In the celebratory moments as exit polls revealed his election as mayor of Paris, the Socialist Party Emmanuel Grégoire was taken aside by a party grandee who asked for a private word. “It’s not the nuclear codes for Paris is it?” the new mayor joked.
There were other grave tidings. Lionel Jospin, the former prime minister and icon of the Socialist Party remembered for introducing the 35-hour week, had died aged 88, having followed and supported Grégoire’s campaign to the end.
The new mayor’s first public statements after his victory were to pay tribute and dedicate his win to Jospin.
“I joined the Socialist Party because of him, for his 2002 campaign,” Grégoire said, describing Jospin as a “moral lodestar”.
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The sentiments were reflected among allies and rivals alike, in a rare moment of unity that highlighted how a now-divided French left was once united under Jospin.
Born to a Protestant family of activists in a Paris suburb in 1937, Jospin’s childhood was overshadowed by the second World War and the French resistance networks that worked to undermine the Nazi occupation of France.
“I still remember from that time the importance of silence. You had to know when to keep quiet because, if you didn’t, you could put others at immense risk,” he recalled in a book of interviews, Lionel Raconte Jospin, published in 2010.
“Perhaps this explains my later aversion to idle talk in my political life.”
Jospin became politically active as a student in Paris in the 1960s, protesting against French brutality during the Algerian war of independence, and after a period in a radical Trotskyist movement he became an economics lecturer and joined the Socialist Party, rising quickly through its ranks.
He came to public notice in a television debate in 1980. Then number two in the Socialist Party, he filled in for leader François Mitterrand to face down a communist opponent, giving a fiesty performance that gained him the nickname “battling Lionel”.
Jospin went on to serve as a parliamentarian and government minister, before uniting the greens and various left-wing groups to win a famous victory in parliamentary elections in 1997.
His government was remembered for introducing France’s emblematic 35-hour working week, civil unions, extending universal healthcare and for fierce resistance to raising the retirement age.
With this record behind him, his team for the 2002 presidential campaign was complacent of victory.
But there were warning signs. Jospin had a taciturn public image, once memorably describing himself as a “resolute person who can change, a serious person who laughs, an atheist Protestant”.
He was the frontrunner among a fragmented field of left-wing candidates, few of whom had real prospects, but who assumed they would unify behind Jospin in the vote’s second round.
The result is remembered as one of the great shocks of French political history.
For the first time ever, the far-right founder of the National Front Jean-Marie Le Pen qualified for the second round, knocking out Jospin with the exceptionally close result of 16.86 per cent to 16.18 per cent to contest a two-way runoff with Chirac.
Emerging to address supporters, Jospin announced he would withdraw from politics outright. There were screams of shock.
With the passage of time, this decision is remembered as one reflecting a man of deep integrity.
“An intellectual force,” were the words of the hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, formerly a minister in the Jospin government, lately at war politically with the centre-left.
Praise from the Élysée Palace was no less fervent.
“Lionel Jospin was, throughout his life, an authority and a conscience for the left, and for the Republic,” the statement from president Emmanuel Macron’s office read.
“A great servant of the state who left a lasting mark on our history, and changed France.”
