INTERVIEW
The appointment has a taste of nostalgia. Jacques Attali and Frédéric Taddéï meet on the square Jacqueline de Romilly adorned with cherry blossoms, in front of the Polytechnic school. This is where the essayist and former special adviser of François Mitterrand was a student. The time of a Parisian walk, he traced his career and evoked his latest book, Histoires de l'alimentation .
"Very serious"
Of his two "major" years at the X, Jacques Attali concedes that he was "very serious". Serious enough to finish major, then go on to the Ecole des Mines while doing Sciences-Po to prepare the ENA. A CV that ticks all the boxes. Even today, he says he is bulimic about work to the point of eating "too fast". He does, he says, "the opposite" of what he writes in his last book: "The important thing about the meal is not the meal itself, it is the time spent there and the conversation that arouses. " And yet - and the phenomenon is global - "there is a reduction in the time spent at the table and conviviality and what the meal allowed. (...) For 5,000 years, we realize that all the structuring societies, governance, politics, was done around meals.The banquets of Gods, emperors, kings, of any other nature, were the form of organization of politics both in China and in China. Egypt or Greece or Rome. "
A "frightful" hazing
By evoking these times of meals that disappear, he returns to the courtyard of Polytechnic. "It has become ugly," he observes. He remembers the "very monastic setting" at six per room, and a "frightful" hazing. "We had been walking in underpants for hours on all fours on the stairs and corridors, it was not funny." But there are also those memories of great history, such as the announcement of Kennedy's death in 1963.
After a passage through the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, the duo continues the conversation by heading to the Pantheon. It is in this monument that came François Mitterrand, the afternoon of May 20, 1981, day of his investiture. Jacques Attali was not there. "I was a chore, it's a lot to say, François Mitterrand said to me, 'I want to drop roses, but someone is not in the Pantheon'." This someone was Leon Blum, a figure of the Popular Front whose Jacques Attali was then charged with decorating the tomb in the Yvelines just as Mitterrand was blooming the Pantheon.
The Pantheon, "you have to take children there as much as at Eurodisney"
Entered inside the monument, Jacques Attali regrets the absence of Diderot. "In my opinion, there was his place," he judges. "Today, the one to be seen here is Simone Veil, a friend, a great lady and a beautiful woman (...) who really embodies France in its multiplicity and size" , he says. "It's a pedagogical place, it refers to people who serve as role models, we need in a nation to build heroes who structure the common thought," he says before uttering a cry of the heart: "There must be to take the children as much as to Eurodisney! "
"On roundabouts with merguez"
Back outside, they take the boulevard Saint-Michel, where is located the School of Mines. Walking is an opportunity to return to food and this time to the fast-food phenomenon. "The fast food is part of this society where every minute counts.The meal is an enemy of capitalism, it is something that is expensive and it takes time, it takes time to work. to reduce to nothing the meal ", analyzes Jacques Attali who proposes a parallel with the yellow Vests:" The rage and the anger are the permanent features of the predictions that I make for a long time and the fact that it is incarnate today In a desire to meet on roundabouts with merguez, it refers to this demand for real time spent together, which can only be a meal time, which is by nature time spent together.
"Love at first sight" with Coluche
The conversation continues through the Luxembourg garden and slips on the memory of a dinner spent at France Gall and Michel Berger where Coluche and Jacques Attali were also invited. During this first meeting, the two men treat each other as a liar before experiencing "a real love at first sight," says the former advisor Mitterrand who had also met the comedian and the president.
"The worst, eat insects"
Also a theater writer, Jacques Attali enthuses when he arrives in front of the Théâtre de l'Odéon: "There is nothing more beautiful than the live show.It completes this trip in the 5th, in this district where there is to all dimensions of the greatness of France, great men, science, engineers, faith and then food. " As for predicting what will be tasted tomorrow, the writer considered it in his book. "The worst is possible, to eat insects, artificial things, or to return to healthy food that can exist without pesticides, as long as it transforms agriculture, the organization of work, the city very deeply. things close to home, almost more meat, eat locally, do it yourself, we are made of who we are, "concludes the man from the 5th district.