Death of Jacques Julliard, a figure of the left and the press

The historian and columnist Jacques Julliard has died at the age of 90, Marianne and Le Figaro announced on Friday September 8, two newspapers for which the intellectual, a figure of the second left, worked.

“Our editorialist Jacques Julliard, theoretician and lover of the French left, has died,” announced on X (ex-Twitter) Natacha Polony, editorial director of Marianne magazine. “Dear Jacques, you offered Marianne your humanity, your immense culture, your intelligence. Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” she added.

Dear Jacques, you offered Marianne your humanity, your immense culture, your intelligence. Thank you from the heart
Our columnist Jacques Julliard, theoretician and lover of the French left, died https://t.co/Hh6WYuoQ7w via @MarianneleMag

— Natacha Polony (@NPolony) September 8, 2023

Journalist and academic

“Journalist, academic, historian, trade unionist… From his various positions of observation of society and the political world, Jacques Julliard will have devoted most of his existence to the analysis of the left”, also notes Marianne’s website .

For Le Figaro, where Jacques Julliard wrote a monthly column, “he left his mark on French intellectual life”.

The announcement of his death, the circumstances of which have not been specified, sparked numerous reactions within the political class, all sensibilities combined, and the journalistic community.

A tribute from François Hollande

“A great republican, humanist and socialist voice has just died out. (…) The press loses one of its finest writers, the left one of its most fertile intellectuals,” greeted former President François Hollande in a press release.

Born on March 4, 1933 in Brénod, in Ain, into a family of local notables, Jacques Julliard evolved in a republican environment with a radical tradition. An academic and trade unionist, he has been an activist since the 1970s within the Socialist Party, where he counted Michel Rocard among his political friends.

A pillar of the “New Observer”

He stands out in particular for his project of ideological modernization of the PS, that of the second left, opposed to the first, the Mitterrandist. At the same time, from the end of the 1960s, he became one of the pillars of Nouvel Observateur alongside Jean Daniel, founder of the left-wing magazine.

He ended up leaving the publication after thirty-two years of collaboration to join the weekly Marianne in 2010, where he became an editorial writer. At the age of 84, in 2017, he decided to also write a monthly column for Le Figaro. He had a son in 1963, Jean-François, appointed director of Canard chainé in 2023.

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