“Chaotic”, ” Aboveground “, “Lack of common sense”… On the phone, when the first confinement began, in March 2020, Thierry Cotillard, then president of Intermarché, storms the government and its management of the pandemic. He who, with his teams, tries to find inexpensive masks in Asia is sorry for the “Lack of field experience” of the French administration.
At the other end of the line, his twenty-year-old friend and football comrade Julien Neutres is just as critical. Smart glasses, strong tone, this 44-year-old graduate of the National School of Administration (ENA) is director of creation, territories and audiences at the National Center for Cinema and Animated Image (CNC). For ten years, the senior official, who also worked in the private sector, including three years at McDonald’s, has been thinking about a way to bring elected officials closer to citizens. “From the moment I entered ENA, I dreamed of another school”, he remembers.
Both then imagine a place of training to help budding leaders, local elected officials as association presidents, to count more in national public life. In short, an “ENA from the field”. Julien Neutres is convinced that the crisis is the ideal moment to launch such a project. “ Thierry could no longer affirm that “it is on one side the elected officials, on the other the companies”, he recalls. With the pandemic, politics had become for everyone concrete, very intimate. ” A thousand miles from the political world, Thierry Cotillard, 47, a graduate of HEC, does not hesitate: “The craziest projects interest me. “ In December, he decided to leave the presidency of Intermarché to devote himself, he said, to new projects. It remains for the two friends to find new recruits.
Artist JR takes part in the adventure, almost by chance
The artist JR will be the first. Almost by accident. The pandemic closes the doors of the solidarity restaurant in which the famous collage author participates. The Refettorio, nestled in the crypt of the Church of the Madeleine, in Paris, is no longer accessible to the poor. Delivery is essential. Luckily, the restaurant manager is none other than the mother of Thierry Cotillard’s assistant. The latter hastens to help him. “I called the bosses of all the big brands. Pasta, preserves, compotes… Whole trucks have been filled. ”
JR, his partner, entrepreneur Marco Berrebi and their team then deliver 3,500 meals a day. But a coincidence never comes alone. Dominique Versini, deputy in charge of solidarity at the City of Paris, notes that, in the accommodation intended for the most precarious, families lack food. She then called on the JR-Berrebi-Cotillard trio.
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