Bruno Le Maire

, 52, French Minister of Finance will be surprised when he learns that his defense of the superiority of books on screens in a passionate speech he gave to a group of young people at the end of February has become a phenomenon in Spain On twitter.

But it is like this.

He, who has written "TWITTER does not allow you to build yourself. Like all social networks, one does not build with them, one drowns with them", surfs on the crest of the wave of

likes

.

Exception that confirms the rule.

A man of letters at the head of the ministry of numbers.

Paradoxes

Only apparent paradox.

Because the minister is a man built by language, who has made a career with the pen as a tool, who

needs literature

and who publishes regularly.

His latest book,

The Angel and the Beast

is subtitled for

temporary memories

and begins on its 50th anniversary, with the champagne in the ice bucket and the guests arriving at the spectacular attic of the Ministry with impressive views of Paris, when Notre Dame begins to burn .

"Unable to take my gaze from Notre Dame burning, I took pictures with my mobile phone. I walked away from my advisers, I looked. I wanted to understand and did not understand anything ..." Follow a dozen lines of personal memories about his youth experience with religion .

"I was still watching. I was crying. It seemed to me that all my memories were going up in smoke and with them my life, at least a part of my life."

From an executive father and a school director mother

A brilliant student of the

San Luis Gonzaga

school

, the son of an executive of a multinational company and a director of the Jesuit school, he has the curriculum of the elite of the men of French power:

Institute of Political Studies

,

Normal School of Administration

from which they have emerged half of the ministers of the V Republic.

Its peculiarity is that its basic training in the Normal School is modern letters.

Notre Dame burns to page 14 of the book, published last month by

Gallimard

in one of its prestigious collections.

On page 15 his mentor, appears

Dominique de Villepin

, Minister President

Jacques Chirac

, determined Bonapartist, the man who defended the Security Council of the UN

not

from France to the Iraq war.

Do you know who the writer of Villepin's speeches was?

Bruno Le Maire.

Villepin maintains that "the politician must write to know what he thinks."

Your student says: "I write to better understand what I am doing and to explain it."

In the full-page review that

Le Figaro

dedicated to the last book of the favorite minister of the conservative newspaper,

Camille Pascal

, former pen (

we say

black

in Spanish) of President

Nicolas Sarkozy

and today adviser to the prime minister,

Jean Castex

: "The historians they have a false vision of power because they do not know how it works. It is up to literature, to restore it. I do it about past times [his latest book deals with the court of

Louis XV

]. Le Maire does it about immediate history. I am a writer of power. He is a writer in power. "

The right-wing politician and writer

Bruno Le Maire,

Emmanuel Macron's

court writer

.

In his book, the minister discovers himself the lucid manager of a country on the brink of "a regime crisis."

And he tries to respond as a convinced Europeanist, the thesis of his previous volume,

The New Empire (Europe of the 21st century)

.

A necessary Europe in times of China and the US as masters of the world, a modest Europe, made of the concrete, Gaullist but orphan of great lyricisms and discourses.

Le Maire is a right-wing politician who, after following Villepin to the prime minister's palace and serving in the Agriculture portfolio, wanted to lead the right in that collective suicide that was the primaries.

It gave a monumental slap.

The drift of the conservatives allowed him to jump with natural elegance to Macron's boat between the two laps of the 2017 presidential election. He gave him the choice of a ministry although he probed him for prime minister.

Le Maire said "Finance".

And so it was done.

"We are the only nation in the world where literature is a form of power," he writes.

"

Houellebecq's

name and work will

remain longer than that of many politicians," he says.

He is related and writes regularly with him.

Also with

Marie Darrieussecq

with

Jean Christophe Rufin

and recently seen with

Peter Handke

.

In the video that has given him flight in the networks, the minister reels before a youth audience, truths that are dear to him: "Literature is an immense pleasure (...) a solitary activity that opens you up to the rest of the world (. ..) Screens devour you, reading feeds you (...) Literature is a weapon of freedom ".

Said in a calm tone, persuasive without reaching the sermon, convincing by convinced, clear as that of an entrepreneur, but without the passion of

a wounded revolutionary letter

.

"All power is a representation. More than any of the other Arts, literature is the best representation of power."

And Bruno Le Maire, an admirer of

Proust

, writes the script.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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