the intimate reservations of François Bayrou on the end of life

” We have a law to accompany this p***age towards death, but we are not doing a public service to kill », underlines François Bayrou, president of the Modem. Sebastien SORIANO/Le Figaro

Francois Bayrou descended to the bottom of the grave. In the cemetery of Bordères, his village in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, the 1980s have just begun, and he mourns his deceased neighbor. A m*** has just been celebrated in his memory. A crowd, m***ed above the grave, watches the coffin slide into it.

Below, the young Béarnais seizes it to bury it. For the past few days, he has watched over the body while the women have groomed it. He is used to it: in the Pyrenean villages, there are not yet funeral directors. “Put friends in the ground, I did that with the hands that are there”, said François Bayrou forty years later, palms open. In this “other world” now gone, he explains, “not only was death part of life, but caring for death was a civic obligation.”

From those years, this father of six children, with an intact Catholic faith, claims to have kept “another view” of death. At 71, he “hated” always…