“It’s easy to be in a camp, to stick to one vision of the world”

By Denis Cosnard

Posted today at 01:29

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Interview“I wouldn’t have arrived there if…” Each week, “Le Monde” questions a personality regarding a decisive moment in their life. The former boss of the agri-food group talks regarding his youth in the mountains and his taste for climbing… Especially as a leader.

Considered the most social boss of the CAC 40 when he headed Danone, Emmanuel Faber was dismissed in 2021 by his board of directors. He now chairs the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), an organization responsible for defining global extra-financial standards, and has just published open a way, a metaphorical book regarding his passion for the mountains, his taste for climbing… and the risk of falling.

I wouldn’t have come here if…

If there had not been, upstream of my commitments, a desire for justice with very deep roots. In one of my first memories, founder, I am 3 or 4 years old and I play in a sandbox, at the bottom of our building, in the suburbs of Grenoble. I push toy cars on imaginary roads with a friend my age. A very tall lady arrives, lifts him up by the wrist and slaps him, for some stupidity that I don’t understand. So, I pull the skirt of this lady, and, from the height of my 3 years, I say to her: “The big ones don’t hit the little ones. The big ones defend the little ones. I don’t know where this revolt once morest injustice came from, but it was a powerful driving force. In my eyes, certain rules can be transgressed in the name of a morality stronger than the established order. The other trace that I keep from this episode is that a part of me feels good at ground level, at ground level. Watching the world from below, sitting on the ground, helps lift some taboos.

What was your childhood like?

I wouldn’t have arrived there either if I hadn’t been born in Grenoble, at the foot of the Alps. I spent a happy childhood there. My parents, students when I was born, were quite idealistic. My mother had a passion for the mountains, geography, astronomy, while being in love with literature. My father, a mathematician who had been a scout, was in love with nature. I still remember one winter, I was 7 or 8 years old, I was on a ski slope, and the low sun illuminated the snow powder. For ten seconds, I had the sensation of the divine, the feeling of being connected at the same time to the smallest and the immense. This flash left a trace, a question, a breakthrough.

Around the same age, I remember a huge storm while we were in the Bans refuge, in the Ecrins massif. [Hautes-Alpes]. Two mountaineers caught in the deluge arrived shortly following, helmeted, soaked, wrung out. Real aliens in my eyes. Curiosity grabbed me by the guts. I thought: people are going to this planet… One day, I will go too! These first experiences put me in contact with what is above us, this floor where there is wind, sun, cold, but no men. So divine there is, that’s where I meet him, in the mountains.

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