Catherine Chevillot will not have had the same consideration as Marie-Christine Labourdette renewed at the Château de Fontainebleau: she will not serve a second term as president of the City of Architecture and Heritage. She is replaced by a magistrate from the Court of Auditors who spent his entire career in the City of Paris and then in the Senate.
When he left the ENA in 2000 (Averroès promotion, the same as that of Alexis Kohler, Emmanuel Macron's right-hand man) Julien Bargeton (51 years old) joined the Court of Auditors. But he left the Court very quickly to pursue a political career. First at the City of Paris as deputy to Bertrand Delanoë then to Anne Hidalgo, whom he left in 2017 in favor of Emmanuel Macron. A short-lived candidate for mayor of Paris, he joined forces with Benjamin Griveaux before the latter gave up after the intimate video affair. In the meantime, he was elected senator of Paris but was not re-elected in 2023. He then retreated to the Court of Auditors, retaining only a mandate as a regional elected official.
His skills in architecture and heritage are as thin as a sheet of parchment. The press release goes to great lengths to find them – it situates them in the context of the issues:“Julien Bargeton has built strong experience in the issues of the world of culture and the issues of heritage, architecture and public space through his career as an elected official in Paris”.
The first president of the Cité de l'architecture – François de Mazières – was also a municipal elected official when he was appointed (in 2004), but he then had a career in culture behind him, notably as director general of the Heritage Foundation then cultural advisor at Matignon.
