Jean Bardet

Jean Camille Louis Bardet was born on 22 June 1941 in Paris. He studied medicine and in 1972 completed a doctoral thesis on the effects on myocardial contractility of selectively blocking the heart's adrenergic receptors.

He became a professor of medicine and hospital practitioner at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, specialising in cardiology. From 1997 until his retirement in 2007 he was head of the cardiology department at the Hopital Saint-Antoine in Paris.

Bardet's political career began in the Val-d'Oise. In 1983 he was elected a municipal councillor in Le Plessis-Bouchard, where he served as deputy mayor until 1989, and in Taverny, where he sat until 1995. He represented the canton of Saint-Ouen-l'Aumone on the general council of the Val-d'Oise from 1985 to 1992 and was a regional councillor of Ile-de-France from 1986 to 1992 and from 1998 to 2004.

He entered the National Assembly in 1986 for the Rally for the Republic, replacing Helene Missoffe in the Val-d'Oise under the proportional system, and served until 1988. In 1993 he won the 3rd constituency of the Val-d'Oise and was re-elected in 1997, 2002 and 2007, sitting with the RPR group and then the Union for a Popular Movement group from 2002. He was briefly associated with Dominique de Villepin's movement Republique solidaire in 2010 and 2011.

As a doctor in parliament he focused on social, humanitarian and bioethical issues and was a member of the National Consultative Ethics Committee. In 2007 he produced a report for the parliamentary office for the evaluation of health policies on the early management of strokes, and in 2011 he served on the Assembly's fact finding mission on the Mediator affair and pharmacovigilance. In June 2012 he lost his seat to Jean-Noel Carpentier.

Bardet was a Catholic. Alongside medicine and politics he wrote fiction, publishing the novels Au commencement etait le Verbe (2005) and Le gene du mal, as well as Un coeur en forme, a book on heart health for general readers. In 2014 he published L'affaire Mediator, un devoir de verite, his own analysis of the evidence heard by the parliamentary mission, in which he argued that the death toll attributed to the drug had been overstated.

Jean Bardet died in Paris on 5 November 2026 at the age of 85. A notice published in Le Figaro on 12 November 2026 by the Bardet, Schlumberger and Caille families announced his death, describing him as a professor of medicine and knight of the Legion of Honour. The cause of death was not made public.

Bardet is remembered as one of the physicians who brought clinical experience into the National Assembly, serving five terms for the Val-d'Oise over a span of 26 years while leading a major Paris cardiology department. His work on bioethics, stroke care and drug safety reflected that dual role. He was made a knight of the Legion of Honour on 14 July 2018.