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There is a whole mythology of Americans in Paris. From the founding fathers (Franklin, Jefferson, Adams), through Hemingway and the lost generation, the film painter-dancer played by Gene Kelly, and even Emily in Paris, a new series that portrays the themes of transatlantic fascination for the French capital. The club has another distinguished member. Antony J. Blinken, future head of American diplomacy, lived as a child and teenager in the City of Light, where he discovered a passion for international relations and acquired a global vision that can help him repair the damage in the world. America first de Donald Trump.
“He was a student involved in everything, as are American students, with a habit of doing other non-academic activities,” says Elisabeth Zéboulon, who was her math teacher at École Jeannine Manuel, a bilingual private school founded in the postwar period of a former Nazi resistant, and in which Tony Blinken studied between 1971 and 1980. One of the activities to which Blinken has devoted himself in the last year has been the elaboration of the yearbook, the yearbook at the end of the course. “He was an open person,” says Zéboulon, who is now the center’s general manager, “always ready to participate.”
Blinken’s appointment as Secretary of State in the new administration of President-elect Joe Biden was welcomed as a balm in Paris. “Francophile and Francophone”, celebrated in Point the former French ambassador to Washington or the UN, Gérard Araud. Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said he was “particularly happy” that his new counterpart is someone he knows – it’s “you” – and who knows France. Almost a French by adoption, a breath fraternity between the two countries after the rudeness of the Trump years.
Blinken (New York, 1962) was nine when he arrived in Paris. His parents – he, a diplomat; she, cultural manager and promoter of the Franco-American agreement, was just divorced. His mother married Samuel Pisar, a lawyer whose life he would give for several films. Pisar, born in Poland in 1929, survived the Majdanek, Auschwitz and Dachau camps. Her parents and little sister were killed in the holocaust. Some relatives welcomed him to Australia and he was able to study at Harvard and the Sorbonne. He was an advisor to John F. Kennedy and a friend of presidents Valéry Giscard D’Estaing and François Mitterrand.
Parallel to his career as a renowned lawyer – his clients included Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor and Catherine Deneuve – Pisar was determined to promote rapprochement between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War through international trade. The idea was that the exchanges – the business– between the two blocs it would end up weakening the Soviet regime. Pisar tells in one of his books that, when in 1980 Ronald Reagan, supporter of the confrontation with Moscow, arrived at the White House, one of the advisors of the new president celebrated: “The era of Pisarism it’s over”.
This was the family environment in which Blinken grew up. On the one hand, connected with Paris chic, that of movie stars and that of those in power. On the other hand, politically cosmopolitan and liberal, convinced of the virtues of dialogue and global cooperation, and well aware of the weight of a traumatic event lived raw at home. At school these worlds converged. “He was attracted to political science and international relations,” recalls a classmate, Theodora van Leeuwen, in an email.
Blinken then started playing electronic guitar. Played at football, European football. “Ski much better than me. But he has agreed to give up his dream bike and is waiting for the car he will surely receive now that he has passed his high school exam in Paris and been admitted to Harvard, ”Pisar wrote in the memoir. The blood of hope, published in 1979. At Harvard, the future Secretary of State published in the newspaper The crimson several chronicles on French politics. In one of them, on the victory of the socialist Mitterrand in the presidential elections, he described the rue Solférino, headquarters of the PS, as a “long and undulating street near the Eiffel Tower” (it is actually short, straight and 2.5 kilometers from the Eiffel Tower).
Zéboulon, in his office at the school, shows the old yearbook and turns the pages. There’s young Tony in a thoughtful pose and, below, a line from a famous Pink Floyd song: “Just another brick in the wall?“” Another brick in the wall? “And here, on another page, one of his best friends, a boy with Bob Dylan’s curly hair,” very bright, very revolutionary. “This is Robert Malley who, like Blinken, would hold senior positions in the Clinton Administrations. and Obama. “Fidel… comme Castro“, Reads under the photo.” Faithful (fidel, in French) as Castro “.
“In those years French public opinion was quite hostile to American foreign policy. This undoubtedly influenced him: he is an American with an international vision, an American who can understand how others see America,” Malley says over the phone. , who now chairs the International Crisis Group, an NGO dedicated to conflict prevention and resolution. Last July, Blinken intervened on video at the virtual graduation ceremony (obliges the pandemic) for the elderly. “You graduate at a time of greater uncertainty than ever,” he told them in reference to the pandemic. “This will pass,” he promised.
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