Paris (AFP)

"A pact of esteem and affection which the Corrèze was the cradle": Jacques Chirac, by its roots, then according to its political course, woven a privileged link with the peasant world and the terroirs which lasted all its life.

Schooled during the Second World War in the small town of Corrèze Sainte-Féréole, where his maternal grandfather was a teacher, Jacques Chirac left the capital, as soon as his studies ended, to plow limousines land and forge his political destiny.

Elected municipal councilor of Sainte-Féréole in 1965, he then has the mission to go to the left to take a seat of deputy in Corrèze, in the district of Ussel.

"Corrèze was his first political experience in the field and he focused on a number of people including farmers," says François Guillaume, president of the first agricultural union, the FNSEA, from 1979 to 1986.

"There was a sort of tacit agreement between the peasants and him, a pact of esteem and affection which the Corrèze was the cradle," he says.

Jacqueline, a resident of Ussel, summarizes this link in her own way: "He was someone who loved people, and who loved rural people, he was very close to the people of the land (...), we were 'met several times, my children were sitting on his lap'.

Philippe Vasseur, former Minister of Agriculture, in the Juppé II government, remembers above all his "empathy".

- Star of the Agricultural Show -

Mr. Vasseur retains no major agricultural reform, even if Jacques Chirac was entrusted with the morocco under Pompidou, but rather his "complicity" with the agricultural world and "the ability he had to decide in favor of the agricultural world" .

Beyond his panagrelic appetite for local products, farmers are grateful to him for standing up to the Germans while forging a virtuous agreement with them under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in 2002, recently emphasized Christiane Lambert, the current president of the FNSEA.

"The interest of farmers is also the interest of France," he said to France 2 in 1999.

Encouraging the peasant's productive effort to "feed the country" after the post-war food restrictions, Jacques Chirac enjoyed a love rating in the rural world that spread to the terroirs, especially for the Act II on decentralization during his second term as President.

"In the living room, a farmer facing Chirac, it was like my little girl against Justin Bieber," dares Philippe Vasseur, to describe the fervor that surrounded the head of state, during his famous visits to the largest farm from France where he was received every year as a star.

Ice-cold strawberry milk, flowing camembert, ham on the run, "he ate a lot, quickly, he did not pay attention, he tasted a bit of everything," recalls François Guillaume.

In 2011, weakened by the consequences of his stroke in 2005, Jacques Chirac went to the show for the last time. He is no longer a minister. Neither president. The usual marathon is cut short, but it is always welcomed with fervor, causing a beautiful crowd in the alleys of the Porte de Versailles.

In Sainte-Féréole, where he still came less than five years ago to drink glasses with his childhood friends in the village square, in the shade of the big family house with slate roof, the oldest still remember

© 2019 AFP