NEWSPAPER
The French press greets on Friday the memory of Jacques Chirac, who died the day before at 86, celebrating "what was" the politician during his career of half a century more than "what did" the fifth president of the 5th Republic.
"The man more than the president ... At the moment he fades, that's how we want to remember Jacques Chirac," writes Laurent Joffrin in Libération title in a "sans Chichi", the nickname attributed affectionately by his fellow citizens. Jacques Chirac, it is "a part of humanity, after all, which ended up dominating this figure of sabereur without state of soul, of president almost aboulic, and which raises in the opinion, at the moment of its disappearance, as a nostalgic tenderness ", continues the director of Libération .
"The incarnation of a" France friendly but pessimistic because she does not love herself much "
The affection devoted to the former president by his fellow citizens stems "more" from "what it was" than from "what he did", also judges Le Figaro soberly "goodbye" to the "one". The former head of state "married the permanences and contradictions of a country that he knew to embody, as a statesman, with allure and humanity" and "if the French, beyond appearances , have never stopped loving Jacques Chirac, is that, in his virtues as in his weaknesses, he was deeply French, "writes Alexis Brézet.
What will remain of Jacques Chirac who was never as popular as at the end of his long career? "The image of the great Jacques, his smile, his little sentences but also his awkwardness that shaped the character and its legend", replies Mickaël Tassart in The Picard Courier . The Corrézien will remain the epitome of a "France friendly but pessimistic because she does not love herself very much, who loves to hate herself except when she is greeted from abroad because she is always capable of plume", remark Maurice Bontinck in The Charente Libre .
"We are going to evoke his love of the calf's head and the cold Corona beer, his gauloiserie, his seduction of grand échalas, his eye which curled at the sight of a pretty woman, his handshakes in the countryside. distributed so generously that at the end of the day he needed a bath of ice water to leave, "lists Jean-Marcel Bouguerreau in The Republic of the Pyrenees .
"The beloved"
Jacques Chirac "loved above all France and the French, passionately, with humanity and modesty," insists Christophe Hérigault in La Nouvelle République . His editorial is simply called "human" Chirac is the "beloved", says Patrice Chabanet in The Journal of Haute Marne . It is also, according to him, "a maker of empathy, seducer in the soul, humor always in ambush". "It is an ancestor who leaves us", cries Dominique Jung in the Latest News of Alsace thinking about this "brawler by method, voracious by nature, optimistic by principle".
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For Jean Levallois, La Presse La Mancha , "the immense vitality of the former head of state was fueled by the fuel of his natural empathy". "Jacques Chirac loved people, he also loved France without a doubt, because he wanted her to be strong, values-rich and creator of peace in the world, but he loved the French deeply, intensely," he notes. So much so that "we all have in us some Jacques Chirac, whether we have fought his action or that he has been supported", remarks Pascal Ratinaud in La Montagne .
Even the communist daily L'Humanité confesses a "strange attachment" to Jacques Chirac because he "respected everyone" and was "not the type to spread his snot". Already, "someone is missing from France", regrets Olivier Biscaye in Le Midi Libre .