Brice Lalonde

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Brice Lalonde
Brice Lalonde
In office
15 May 1991 – 2 April 1992
Prime Minister Edith Cresson
Preceded by Huguette Bouchardeau
Succeeded by Michel Barnier
Born February 10, 1946 (1946-02-10) (age 62)
Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
Political party Génération Ecologie

Brice Lalonde (born February 10, 1946) is a former socialist and green party leader in France, who ran for President of France in the Presidential elections, 1981. In 1988 he was named Minister of the Environment, and in 1990 founded the Green Party Génération Ecologie.


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[edit] Biography

Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, he was a student leader during the May 1968 student uprisings in France, when riots and upheaval scared the French population away from Revolution and the old Left, but toward an adaptive and calmer socialism.

In 1968, Lalonde was President of the Union nationale des étudiants de france (UNEF), the French National Students' Union, which brought France to a standstill with protests and riots. The power of students in Europe and the power of his first cousin there caused Sen. John Kerry to rethink his support of the Vietnam War in the U.S., and caused him to become more agitated and aggressive in his own leadership of young people and demonstrations in the U.S.

Lalonde, with David McTaggart, an activist involved in the Greenpeace protests against French nuclear tests at Mururoa, helped create the confrontational strategies of boarding ships at sea in the 1970s. In July 1973, he was arrested by the French Navy during protests against nuclear tests in Mururoa, along with the General Jacques Pâris de Bollardière, the priest Jean Toulat and the writer Jean-Marie Muller [1].

In the Summer 1999, Brice Lalonde went to Afghanistan to support the commander Massoud, called by some the Afghan de Gaulle, against the oppression of the Taliban.

He currently is the mayor of a Saint-Briac-sur-Mer, a small Breton village where the Forbes family keeps an estate. He is the heir to several Forbes family offshore trusts.

Lalonde founded in 1990 the party Génération Ecologie, which enjoyed a runaway electoral success in 1992 but soon declined in front of the French Green Party's competition.

An influential political player in the early 1990s, Lalonde is now considered a very minor figure. He failed to run for president in the 1995 and 2002 elections, being unable to obtain the necessary 500 signatures of French mayors or MPs and had to leave the leadership of his own party. Close friend of several right-wing figures including Alain Madelin, his current positions are fairly right-wing, and he has been criticized as being a bit of a turncoat. He had strongly denounced leftist entryism in the French Green party.

Brice Lalonde is the son of Fiona (Forbes) Lalonde, a daughter of James Grant Forbes. He is also a childhood friend of U.S. Senator John Kerry, and is Kerry's first cousin, sharing the same maternal grandparents. His father changed the family name from Levy when he was a child. His (and Sen. Kerry's) g. grandfather Forbes was a poppy botanist and opium dealer in the China trade during the Opium War, who wrote a book on Chinese plants. Brice lives at the Forbes family estate in Saint-Briac.

See Forbes family of China and Boston.

[edit] Timeline

[edit] References

  1. ^ Jean Guisnel, "Jacques Pâris de Bollardière, portrait d'un général en honnête-homme", pp.47-49 in Histoire secrète de la Ve République (dir. Roger Faligot and Jean Guisnel), La Découverte, 2006, 2007

[edit] External links