Claude Allègre, geologist and former minister of national education, has died

How many times have we picked up the phone to hear him grunt, without preamble, in this voice that boxed words and rushed syntax: “You don’t understand anything! » What followed was a shouting match, a plea, a lecture, or all three at once. Claude Allègre will no longer call. He died on Saturday January 4, his son announced to Agence France-Presse. He was 87 years old.

Surprising and explosive character. Bushy and inventive, peremptory and funny, as annoying as endearing, reformer as blunderer, voluntary as volcanic. Asserting his truths to the point of bad faith, iconoclastic by principle, brutal by conviction. Rebel, but with a strong appetite for power, always rushing, lashing out and scrambling, always cramped, in conventions as in his costume. “I don’t believe in reforms that are done through consensus” was his credo. For better, sometimes for worse, he constantly demonstrated this, in his life as a scientist as in that of a minister.

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