Book. Diplomacy, Larousse teaches us, rhymes with “intergent”, “fingering”, “flexibility”, “tact”. Jean-Maurice Ripert, however, added another epithet to it in the title of his book Combat diplomacy (Perrin/Les Presses de la cite, 384 p., €24), that he opposed to the “doormat diplomacy”or the sacrifice of the ideals of the Republic in the face of the mercantile realism of international trade.
A pure product of the civil service, leaving the ENA in 1980, Voltaire promotion, where he rubbed shoulders with former President François Hollande and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, Jean-Maurice Ripert joined the Quai d’Orsay, where he acquired a solid knowledge cogs and cabinets (Christian Nucci, Roland Dumas, Bernard Kouchner), before surveying those of Matignon (Michel Rocard, Lionel Jospin). In 2012, he was part of the first wave of new ambassadors of the European Union trained in the Anglo-Saxon way: “We speak to each other informally and we dress most often “casual” [informel], but the hierarchy is strict and strictly respected. We spend entire days working on fully digitalized accounting and financial commitment procedures, ethics rules and data protection, internal and external controls. »
Clinical observation
He was appointed in Turkey, at a period (2011-2013) when Recep Tayyip Erdogan established himself as “the real holder of power”. Syria’s slide into civil war, the Kurdish question and migration are taking precedence in a context marked by the hardening of power and repression. A foretaste of the diplomat’s next two missions – in Russia (2013-2017), then in China (2017-2019) – as French ambassador, where he must face the ever-increasing erosion of relations.
It is enough to cite the decision taken in 2015 during his mandate by François Hollande – who prefaced this book – not to deliver the Mistral ships to Russia; or the death in detention, in July 2017, of Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo, 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner. “I was summoned the same day by the waijiaobu [le ministère des affaires étrangères] not to mention the name of Liu Xiaobo in my speech for the National Day [française, le lendemain, le 14-Juillet]. I refuse to do so, just like giving them a copy of my speech in advance”, says the diplomat.
No revelations in this book, no confessions on the underside of a complex mission, but a clinical observation on the rise of autocracies. “For Vladimir Putin, the world remains a triangle, of which Russia is one of the vertices, of course, writes Jean-Maurice Ripert. The second, China, is characterized by (…) a worrying hegemonic desire, and the third, the United States, remains the natural interlocutor on whom the recognition of one’s own power depends. » In this context, the diplomat had to overcome another difficulty, and not the least, with an expatriate French community more attached to maintaining good relations at all costs to pursue its business. Of the “French teddy bears” and “French pandas”as he calls them, and whose continuous attacks against an ambassador judged ” engaged “.
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