets the boss of the LR senators. I know that our political family is looking for a leader, but part of our failures comes from the little taste we have for the debate of ideas. We have opened a gap, a void, and in this nothingness we have allowed ideologies to unfold: Islamism, the ideologies of deconstruction, the cancel cultureThe right must occupy the cultural field. He never gave in to the sirens of Emmanuel Macron, who in his eyes carries “a particular duty for having spoken of “deconstructing” History and for having mentioned that there was “no French culture”.

A “war machine”

Co-founder of the Sens commun motion, who labored for LR earlier than becoming a member of Éric Zemmour over the last presidential election, Sébastien Pilard rubbed shoulders with Bruno Retailleau in 2013 within the marches in opposition to homosexual marriage, of which the senator was a robust supporter, denouncing Taubira within the reform “a Trojan horse of PMA and GPA”. “Bruno is deeply right-wing, because of his history, his intellectual training, his encounters. I have never seen him back down from what he thinks. He cannot stand political opportunism, rents the old LR which has been moved to Reconquête. It would have been much easier for him to play on Macronist ambiguity, as he is in the West and group president in the Senate. Vendée is a centrist land, where many mayors are in ambiguity. But he has never wavered, while Macron won 100% of the deputies in his department in 2017. Still in contact with Retailleau, who had included him on his list for the 2015 regional elections in the Pays de la Loire, Sébastien Pilard warns his opponents: “He's an enormous employee, a struggle machine.”

Nicolas Sarkozy's loyalists, for his or her half, accuse Retailleau of being nothing greater than a distant cousin, a spare half who joined the UMP late in 2012. They can’t abdomen the truth that he desires to excommunicate the “boss” for having mentioned that the previous head of state was free to depart the Republicans. He is cautious, nonetheless, to not open a entrance with Laurent Wauquiez, whom he respects however struggles to grasp. Retailleau has by no means been, actually, a historic RPR activist. He was alongside Philippe de Villiers till 2010, the date of their brutal break-up which earned him, in Releasethe nickname of “Borgia of the bocage”. The LR senator retorts that he is aware of the place his middle of gravity is, the place his values ​​are, on this little piece of Vendée the place he feels “rooted”.

Here he has his chickens, his horse, his sheep, his donkey, his canine, photovoltaic panels. “My balance is there. I can't live without animals, I'm a rural person. It's a relationship to place, a relationship to time, a rooting. We know here that, to harvest, you have to have sown first,” he confides, admitting to cultivating few Parisian friendships.

Doctrinaire, the chief of the LR senators? One of his best-kept secrets and techniques is an artwork gallery nestled within the coronary heart of the Marais district in Paris, a stone's throw from the Centre Georges-Pompidou and the Picasso Museum. A curious thoughts, extra open than his rivals think about, he commonly invitations himself there to admire works by René Laubiès or the Korean artist Hong InSook, of whom he has a number of work at dwelling, as a “small collector” of contemporary artwork. Intense work, which stir and invite meditation. “He has a secret garden. Culture and contemplation are very important to him. Art brings him back to the essentials,” assures Alain Margaron, who opened this gallery in 1993 and met him within the 2000s.

“You can't be sectarian and love art. It's a questioning, a doubt. A politician who doesn't have a cultural dimension doesn't last,” he continues in response to those that want to lock the one who has grow to be his good friend right into a dogmatic posture. These days, whereas he was making ready a personal viewing, Alain Margaron handed on a message to Bruno Retailleau, who had gone to marketing campaign on the roads of France: “If he wants to win, he has to come and see the exhibition.” The Republican presidential hopeful gave him this response: “But I intend to go! After the victory.”

ÉLODIE GREGOIRE FOR “LE POINT” (x3)