Philippe de Villiers

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Philippe de Villiers (2007)

Philippe de Villiers (born March 25, 1949 in Boulogne , Département Vendée ; actually Philippe Marie Jean Joseph Le Jolis de Villiers de Saintignon ) is a French politician and publicist. From 1988 to 2010 he was President of the General Council of Vendée, from 1994 to 2018 chairman of the national conservative party Mouvement pour la France (MPF) and between 1994 and 2014 he was a member of the European Parliament on several occasions . He ran unsuccessfully for the presidential election in 1995 and 2007.

Origin, family, education

Philippe de Villiers is a member of the noble family Le Jolis de Villiers , which comes from Normandy and had the title of Viscount . Through his paternal grandmother, he also descends from the Lorraine Counts of Saintignon . His father Jacques de Villiers was a member of the Resistance during World War II and later for 36 years mayor of the small community of Boulogne in the western French department of Vendée , where Philippe de Villiers was born and grew up. A younger brother is the retired Army General Pierre de Villiers , who was Chief of the General Staff of the French Armed Forces from 2014 to 2017 . Philippe de Villiers has been married to Dominique de Buor de Villeneuve since 1973, with whom he has seven children.

After attending Catholic private schools, Philippe de Villiers completed a law degree at the University of Nantes , which he graduated in 1971 with a maîtrise in public law. The following year he graduated from the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) in the field of public service. From 1976 to 1978 he attended the École nationale d'administration (ENA; class “Pierre Mendès-France”). He then worked in the prefecture of the Charente-Maritime department . In 1978, in the ruins of the Château du Puy du Fou in Les Epesses (Vendée), he initiated the historical spectacle La Cinéscénie , which later became the theme park “ Puy du Fou ”.

In 1979 he became sub-prefect of the arrondissement of Vendôme in the Loir-et-Cher department . Immediately after François Mitterrand's victory in the presidential election in 1981, he resigned in order not to have to serve under a left-wing government. He then worked for the Regional Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Pays de la Loire . After the liberalization of broadcasting, de Villiers founded the private radio station Alouette FM in November 1981 and the weekly newspaper Alouette Hebdo the following year . Together with Olivier Guichard , who later became the regional president of the Pays de la Loire, de Villiers founded the private communication school in Nantes in 1984 .

Career as a politician

Philippe de Villiers joined the liberal-conservative Parti républicain in 1985 , which belonged to the bourgeois party alliance Union pour la démocratie française (UDF). In the 1986 parliamentary elections , he stood for the joint list of UDF and RPR , but missed the entry into the National Assembly . From March 1986 to June 1987 he was State Secretary for Culture (under the Minister of Culture François Léotard ) in the Chirac II cabinet . After the death of the MP Vincent Ansquer, de Villiers moved to the National Assembly in July 1987, to which he was a member until 1994 (re-elected in 1988 and 1993).

He was also the representative of the canton of Montaigu in the General Council of the Vendée from 1987 to 2010 and President of the General Council of this department from 1988 to 2010. In this capacity, he and Alexander Solzhenitsyn inaugurated the memorial for the victims of the suppression of the royalist-Catholic uprising of the Vendée by " columns of hell " in the Jacobean First Republic in 1794 in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne in 1993 . Villiers also campaigned for the United Nations to recognize terror in the Vendée as a crime against humanity .

In addition to the RPR politicians Charles Pasqua and Philippe Séguin , de Villiers was one of the most prominent conservative opponents of the EU Treaty of Maastricht and leaders of the "No" campaign in the 1992 referendum. In 1991, he initiated the Combats pour les movement with Christine Boutin and Bernard Debré Valeurs ("Fight for Values"), from which 1993 Combat pour la France ("Fight for France") emerged. In the European elections in June 1994, de Villiers was at the head of the Eurosceptic list Majorité pour l'Autre Europe ( "majority for another Europe"), which won 12.3% of the vote and 13 deputies in the European Parliament moved . There he sat in the Europe of Nations Group and was a member of the Committee on Civil Liberties and Internal Affairs .

In November 1994, the members and supporters of the list established Majorité pour l'Autre Europe the party Movement for France (MPF, "Movement for France"), whose board was chaired by de Villiers. She advocated a largely independent France that would not give up any sovereignty to the European Union . In the 1995 presidential election , de Villiers ran for the MPF and came in seventh place with 4.7% of the vote. He just missed the five percent hurdle that would have entitled to reimbursement of election campaign costs. In June 1997 he resigned his mandate in the EU Parliament to return to the French National Assembly.

Together with Charles Pasqua, who renounced the Gaullist RPR due to his opposition to the EU Treaty of Amsterdam , de Villiers led the list Rassemblement pour la France et l'indépendance de l'Europe (RPF), the 13.1 in the 1999 European elections % of the vote and received 13 of the 87 French seats in the European Parliament. De Villiers became deputy chairman of the Union for Europe of the Nations (UEN) parliamentary group , but resigned from the EU Parliament in December 1999 to continue his mandate in the National Assembly. In the summer of 2000, de Villiers' MPF and Pasqua's RPF went their separate ways again.

