In the book And that’s what changed everything, published in 2019, Valérie Pécresse made rare confidences about her family and her childhood, which she spent in Neuilly.
In 2019, Valérie Pécresse published the book And that’s what changed everything, co-written with journalist Marion Van Renterghem. In this book, the candidate Les Républicains in the next presidential election looks back on his modest childhood and on his family. “My parents were very much of their time. They listened to Hair and Cat Stevens, they remade the world with their university friends. It smoked a lot”, she revealed in particular over the pages, dwelling on the profession of her father, who obtained a doctorate and then “belonged to the teaching team which founded the new Paris IX-Dauphine University, born of the movements of 1968, precisely, and of the Edgar Faure law”.
Valérie Pécresse, who herself studied at this establishment, revealed that her “father was a born pedagogue, charismatic and adored by his students”. The latter even took pleasure in reminding his daughter that she had “lucky to have him as a father”. Also, when she was younger, her parents “settled in Neuilly, because there were good schools there and they found an apartment there at an affordable price”. His mother, for her part, did secretarial work. Believing to have had “a very happy childhood in a united family and which had social ambition in the good sense of the term”, the candidate LR recalled having grown up in a city which was, at the time, not “the ultra-privileged she has become”.
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“Sociologically, Neuilly was rather the Levallois or the Suresnes of today: a suburb of executives, middle or senior”, assured Valérie Pécresse, who lived “an apartment on the ground floor, in the backyard”. In order to silence gossip, the former budget minister stressed that she “don’t come[t] not from the big bourgeois family that this image implies”. “The picture of Neuilly does not sum up my story”, she said, lamenting the fact that some critics did not “never reproached François Hollande, nor Dominique Strauss-Kahn for having also grown up in Neuilly”. “My father never forgot where he came from, and he always worked hard so that we lacked nothing”, remembered the politician, who hopes to win against Emmanuel Macron next April.
Article written with the collaboration of 6Medias
Photo credits: Federico Pestellini / Panoramic / Bestimage