Edouard Philippe, on behalf of the father – Paris Match

If the Philippe post-2014 is familiar to us thanks on camera by Laurent Cibien, his youth is less so. In “Le Sioux”, rich in encounters, from Havre to Paris via Bonn, Bérengère Bonte takes us to the heights of Rouen, to Grand’Mare, where, in 1970, Edouard, son of Anne-Marie and Patrick, teachers on the left trend “rad-soc”, younger brother of Anne Claire.

Atheist, freemason, translator of Dante, Patrick Philippe loves education, not National Education and considers that we can approach everything with a child. Discussions at the table in the evening, without a screen, are “without taboos”, insists the former Prime Minister. “When I asked my father for his salary, he told me… We spoke very freely”.

“I feel like I talk to him every day”

The diabetes that has been eating away at Patrick Philippe since the age of 14 has shaken up family daily life. His children and even their friends have always known how to watch for the warning signals to prevent hypoglycemic attacks, or even diabetic comas. Father-son communication is complicated “a gene specific to the Philippe family”. The mayor of Le Havre will need get the ENA to feel fatherly pride for the first time. “This is one of the very few times I’ve seen him say something to me that wasn’t flattering,” he confides to the author. That day he said: “It’s good, I’m proud”. In general, he would say: “It’s not bad” “.

In September 2014, during the primary campaign, the father “bluffed” the son. Already amputated of a toe, then a half of a foot and under the threat of a new amputation, he stopped dialysis and died a few days later. “It is enough like that, he told her, I am not going to leave in pieces”. “He is leaving a life that was hard materially and medically, but which was emotionally very beautiful. He really was a dignity, a class! ”, Confides the son. If he has repeatedly mentioned that he started boxing at the time of his father’s death, Edouard Philippe also confides in this absence. “When loved ones disappear, for me it is not an annihilation. I live very well, moreover, with the death of my father. I feel like I talk to him every day. I don’t miss him at all, it’s scary! I probably shouldn’t say that, but I talk to him every day. I did not imagine that for a second, but it is reality ”.

Read also:The astonishing confidences of Edouard Philippe

“The Sioux”, by Bérengère Bonte
352 pages, 20 euros
The Archipelago.

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