Early Life
Born 3 August 1948, Raffarin grew up in Poitiers as the son of a prominent national figure: his father Jean Raffarin was a vice-minister of Agriculture in the government of Pierre Mendes-France (1954–1955). He studied law at Pantheon-Assas University and later graduated from ESCP Europe business school. He started his professional career in marketing.
In the 1970s, his first political commitment was in the association of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's young supporters. Defining himself as a "giscardien", he joined the staff of Lionel Stoléru, Secretary of state for Manual Workers and Immigration, and the Republican Party, the liberal-conservative component of the centre-right confederation the Union for French Democracy (UDF).
Read more about this topic: Jean-Pierre Raffarin
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer’s life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)