The political scientist and essayist died this Saturday at the age of 53, his wife announced on social networks.
Political scientist Laurent Bouvet, co-founder of Printemps Républicain, a movement created in 2016 to advocate a strict vision of secularism, died this Saturday at the age of 53 following a long illness, announced his wife, Astrid Panosyan- Bouvet, on social networks.
Laurent Bouvet had explained, at the end of November, on Facebook, to be suffering from Charcot’s disease, a neurodegenerative disease which had deprived him of the use of his limbs and speech.
The Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, wrote on Twitter: “Farewell Laurent Bouvet. He embodied courage in his thought as in his life. He defended what we have most precious in common: the Republic and therefore freedom, humanism, universalism “.
“Our friend Laurent Bouvet was much more than an intellectual, great defender of the republican left,” also assured the Minister for Citizenship Marlène Schiappa, on the same social network.
A firm line on secularism
Professor of political science and controversial co-founder of Printemps Républicain, Laurent Bouvet, was in favor of a firm line on secularism.
Long a socialist party activist, he moved away from it to found this Republican Spring movement in 2016, notably with the interministerial delegate for the fight against racism and anti-Semitism Gilles Clavreul. The movement, often accused of identity, has frequently accused the left of being too conciliatory with Islamism.
Laurent Bouvet had signed numerous books on identity and cultural insecurity.
He defined this concept of “cultural insecurity” as “the expression of a concern, a fear, even a fear, vis-à-vis what one lives, sees and perceives and feels, here and now, ‘at home’, upheavals in the order of the world, changes in society, of what can be at the same time near or far, familiar or foreign to us “, wrote the daily Le Monde on Saturday.
The LR candidate at the Elysee Palace Valérie Pécresse evoked on Twitter her “great sadness”, assuring that Laurent Bouvet would miss “the French intellectual landscape”.
He embodied, valérie Pécresse estimated, “this republican left which yields neither to identitarianism nor to wokism”, an American militant movement for the protection of minorities, which has become a broader reading grid, tending to deal with a number of problems of society in the light of the fight against discrimination.
Manuel Valls paid tribute on Twitter to his “friend” by saying “tonight, I cry him”. “I will miss Laurent, his personality, his courage, his thought, his writings will miss me and our country, the left, mine, the Republicans,” wrote the former Prime Minister.
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