Photographer Sacha Goldberger and writer Émery Doligé reveal the men and women who discreetly organize everyday life at the Elysée.
They are gendarmes, treasurers, gardeners, in charge of protocol, flowers, wine, presidential gifts or clocks, a whole “human machinery” that takes us behind the scenes of the Élysée. Some have been there for over thirty years. Photographed in black and white by Sacha Goldberger, confessed and sketched with a benevolent pen by Émery Doligé, thirty discreet witnesses parade one after the other in this work punctuated with information and anecdotes.
We thus learn that the president never ventures alone into the palace, he is always escorted by a security officer, designated in this highly secure enclosure as the “shoulder”; or even that some of the staff members loved her so much that they called Bernadette Chirac “mom” These women and men who show up at the entrance to 55, rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré every morning are driven by the same passion , an unfeigned pride. They form the first circle of these elected officials who are only passing through and of France which remains.
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