In the 2002 general election , de Villiers was confirmed as a member of the National Assembly, which he was a member until July 2004. For the 2004 European elections , he moved into the European Parliament again for the MPF, which this time received 7.6% of the vote and three seats. There de Villiers sat in the EU-skeptical Independence / Democracy group and was vice-chairman of the Committee on Fisheries from 2004 to 2007 . According to a survey by Parlorama , de Villiers was one of the MEPs who missed most of the sessions in the 2004-2009 legislative period (910th out of 921).

De Villiers in the 2007 presidential election campaign - motto "The pride of being a French"

Villiers made headlines in 2006 with his book Les Mosquées de Roissy (“The Mosques of Roissy ”) about alleged networks of Islamic fundamentalists in baggage handling at Paris' major airport . The following year he made another attempt to be elected President of France . The main themes of his campaign were the fight against the European Union and the strong euro , his call for a freeze on immigration and his warning of a possible Islamization of France. On the political spectrum, Villiers tried to occupy the space between the conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy and the right-wing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen . In addition, Villiers relied on his political record as President of the General Council of the Vendée. But he only got 2.2% of the vote.

Philippe de Villiers in the 2009 European election campaign

In February 2009 Villiers announced his membership in the newly formed pan-European organization Libertas , which rejected the Lisbon Treaty . With Villiers' membership, Libertas met the criteria necessary to be recognized as a European political party . In the European elections in France in 2009 , he was the only Libertas candidate ever to be elected to the European Parliament. There he was deputy chairman of the Europe of Freedom and Democracy Group (EFD) for the legislative period up to 2014 . He was a member of the Committee on Regional Development , the Delegation for relations with Switzerland and Norway, the EU-Iceland Joint Parliamentary Committee, the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the European Economic Area and the Delegation for relations with South Africa. In 2013, De Villiers took part in the protest against the opening up of marriage to same-sex couples ( La Manif pour tous ) .

In the 2014 European elections , de Villiers did not run again. For the 2017 presidential election , he did not make any election recommendations. However, he met several times with Marine Le Pen of the far-right Front National to support their presidential campaign. The Mouvement pour la France dissolved in June 2018.

Fonts

  • Lettre ouverte aux coupeurs de tete et aux menteurs du Bicentenaire (1989).
  • La chienne qui miaule (1990).
  • Notre Europe sans Maastricht (1992).
  • Avant qu'il ne soit trop tard (1993).
  • La société de connivence (1994).
  • Dictionnaire du politiquement correct à la française (1996).
  • La saga du Puy du Fou (1997).
  • La machination d'Amsterdam (1998).
  • Vous avez aimé les farines animales, vous adorerez l'euro (2001).
  • La 51e étoile du drapeau américain (2003).
  • Quand les abeilles meurent, les jours de l'homme sont comptés (2004).
  • Les Turqueries du grand mamamouchi (2005).
  • Les mosquées de Roissy (2006).
  • Une France qui gagne (2007) ISBN 978-2-268-06148-1
  • Les Secrets du Puy du Fou (2012) ISBN 978-2-226-24017-0
  • Le Roman de Charette (2012) ISBN 978-2-226-24421-5
  • Le Roman de Saint Louis (2013) ISBN 978-2-226-24977-7
  • Le Roman de Jeanne d'Arc (2014) ISBN 978-2-226-31234-1
  • Le moment est venu de dire ce que j'ai vu (2015) ISBN 978-2-226-31906-7
  • Les cloches sonneront-elles encore demain? , Albin Michel, Paris 2016, ISBN 978-2-226-39378-4
  • Le Puy du Fou: un rêve d'enfance , Editions du Rocher (April 25, 2018), ISBN 978-2268099347
  • Le Mystère Clovis , Albin Michel (October 10, 2018), ISBN 978-2226437754
  • J'ai tiré sur le fil du mensonge et tout est venu , Fayard (March 6, 2019), ISBN 978-2213712284

swell

  1. ↑ Steven Laurence Kaplan: Farewell, Revolution. Disputed Legacies - France, 1789/1989. Cornell University Press, Ithaca (NY) / London 1995, pp. 109-110.
  2. ^ A b c Laurent de Boissieu: Mouvement pour la France (MPF). In: France-politique.fr , 4th June 2019.
  3. ↑ a b c d Entry on Philippe de Villiers in the Members' database of the European Parliament
  4. ↑ Jean Quatremer: Philippe de Villiers doit-il rembourser son salaire d'eurodéputé? In: Liberation - Coulisse de Bruxelles , April 22, 2009.
  5. ↑ Thibaud Metais: Manif pour tous qui dans quel manifest cortège? In: Liberation , January 13, 2013.
  6. ^ Ariane Chemin, Olivier Faye: De Buisson à de Villiers: comment Marine Le Pen commence à séduire la “droite hors les murs”. In: Le Monde , March 4, 2017.
  7. ^ Mouvement pour la France , Projet Arcadie.

Web links

Commons : Philippe de Villiers  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Villiers, Philippe de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Viscount Philippe le Jolis de Villiers de Saintignon (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French politician, member of the National Assembly, MEP and author
DATE OF BIRTH March 25, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Boulogne ( Vendée department )