François Léotard: death of the politician, former Minister of Culture, at 81

Politician and writer François Léotard died at the age of 81, announced the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, on his Twitter account on Tuesday April 25. During the two cohabitations under François Mitterrand, he was first Minister of Culture and Communication from 1986 to 1988 in the government of Jacques Chirac, then Minister of Defense from 1993 to 1995 in the government of Edouard Balladur.

" He [carried] during his mandate [...] the law of 1986 relating to the freedom of communication, which was regularly adapted to the evolution of the landscape and the uses, and which remains still today the base of our right on audiovisual and electronic communication", underlined the current Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, in a statement paying tribute to this "statesman and man of culture".

"François Léotard will thus have left his lasting mark on French cultural and audiovisual policy ", hailed Arcom, considering that the law of September 30, 1986 "confirmed the transition from a State monopoly to an open and modern, where public service media and private media coexist" and that more "thirty-five years later, [its] fundamentals, which are the freedom and pluralism of actors and programs, still remain the two compasses of the regulator ”.

Originally from Var, where he was elected deputy several times (he was also mayor of Fréjus from 1977 to 1997), François Léotard chaired the Union for French Democracy (UDF) from 1996 to 1998, succeeding its founder, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. He had left politics in 2001, very affected by the death of his brother, actor and singer Philippe Léotard. He devoted the second part of his life to writing novels and political essays.