© Thomas Samson, AFPIn 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron chose Jean-Louis Georgelin to lead the reconstruction work on Paris's Notre-Dame cathedral.
General Jean-Louis Georgelin, 74, died on Friday in the Pyrenees mountain range straddling the France-Spain border, said the prosecutor's office in the southern French city of Foix.
A mountain rescue team deployed to the Mont-Valier peak "discovered the body of a man who has been formally identified as General Georgelin", a spokesman said, adding that an accident was the likely cause.
Notre-Dame has lost "the overseer of its rebirth" and France "one of its great servants", President
Emmanuel Macron wrote on Twitter, now rebranded as "X".
Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo hailed Georgelin on the same social media platform for creating "the human and organisational conditions for successfully completing the reconstruction of Notre-Dame".
A five-star general who was the French army's chief-of-staff between 2006 and 2010, Georgelin supervised operations in Ivory Coast, Afghanistan, the Balkans and Lebanon.In 2020, Macron chose him to lead the complex and expensive reconstruction work on Notre-Dame.The cathedral, one of the French capital's most famous landmarks, was gutted by a blaze that shocked the world the previous year.
Georgelin, a practising Catholic whose motto was "move forward without procrastinating," said Notre-Dame's new spire would be completed by the end of the year.
Comment: This is
, obviously, suspicious, for a number of reasons. Such VIPs don't tend to 'hike alone in the Pyrenees', especially not in the middle of 'the hottest heatwave ever', and especially not given how serious and pressing a job he had
to get Notre Dame ready in time
for the Olympics in Paris next year
. La Depeche reports:
His body was found below the path located under the Col de Faustin, on the slopes of Mont-Valier, in the Ariège Pyrenees. General Jean-Louis Georgelin, who supervised the reconstruction of Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral, died on Friday August 18 during the descent, "at the level of a particularly steep rocky passage"...
This Monday, the deputy prosecutor of Foix, Benoît De Saintignon, clarified that "nothing suggests that the general was on the wrong path at the time of his fall". While some regulars in the area wondered about the route taken by the victim, suggesting that he had been able to go through a mountaineering route, "a very steep path with cliffs at the end..."
The magistrate said: "according to the rescuer who intervened on the spot, Jean-Louis Georgelin was on the normal route, the one which is marked and which appears on the IGN maps. It is a not particularly dangerous path which nevertheless requires one to be vigilant. It is true that on this passage, cables have been installed, but only for the purpose of guiding the hiker."
Another reason this is suspicious is because of the remaining questions over what happened to the Notre Dame cathedral (specifically, whether it was caused by 'an electrical fault' or arson). Did Georgelin learn something about this? Notre Dame's reconstruction is such a sensitive issue in France that it could also be that Georgelin clashed with the government about how it should be rebuilt.
Then there's this bombshell tweet from the Russian Deputy Ambassador to the UN, in which he strongly insinuates that he has inside knowledge that Georgelin was in fact killed in the line of (covert) duty in Ukraine, and his dead body later brought to the Pyrenees to be 'discovered':
Comment: This is, obviously, suspicious, for a number of reasons. Such VIPs don't tend to 'hike alone in the Pyrenees', especially not in the middle of 'the hottest heatwave ever', and especially not given how serious and pressing a job he had to get Notre Dame ready in time for the Olympics in Paris next year. La Depeche reports: Another reason this is suspicious is because of the remaining questions over what happened to the Notre Dame cathedral (specifically, whether it was caused by 'an electrical fault' or arson). Did Georgelin learn something about this? Notre Dame's reconstruction is such a sensitive issue in France that it could also be that Georgelin clashed with the government about how it should be rebuilt.
Then there's this bombshell tweet from the Russian Deputy Ambassador to the UN, in which he strongly insinuates that he has inside knowledge that Georgelin was in fact killed in the line of (covert) duty in Ukraine, and his dead body later brought to the Pyrenees to be 'discovered':