It was Tuesday, December 9th 1958, and the doyen of the newly composed National Assembly, as such presiding over the first seance of the house under the newly created Fifth Republic, was reaching the end of his speech. His address had already gone on for far too long when he announced: “Faced today with colleagues who are Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Muslim, faced with representatives of all expressions of spirituality, and I don’t want to exclude any, the old priest and tolerant republican that I am calls upon the help of god in this first session of our National Assembly.”
There followed a hearty round of applause. Yet to call upon “the help of god” is not a common event in the secular institution that is the assembly of French lawmakers. But there was nothing common either about Félix Kir.
A priest and the last Member of Parliament (MP) in France ever to wear the cassock, Kir took up political activity relatively late in life, becoming mayor of the town of Dijon, in southern Burgundy, at the age of 69, when he also entered parliament for the first time. He was a true conservative, who throughout his life deplored the 1905 legislation in France that separated the Church from the State. When, in 1960, the leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, made a visit to France, Félix Kir was the person he particularly wanted to meet.
Kir was born in January 1876 into a poor, rural family in the Burgundy village of Alise-Sainte-Reine. Educated at a small seminary, ordained in 1901, he served as parish priest in several villages in Burgundy. When the First World War broke out, he was 38 and, like many mobilised priests, was posted to the French army medical corps, where he distinguished himself in action and was awarded the prestigious Croix de Guerre.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
After the war, Kir returned to his activity of parish priest in the village of Bèze, where he became known for his oratory skills. In 1928, he was appointed by the bishop of Dijon to the Fédération Nationale Catholique, which led to him becoming the director of the newspaper, Le Bien du peuple de Bourgogne. Under Kir, its readership doubled. Made an honorary canon in 1931, he had by then built a solid reputation within the diocese of the local Côte-d’Or département (county).
The Pétain supporter who became a Resistant
Kir was a politically conservative figure, opposed to the 1936-1938 leftwing Popular Front governments. On June 16th 1940, shortly after Germany’s invasion of France, he was appointed to a leading role within the municipal “delegation” of Dijon, after the town’s mayor, like others, had fled the arrival of German troops. Although Kir was a supporter of Philippe Pétain, the First World War marshal who became leader of the collaborationist Vichy government, the canon above all hated the Germans.
Within the municipal delegation he was given responsibility for logistical organisation and prisoners. The German military placed around 40,000 prisoners of war in a stalag erected at a captured French air base at Longvic, close to Dijon. Kir helped some of them (he claimed they numbered 5,000), escape to the Vichy-governed region of southern France. But the operation was soon discovered and on October 10th 1940 he was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death. It was his status as a man of the cloth that saved him, and he was released, two months later, on December 7th, and placed under close surveillance.
Despite turning 65 the following month, he continued with his resistance activities. He was arrested for a second time in 1943 on suspicion of helping in the escape of a prisoner, when he once more succeeded in being freed. On the night of January 24th 1944, a group of French collaborators controlled by the Germans (who were not from the notorious Milice of collaborators), entered his apartment and shot him five times. Kir, hospitalised, miraculously escaped death. He soon fled and found refuge in the north-east Haute-Marne département. Two of the would-be assassins were sentenced to death in 1946 for their part in the attempted murder.
Kir returned to Dijon when the town was liberated in September 1944. Held in great esteem locally, in 1945 he became mayor and also MP, subsequently re-elected at every parliamentary election until 1967, and constantly re-elected as mayor until his death in April 1968. His relationship with the population of Dijon was his force. “An election is sometimes the result of an infatuation, or a stroke of luck; a re-election never is,” he once claimed.
A sharp-witted anti-Gaullist who caught Khrushchev’s eye
In parliament, Kir sat allied to the MPs of the independent Right parties. With his reputation for regularly interrupting speeches, the speaker of the National Assembly once pointedly told him: “Monsieur canon, now put together all your interruptions and later on you can give a speech.” Kir was also known for his quips: “I can’t turn my coat,” he once said, referring to his cassock, “it’s black on both sides.” Reacting to a jibe from a Communist MP, who asked how he could believe in god without having seen god, he responded: “And my arse, you’ve never seen it, and yet it exists.”
His relations with the hierarchy of the Church became mediocre, notably with Guillaume Sembel, bishop of Dijon. However, the two men outwardly kept their differences within a peaceful co-existence. This was because Kir had saved Sembel, who during the German occupation rallied in support of the Vichy government, from losing his post as bishop in a post-war purge by the National Council of the Resistance.
