The extraordinary life and career of French MP Félix Kir
Félix Kir was a priest, an honorary canon, briefly a journalist, a one-time supporter of the wartime collaborationist leader Marshal Philippe Pétain before joining with the Resistance, a cassock-wearing Member of Parliament and mayor of the town of Dijon, a conservative anti-Gaullist who was admired by USSR leader Nikita Khrushchev. Ordinary he was not. In this, one of a series of articles about some of the most unusual, stand-out characters in the history of France’s parliament, Pierre Januel traces Kir’s extraordinary life and career (and whose legacy includes the eponymous apéritif).
ItIt 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.”
