At a recent ceremony in Vichy, France, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, a small, dapper man stepped forward from the crowd to place a wreath at the foot of a monument to the dead. He listened to students speak of endangered peace, the defense of French values and the fascist scourge that led to Hitler’s gas chambers.
The seemingly unremarkable face in the crowd was Senator Claude Malhuret, who has become President Trump’s European nemesis. His barbed speeches, viewed tens of millions of times, have cast the president as an “incendiary emperor” and suggested that “never before has anyone so trampled on the Constitution.”
With a scathing directness little heard from politicians in the United States and prompted by what he sees as a presidential assault on America’s essential checks and balances, Mr. Malhuret has compared Mr. Trump to two tyrannical Roman emperors, Nero and Caligula. But he has added that, if Caligula named his horse a consul, “at least that horse did no harm to anyone.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the senator’s onslaught.
Mr. Malhuret, 75, a retired physician and a right-leaning centrist, was the mayor of Vichy for 28 years until 2017. The town in central France is a symbol of the country’s wartime ignominy. From 1940 to 1944, it was the capital of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s regime, which collaborated with Nazi Germany to send some 76,000 Jews to their deaths in Hitler’s camps.
So it was natural to ask him if Vichy’s past inspired his fierce stand against what he sees as an American tilt toward tyranny.
“You know people still come here and expect to see men with little Hitler mustaches,” Mr. Malhuret said. “The so-called regime of Vichy should be called the regime of the French State or of Pétain. By the time I took office here, I was already a visceral antitotalitarian, whether of the right or left.”
The Vichy shorthand long proved useful in deflecting the direct criminal responsibility of France, whose “soul” was supposedly transposed to Gen. Charles de Gaulle and his Free French forces during the years of Nazi collaboration. Only in 1995 did former President Jacques Chirac cut through the evasiveness by saying that the “criminal folly” of those years was “seconded by the French, by the French state.”
Mr. Malhuret, precise and direct, his curtness offset by a courtly manner, has no time for such obfuscation. His political philosophy was formed, and is grounded, in the atrocities and suffering he witnessed as a young doctor in Asia and elsewhere in the developing world.
In the 1970s, he worked for Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, the Nobel Prize-winning charity founded in 1971 to help those in need by providing aid and medical care in conflict zones. The experience shattered his leftist illusions.
Those illusions had taken form in the 1960s. He abandoned medical textbooks to read half of Marx and all of Trotsky in a matter of weeks in 1968, as student protests swept Paris. “We were all in the streets to say, ‘Enough!’” he said. “Enough of what nobody knew! But that didn’t matter. It was time for change, for revolution.”
His exposure to the refugee camps of Laos and Vietnam, to the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Communist dictatorship in Cambodia, to the extreme poverty of India and to the disasters of Marxist economics brought down the curtain on all that.
“I became an anti-Communist militant because of what I saw and nobody in France believed at the time,” he said. “When François Mitterrand invited Communists to join his government in 1981, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it was unimaginable for me, the final rupture.”
Not one to mince words, Mr. Malhuret described Mr. Mitterrand, who expressed admiration for Pétain and served briefly as a low-level functionary of the Vichy government before joining the Resistance and becoming a Socialist politician, as the “biggest falsifier of our history, including his own.”
Mr. Malhuret’s own history, before assuming the role of derisive critic in chief of Mr. Trump’s “chronic overdose of himself” and “ignorant vanity,” had several chapters.
They have included directing Doctors Without Borders for several years; serving as Mr. Chirac’s secretary of state for human rights, a new post, from 1986 to 1988; founding Doctissimo, one of France’s first health information websites, in 2000 (he says he sold his shares way too soon); and serving for about a dozen years in the Senate, where he now heads the center-right Independents group.
“He’s intriguing, very reserved with this discretion that can verge on arrogance,” said Matthieu Perrinaud, who is the head of the Vichy bureau of La Montagne, a local newspaper. “Great erudition, a gentleman’s deference, incisive, a touch of malice, wisdom gleaned from a thousand lives, and a sniper’s aim.”
For a long time, Mr. Malhuret, who was bald before he turned 30, sported an ear-to-ear mustache that he dispensed with in recent years to reveal a face as chiseled as his utterances. His Trump demolition job in early March that spread quickly online lasted just eight minutes.
“He’s obsessed with coherence, and once on a subject pursues it to the end,” said Frédéric Aguilera, the successor of Mr. Malhuret as mayor of Vichy. Marie-Bénédicte Reynard, an aide to both the current mayor and Mr. Aguilera, said Mr. Malhuret is “very reserved and very passionate at the same time, with a ferocious work ethic.”
Vichy today reflects that focus. It is a town revitalized, its famous spa refurbished, the banks of the Allier river beautified with pedestrian paths. Its inscription in 2021 by UNESCO on the World Heritage List as one of the major spa towns of Europe felt to locals like a form of deliverance, even if Pétain’s ghost will forever hover over the vast main square where his office was.
Mr. Malhuret is a pragmatist above all. If Marxism brought economic ruin and China’s opening to the market brought rapid development, he knew where he stood. When Doctors Without Borders was broke in the late 1970s, he clashed with one of its founders, the quixotic Bernard Kouchner, who had a more romantic vision of its future. An enormously successful fund-raising campaign led to Mr. Malhuret’s takeover and gave the organization more power to save lives.
Asked about the clash, Mr. Kouchner, a former minister of foreign affairs, said: “I founded it. He developed it. He has talent and a certain brio.”
Late in life, Mr. Malhuret, who is married with two grown children and likes to return to Vichy when he can to enjoy the “the sweetness of life in a world where it is sometimes missing,” finds himself facing a threatening world he did not expect. He thought the lessons of history had been learned in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated soon after. Freedom and liberal democracy appeared triumphant.
But the pendulum swings and autocrats are back, and the far right and far left have brought paralysis to the French National Assembly, or lower house, and he is rubbing his eyes.
“I don’t think we will see an autocratic, illiberal regime in the United States — that would be a surprise — but then I did not think that would happen in certain European countries, and perhaps even in France,” Mr. Malhuret said, alluding to Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary and the rise of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party.
I asked why he thought a French senator’s words on Mr. Trump had such a global impact: “Never before,” Mr. Malhuret said in his speech, has any president “issued so many illegal decrees, dismissed judges who could oppose him, sacked the entire military leadership in one go, weakened all counter powers and taken control of social media. This is not a mere illiberal drift. It is the beginning of the seizure of democracy.”
Mr. Malhuret reflected for a long moment, before saying: “The Republicans are scared, the Democrats are stunned and leaderless, but I cannot imagine there will not be a reaction. The American people are facing one of the great challenges of the 21st century, as great as that confronting the French in 1940, when they had to decide whether to join the Resistance or not.”
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