Michel Barnier has promised there will be no grandstanding in the prime minister's office. "We're going to do more than talk," maintained the new prime minister as Gabriel Attal handed the ministry over to him on September 5. "Humility" is his watchword. But can we believe someone who says he doesn't deal in words? At 73, the advantage of Barnier, the oldest head of government in the history of the Fifth Republic, is that the thickness of his archive file makes it easier to form a judgment on the basis of the evidence. The man appears, in fact, to be less a communicator than a specialized political craftsman.

How many teenagers have sent a letter to Le Monde about the employment of young farmers in the mountains and "the life-long severance pay system?" It was on January 30, 1968, that Barnier's name appeared for the first time in the newspaper, in "The tourism column." At the time, the 17-year-old native of Savoie, in the French Alps, was active in the Union des Jeunes pour le Progrès (Youth Union for Progress, UJP), a youth movement supporting General de Gaulle, of which he had set up a section in his high school in Albertville. His scholarly, acronym-laden prose on vocational training seemed far removed from the revolt of a generation about to take to the streets of Paris in May 1968.

Barnier took a liking to his correspondence with Le Monde. On March 3, 1970, in a feature devoted to "the voice of youth," Le Monde again published his writing. This time, the "UJP delegate in Savoie's second constituency" wondered whether the age of eligibility for national political office should be lowered from 23 to 21. In his view, this would be a good way of "firmly anchoring the spirit of responsibility" in the minds of "young people," who, in the days after May 1968, had too little "overall capacity for discussion, for understanding the simplest mechanisms – for example, those of economic life." Need we point out that Barnier, a student at the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris, a business school, was 19 at the time?

Eager to run for office, this son of a businessman and a community activist attended meetings of the Union pour la Défense de la République (Union for Defence of the Republic, UDR), the UJP's parent organization, and ministerial cabinets. Meanwhile, at the age of 22, he won his first term as a regional councilor. During the 1978 legislative elections, journalist Bernard Elie followed the young politician on the campaign trail in bourgeois Albertville. "The Barnier villa was transformed into an electoral HQ. There was feverish folding, gluing, stamping," Elie recounted on March 18, 1978. At 27, the man from Savoie became the youngest member of the Assemblée Nationale.

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