the essential The former Minister of Justice during Emmanuel Macron’s first five-year term, Nicole Belloubet, was appointed Minister of National Education this Thursday, February 8. The former rector will have the difficult mission of forgetting the repeated controversies triggered by Amélie Oudéa-Castéra and of reestablishing a bond of trust with the teaching world.
The chance of political life meant that the destiny of Nicole Belloubet and that of François Bayrou became entangled on two occasions. The first time was in June 2007 when Emmanuel Macron and Edouard Philippe were forced to find a replacement for François Bayrou, who had just resigned from his post as Minister of Justice and Keeper of the Seals due to his indictment in the affair of the MoDem parliamentary assistants in the European Parliament. The Aveyronnaise then succeeded Bayrou in this regal ministry. The second time, this Thursday, Nicole Belloubet beats François Bayrou, whom rumors gave as the favorite to replace at the Ministry of National Education an Amélie Oudéa-Castéra burned by the repeated controversies that the latter has triggered since January 11.
With Nicole Belloubet, the executive couple has clearly chosen a very different profile with the hope that the person’s past as rector will allow her to reconnect with the teaching world, bruised by the controversies of recent weeks and worried about the projects of the government for National Education. By recalling Nicole Belloubet to the government, Emmanuel Macron also rewards loyalty and an exemplary career of republican meritocracy.
The family cradle in Aveyron
Born in Paris on June 15, 1955 to a father who was an electromechanical engineer and a mother who managed a small hotel on Place Denfert, Nicole Belloubet is “a pure Aveyronnaise” in her words, who spent her vacations in Rieupeyroux as a child. . “The birthplace of my family is located in Jarlagou, in the commune of La Capelle-Bleys. My father, Georges, is from there. My mother is from Camjac,” Nicole Belloubet told us in an interview .
Holder of a DEA in public law and another in legal history, the assistant at the University of Paris I also became an activist in the Socialist Party in 1983, after the debacle of the left in the municipal elections. From 1989 to 1996, she was a municipal councilor in Saint-Rémy-les-Chevreuses, in Yvelines. “I got involved in politics to convince and to try to ensure that we live better together. This seems natural to me. Ma awareness is intellectual. It does not come from my family. It is my reading, it is Jaurès that I discover like an illumination”, she confided to La Dépêche in December 2013, a few months after being appointed to the Constitutional Council by Ariégeois Jean-Pierre Bel, then president of the Senate. “I don’t know if in 2022, I will intellectually want to return to political action,” added Nicole Belloubet, referring to the end of her nine-year lease on rue Montpensier.
The desire for politics will therefore not have to wait for this left-wing woman. “She is a woman of character, a woman of authority endowed with certain courage. At the same time, she is someone very human, warm and simple,” reacted Marin Malvy, the former president of the Midi-Pyrénées region of which she was the right-hand woman during her appointment to the Ministry of Justice.
Shattering resignation from the rectorate in 2005
Character and courage are indeed two personality traits of the one who becomes a minister again. Appointed rector of the Toulouse academy in 2000 (after having been that of the Limoges academy between 1997 and 2000), she resigned with a bang in March 2005 under the Raffarin government to protest against the policy pursued by the minister. of National Education at the time, a certain François Fillon. This had planned a massive reduction of positions in educational establishments for the following school year.
In the 2000s, Ms. Belloubet also approached ministerial offices. In 2001, she was tasked by the Minister of National Education, Jack Lang, with a report on sexual violence in schools, then a report on the future of high schools. In this capacity, from 2000 to 2005, she chaired the Interministerial Steering Committee for the promotion of gender equality in education systems.
After her resignation, Nicole Belloubet returned to teaching, in community law in Evry, then at the Institute of Political Studies in Toulouse in February 2008; and reconnects with political commitment. In 2008, when Toulouse shifted to the left, she became the first deputy of the socialist Pierre Cohen. Two years later, she followed Martin Malvy to the Region to become its first vice-president in charge of education, higher education and research. A position that she will occupy until becoming a Sage on the Constitutional Council.
Thorny justice reform
By moving from the Palais-Royal to Place Vendôme to everyone’s surprise, Nicole Belloubet opens a new chapter in her life. A dry chapter, the sovereign ministry being deemed difficult as French justice suffered from a chronic lack of resources. After having carried the bills for confidence in political life, Nicole Belloubet thus faced in January 2018 a movement of prison staff on historic scale. The end of the crisis will be achieved with an agreement on the creation of 1,100 jobs and the release of 30 million euros for compensation.
Nicole Belloubet with Emmanuel Macron in 2018 POOL – MEHDI FEDOUACH
Then comes the thorny 2018-2022 programming and justice reform law, which concerns the means of justice, the simplification of criminal procedure, the modernization of civil procedure, digitization, the overhaul of sentences and even the judicial organization. Nicole Belloubet will face protests and massive strikes from magistrates, clerks and lawyers, with the National Bar Council (CNB) calling for a “dead justice day” on March 21, 2018. Passed through the filter of the Constitutional Council, the law is pruned but it introduces important changes such as the merger of the district and high courts within a new jurisdiction, the judicial courts, or the creation of the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office.
Nicole Belloubet will also experience the horrors of Emmanuel Macron’s first five-year term when he was hit by the Benalla affair, this mission manager at the Elysée, accused of having usurped the function of police officer, arrested and assaulted a couple of demonstrators in Paris on May 1, 2018. Nicole Belloubet sharply criticizes the Senate commission of inquiry into the Benalla Affair.
“Understanding reality”
A candidate for the ministerial reshuffle promised for the day after the second round of municipal elections, she remains in her post due to the Covid-19 pandemic. She managed the epidemic with tact, avoiding too great a spread of the disease in the prisons and mutinies which seemed possible in these overcrowded prisons.
By leaving her ministry where she compensated for a certain lack of political weight – notably in the face of Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin – with unfailing loyalty to the Head of State and exemplary solidarity with her colleagues, Nicole Belloubet quotes Jean Jaurès on July 7, 2020, at the time of the transfer of power with Eric Dupond-Moretti. “Courage is going to the ideal and understanding reality”, a sentence from the Speech to Youth by Jaurès, delivered to the high school students of Albi in 1903, and which, in 1968, was his “trigger towards socialist ideas in [ses] student years”, as she told us last December.
Since then, Nicole Belloubet has given courses at Sciences Po Paris or at the National School of Magistracy in Bordeaux and, in April 2023, succeeded Bernard Cazeneuve as president of the Club des juristes, always with the desire to share her experience.
Saying “no regrets” about her career and her choices, Nicole Belloubet told us that she “does not like to be unfaithful. As long as the President of the Republic is there, I will remain loyal to Emmanuel Macron. Upon arriving at the Ministry of National Education, Nicole Belloubet returns to a house to which she will have devoted a large part of her life and to the members of which she will have to restore consideration and confidence. By adopting the orientations of Gabriel Attal in terms of authority, programs or uniform, far removed from what she used to say about it…
In an article published in 2016 in the journal After tomorrowtitled : “Eliminate the Ministry of National Education?Nicole Belloubet defended the contested reform of the college of Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, and was ironic about “the nonsense about the restoration of authority or the wearing of the blouse”… Suffice to say that the new minister will have to think against herself.
2024-02-10 00:52:33
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