Europe’s ‘Tormented History’ Drives an Ambitious Macron Protégé
nytimes.comOn a recent visit to Kyiv, Clément Beaune, the French transportation minister, stopped off in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa to pay homage to his Jewish forebears who fled pogroms for France around 1910, only to be deported by French authorities to Auschwitz in 1944 and murdered there by the Nazis.
This was scarcely business as usual for a minister whose habitual obligations include dealing with rail strikes and airport meltdowns.
But Mr. Beaune, 42, has earned a reputation as an iconoclast driven by personal conviction, chief among them a passionate identification with the idea of a united Europe. “I have a small piece of this tormented history in me, and that is the history of all Europeans,” Mr.
Beaune, a man of boyish face, candid gaze and artfully unkempt beard, said in an interview. “We are a continent of people, families and nations torn apart.
