Posted Sep 8, 2023, 1:33 PM
A great figure in the press and in French intellectual life has just ped away. Historian and editorialist Jacques Julliard died at the age of 90, the weekly “Marianne” and the daily “Le Figaro” announced on Friday, two titles with which the essayist, a figure of the second left, collaborated.
His disappearance immediately aroused many reactions and tributes. “Dear Jacques, you offered Marianne your humanity, your immense culture, your intelligence. Thank you very much,” said Natacha Polony, editorial director of the magazine “Marianne”, on X (ex-Twitter).
For “Le Figaro”, where Jacques Julliard wrote a monthly column, “he left his mark on French intellectual life”. “Jacques Julliard was one of those men who are said to be unclifiable and who are quite simply free. He died at the age of 90 and France is losing one of its most precious intellectuals”, writes the editorialist Eugénie Bastié.
Many tributes
Several tributes also came from the political world, in particular from former President François Hollande: “A great republican, humanist and socialist voice has just died out. […] The press loses one of its finest pens, the left one of its most fertile intellectuals. “The mayor of Cannes, David Lisnard, greets his side on X a man” hopelessly free “, “eminent historian, specialist in revolutionary trade unionism”.
Born on March 4, 1933 in Brénod, in Ain, educated in a republican environment with a radical tradition, Jacques Julliard, a history graduate, began his career as an academic, notably at the CNRS and the EHESS, and became involved in unionism, at the CFDT. He was active in the 1970s in the Socialist Party, in the movement of Michel Rocard and participated in the movement of the “second left”, opposed to the first, the Mitterrandist.
He began to collaborate with “Le Nouvel Observateur” in 1969, then became a regular columnist between 1978 and 2010. He then continued his career as an editorialist with another magazine, “Marianne” and then became a columnist for “Figaro”. in 2017, at age 84. He has also published numerous essays, historical and political.