Angers (AFP)
Long respected businessman and essayist, Hervé Juvin, 65, who later became an adviser to Marine Le Pen, now leads the RN list in Pays de la Loire.
He defends an "ecology of civilizations" praising borders against "invasive species".
"He is a man who has a real vision, who knows where he is going," complimented Ms. Le Pen on May 10, during the launch in Vendée of the Rassemblement national (RN) campaign in Pays de la Loire. .
Since he got closer to Marine Le Pen in 2016, at the age of 60, Mr. Juvin has experienced a rapid rise in politics.
Presented as a pledge of respectability for the Lepéniste party, he was elected MEP in May 2019 and is now leading his first electoral campaign in a region where the RN had collected 21.35% of the vote in the 1st round of 2015.
Columnist for the journal Elements, founded by Alain de Benoist, one of the theorists of the French far right, he also created, with the former LFI regional councilor Andrea Kotarac, the localist party whose manifesto "Chez nous!" "
advocates an identity ecology of rooting.
To expose his vision of human societies, the essayist, pro-nuclear and anti-wind turbines uses and abuses the ecological metaphor.
"Ecosystems only live if they are separated from other ecosystems. The big problem with an ecosystem is invasive species," he describes to AFP.
"The removal of borders is the most anti-ecological there is. Ecology, it goes through limits, it goes through borders, it goes through separations".
# photo1
- "Runner and organist" -
Against the "nomads" who are "looters", Mr. Juvin defends the "small local homelands" and highlights his family roots in Guémené-Penfao (Loire-Atlantique) and his Nantes youth.
In the region, however, he only kept as real estate roots a studio in Laval, in Mayenne.
Because Mr. Juvin has spent part of his life as a nomad, traveling the world ("four months a year", he said in 2013 on France Culture).
Raised by a single mother, a teacher in a college for young girls, the young man "runner and organist" educated in the private sector, "goes up" very early in Paris, where he abandons Sciences Po after two years.
Working in publishing, he wrote for the internal journal of an armaments company before being "absorbed by the rise of the financial markets" in the 1980s.
# photo2
He created his consulting firm, wrote essays on finance, management and heritage as well as columns in L'Agefi, L'Expansion or Le Monde and met Raymond Barre or Pierre Bérégovoy.
From these years, he retains the direction of the investment: in 2019, he held more than 1.2 million euros of shares (Total, Air Liquide, Amazon, etc.), according to his declaration of interests.
- "Pétainist ecology" -
During his travels, Mr. Juvin says he is aware of the environmental crisis and takes part in the presidential campaign of the former Minister of the Environment Corinne Lepage in 2002. "I have nothing to say about him. That's me. exasperated that my name is associated with this gentleman, "said the latter to AFP. In 2019 in Liberation, she said she had known a "self-made man, iconoclastic, with complex thought, not on the left, but with a social fiber".
Through a mutual friend, the consultant also meets the philosopher Marcel Gauchet and the historian Pierre Nora who publish five of his books at Gallimard.
Pierre Nora described, last September on France Culture, an "exceptional man", "almost an autodidact turned into a businessman, however very cultivated", in short "an intellectual, a real one".
However, "his books are already clearly far-right books," said Philippe Corcuff, lecturer at Sciences Po Lyon.
Thus, "The Great Separation", published in 2013, "is an apology for a form of cultural apartheid", summarizes the academic.
"In the intellectual constructions of the partisan far right, (Hervé Juvin) is one of the most subtle," notes Mr. Corcuff.
"But it is also one of the closest to historical fascism", he adds, describing a "Pétainist ecology", a "sophisticated and revamped form of classical fascism" close to the thought of Maurice Barrès (1862 -1923).
© 2021 AFP