Obituary – Francois Lamoureux

The premature death of Francois Lamoureux last Saturday has extinguished one of the brightest lights of the European Commission from the era of Jacques Delors. Lamoureux, who died of cancer in his native Bordeaux on Saturday, spent 37 years in the Commission and can justifiably be seen as one of the chief architects of the European Union as it exists today.

He started his professional life in the Commission’s legal service as a lawyer but before long had attracted the attention of the then secretary-general of the Commission Emile Noël and, of course, Delors who recruited him to his cabinet in 1985. Working under the formidable leadership of Delors’ chef de cabinet, Pascal Lamy, Lamoureux played a major part in two of the most important projects in the history of the EU: the Single European Act which paved the way to the single market and the Maastricht Treaty which marks the highpoint of European integration. Günter Burghardt, former head of the Commission delegation in Washington, who worked with Lamoureux in the Delors cabinet, remembers working through the night in the Berlaymont building without heating to prepare Delors’s landmark speech to the European Parliament in January 1985 which first mentioned the target of 1992 for creating the single market. "[With Lamoureux] we started work straight away on the conceptual vision of Delors’ presidency," he recalls.

Lamoureux played an equally important role in the drafting of the Maastricht Treaty which laid the groundwork for monetary union and the subsequent launch of the euro.

After a short spell as deputy head of cabinet to Edith Cresson when she became French prime minister in 1992, he returned to the Commission’s legal service in 1993. He became Cresson’s chef de cabinet in 1995 when she arrived in Brussels as commissioner for research, education and training. In 1996 he became deputy director-general for external relations. He played a major part in the preparations for the enlargement of the EU which took in ten new states in 2004 by helping to devise the enlargement strategy.

Lamoureux was disappointed not be to appointed head of the enlargement task force, which later became DG Enlargement, but became director-general for energy and transport in 1999 where he formed an extremely effective partnership with Spanish Commission vice-president Loyola de Palacio. Under his lead, the process of liberalisation of Europe’s energy sector forged ahead, driven by Lamoureux’s unflinching vision of an ever more integrated Europe with strong powers for the Commission.

This ambition found possibly its greatest expression in the draft constitutional treaty that Lamoureux drew up for Romano Prodi. Termed "Penelope" in a reference to Odysseus’s wife, the text is admired for its "precision, coherence and power", in Lamy’s words, attributes which he says were lacking from Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s draft constitution. Despite Lamoureux’s text’s strengths, the draft failed to have the impact it deserved, not least because of the secretive way it was drawn up, without the knowledge of the two commissioners dealing with the subject at the time: Michel Barnier and António Vitorino.

The episode illustrates the dichotomy of Lamoureux’s reputation. While universally admired for his intellectual brilliance and capacity for work, he will also be remembered for his brusque manner, verging on arrogance. Pascal Lamy, in his obituary of Lamy in le Monde, writes of Lamoureux’s "personnalité ruguese" - his rough personality. While his dedication to the cause of European integration played a major part in the construction of the EU as it stands today, like many brilliant people, his own convictions sometimes impaired his sensitivity to see political realities, leading to occasionally counter-productive outcomes.

Many of his admirers feel he was poorly treated by President José Manuel Barroso in last year’s reshuffle of directors-general. Some believe Barroso could have done more to keep Lamoureux in his Commission and not doing so was seen as a rejection of the ardent integrationists of the Delors era. Yet others argue that Lamoureux could not have been given the two jobs he coveted, Commission secretary-general or head of the legal service and so his departure was hard to avoid.

On news of his death, at the age of 59, Barroso paid tribute to a "prestigious and devoted" public servant and praised his "intelligence, vision and perseverance". His former boss, Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot, lauded Lamoureux’s ability to "conceive ambitious policies and put them into effect".

Lamoureux’s friends held a memorial service in Brussels for colleagues to express their condolences at his passing at which the preamble to Penelope was read out. He will have been remembered by those attending as he saw himself: a tireless servant of the cause of European integration who can take a large share of the credit for the Union as it exists today.

The premature death of Francois Lamoureux last Saturday has extinguished one of the brightest lights of the European Commission from the era of Jacques Delors. Lamoureux, who died of cancer in his native Bordeaux on Saturday, spent 37 years in the Commission and can justifiably be seen as one of the chief architects of the European Union as it exists today.