Mayor of Dijon from 1971 to 2001, Robert Poujade, born May 6, 1928, in Moulins, was part, alongside André Malraux and Michel Debré, of the Gaullists who paraded on the Champs-Elysées on May 30, 1968 to General de Gaulle after his decision to dissolve the National Assembly in an attempt to put an end to the “events”. He died on April 8, at the age of 91, in Paris.
Unlike other “barons” of Gaullism who entered politics through the Resistance, Robert Poujade, too young at the time, gained access through student activism. His political conscience was awakened during the 1940 rout when he was a child, he believed that “France was the greatest European power”, he says in With de Gaulle and Pompidou (The Archipelago, 2011).
From intellectual activism to political engagement
His engagement dates back to 1947 – he was 19 years old and in preparatory class in Montpellier -, the day of General de Gaulle’s announcement in Strasbourg of the creation of the Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF). National secretary of students, he will gradually climb the ladder within the Gaullist movement, secretary general of the departmental federation of Côte-d’Or of the Union for the New Republic (UNR) in 1958, and ten years later secretary General of the Union of Democrats for the Republic (UDR), until 1971.
After his studies at the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he entered in 1948 – he left it aggregated in classical letters with a thesis on humanism by André Malraux -, he was appointed in 1954 professor of letters at the Lycée Carnot de Dijon. It then goes from one intellectual activism in political action.
These are the circumstances which, in this city which he still knows little, will make him the essential politician in the Côte-d’Or for more than thirty years, discouraging all ambition, on the right as on the left. 1967 was a decisive year in his career. Robert Poujade defeated in the cantonal and legislative elections the canon Félix Kir, deputy and mayor of Dijon since 1945.
Master of Burgundian political life
The following year, during early elections due to his death, he entered the municipal council of the capital of Burgundy. In 1971, he was elected mayor of Dijon and remained so for thirty years, until 2001, winning four of his five re-elections (1977 to 1989) in the first round. As master of local political life, he was general councilor for nearly twenty years, with an interruption from 1976 to 1979, and president of the department of Côte-d’Or in 1982 until the application of the law against the cumulation of mandates in 1988. Also started in 1967, his career as a deputy extended until 2002 with as only parenthesis the arrival of the left in power, from 1981 to 1986.
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