Babette de Rozières, the 77-year-old Creole chef who seemed omnipresent on the late France Ô channel (France TV subsidiary), desperately attempted yet another political comeback under the LR-RN banner. This grand comeback, supported by Éric Ciotti himself after the dissolution of the National Assembly, ended miserably yesterday in a crushing defeat. Babette, once a not-so-young starlet of culinary shows, has now traded her pots and pans for political speeches, with the support of the RN, whose young president Bardella she greatly admires.
But here we are, Elisabeth Hildebert, known as Babette, joins Radio Courtoisie in the fall of 2023, the radio where she proudly talks about papaya and other exotic delights. A well-spiced speech that doesn’t lack zest, from someone who claims to have been beaten in an elevator at the ORTF because she was black!
Facing outgoing Macronist MP Nadia Hai and Aurélien Rousseau from the New Popular Front, Babette, who believed France was in danger and saw herself saving it according to our colleagues at Le Parisien, bit the dust. She, who rarely missed a dish, got cooked by the voters.
It must be said that Babette is no stranger to electoral defeats. Already in 2017, as an LR candidate, she flopped with a meager 6.53% of the votes. Even her past friendships with Jacques Chirac, her enthusiastic applause for Nicolas Sarkozy, and her position as a regional councilor alongside Valérie Pécresse in 2015, couldn’t save her.
Babette, by her married name Butin, even drew the ire of her ex-friend Valérie Pécresse with her book The Hidden Face of Politics in Ile-de-France published in 2023, garnering a few defamation lawsuits in the process. And as if that wasn’t enough, she was sentenced in 2018 to one year of ineligibility for rejected campaign accounts and reoffended in 2024 with defamatory remarks.
The stylish cook also managed to make enemies in the entertainment world. After considering a musical career according to her, she alienated Clotilde Courreau, the late Genenviève de Fontenay, and Mimie Mathy, whom she accused of racism, threatening to bring the famous actress down to the level of a bonsai.
In 2015, the narcissistic cook founded the Overseas Gastronomy Fair, a promising initiative bringing together exhibitors from the Antilles, Réunion, Guyana, and Polynesia. But even with the supposed support of Brigitte Macron and Anne Hidalgo, her political credibility quickly dissolved.
Between image rights, public subsidies, and a plethora of companies, Babette’s affairs are a real imbroglio. Despite all her efforts to shine, her political career seems definitively burnt out. The candidate in the shadow of the RN failed to convince, and her failure is a monumental slap in the face.
Let’s wish this almost-octogenarian a peaceful retirement, despite some admitted tensions with her only daughter… In 2021, she told Jordan De Luxe that her daughter revealed a "worrying physique", even considering having her flaws surgically corrected. "But surgery has its limits. The scalpel will never be able to put a smile on an unattractive face […] I sometimes sincerely wonder if this child is the one I gave birth to", she added. No comment…
The one who also attempted history studies in her youth said of Mimie Mathy: "People imagine she is kind, but she is a false kind. In fact, everyone around her knows very well that I am telling the truth."
And you, Babette, what do you think they say about you?