Kir maintained a tense relationship with General Charles de Gaulle and his allies. The leader of the Free French Forces allegedly said of Kir: “He’s not a man of the Church, but rather a man of the circus,” inferring him to be a clown.
On October 4th 1962, Kir voted in favour of a “no confidence” resolution in parliament against the government of de Gaulle’s prime minister Georges Pompidou. The resolution was in protest at de Gaulle’s intention to override the constitution and call a referendum proposing that France’s president should be elected by universal suffrage (and not by political committee). “If, in the near future, I’m led to inaugurate the Sixth Republic, it will be your fault,” he told Pompidou during the debate. The resolution was adopted, Pompidou offered his resignation, which de Gaulle refused, leading to brief period of a caretaker government before snap legislative elections, which the Gaullists won, as they did also the referendum. Pompidou went on to be France’s longest-serving prime minister, before becoming its president.
Following the return of a Gaullist majority in parliament, Kir spoke before the new assembly when he again called for god’s help, this time “so that, within the fraternity of men, universal peace can be reached”.
Promotor of an eponymous apéritif, Kir sought a Nobel prize
Kir was a highly popular figure. The reconstruction of Dijon, and the creation of a 37-hectare artificial lake, named after him, represent the major physical legacy of his mayorship. But his celebrity stretched well beyond Burgundy. In March 1961, a nationwide IFOP opinion poll of religious personalities saw him come second behind Abbé Pierre, a priest who became famous as a self-styled champion of the poor and socially excluded (founder of the Emmaüs movement who has recently been disgraced by a catalogue of claims against him of rape and other sexual assaults).
At receptions with international delegations, and among the public – and notably the clients at the bar of the National Assembly – Kir promoted a Dijon apéritif made up of the local ingredients of white wine (initially Aligoté) and a dash of blackcurrant liqueur. The drink became an eponymous success for the canon, “kir” becoming the common name, still to this day, for the cocktail.
He was a pioneer of novel, post-war town twinning, which saw Dijon become a sibling of Dallas (US), York (UK), Skopje (North Macedonia), Mainz (Germany), Reggio nell'Emilia (Italy), Meknes (Morocco) and, notably, Stalingrad, as it was then in the USSR, with which a friendship “pact” was signed in 1959. Kir, an anti-militarist, defined himself as an opponent of the Cold War. But the twinning with the communist town was frowned upon by the Church because of the intolerance of Catholicism across the USSR.
In legislative elections in 1962, the Communist Party candidate for the same Dijon constituency where Kir was standing stood down in what was seen as a surprise move, but which was most certainly because of the rapprochement with Stalingrad. It allowed Kir to win against the Gaullist Robert Poujade.
In 1960, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev paid a visit to France. The problem was that he wanted to meet Kir in Dijon, but the Vatican strongly disapproved of the idea that the leader of the communist world would be welcomed by a be-cassocked canon. After weeks of heated discussions, Kir submitted to the pressure of the Church and made himself absent from Dijon on the day of the visit. A disappointed Khrushchev was to exclaim: “Canon Kir is physically absent, spiritually he is among us.”
“Down with war!” declared Kir at the national Assembly in October 1966. “I am in contact with 52 nations that all want peace.” He dreamt of being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering organisation of international town twinning, and his MP colleague Charles Dutheil twice lobbied in his favour with Nobel prize committees, in 1960 and 1961, but in vain.
In later life Kir progressively moved towards the Left. In the 1965 presidential elections, he first gave his support to the centre-right candidate Jean Lecanuet, who he described as a “sincere friend”. But after tensions between the two, Kir, one month later, gave his backing to the socialist François Mitterrand, who he declared was the only candidate who could “overthrow the regime of enslavement that we have suffered for too long”. In the end, it was Charles de Gaulle who won the vote with a clear victory over Mitterrand.
In later years, Kir declared himself as being the only truly independent MP in parliament. But his long and remarkable political career came to an end when, at the age of 91, he lost his seat in the first round of legislative elections in 1967, followed a few months later by his defeat in local elections. However, in April 1968, when he died after a fall, thousands turned out to pay their respects before his coffin. Among them was Valerian Zorine, the USSR’s ambassador to France.
-------------------------
- The original French version of this article can be found here. It is one of a series about the history of atypical French MPs published by Mediapart in French, and which can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse