Pierre Hazette

Pierre Hazette was born on 15 March 1939 in Marneffe, a small village in the Hesbaye near Huy, now part of the municipality of Burdinne in Liège province. His parents, Jean Hazette and Denise Mahia, ran a paint and decorating business in the village.

He went to the village primary school and then to the Collège Saint-Quirin in Huy. At the University of Liège he graduated in classical philology and qualified to teach, and he stayed on as an assistant at LASLA, the university's laboratory for the statistical analysis of classical languages. He completed his military service in 1963 with the rank of reserve lieutenant.

After his military service Hazette taught Latin and Greek in the final years of secondary school, first at the Athénée in Andenne, then in Huy and finally at the Athénée in Waremme. He had joined the liberal party in 1961, and after the municipal elections of 1970 he became alderman for education in Braives, serving from January 1971 to December 1976. He later sat again on the Braives council in the 1980s.

In 1973 the education minister Michel Toussaint brought him into his cabinet, and he followed Toussaint to the foreign trade ministry. From 1974 he also directed the office of André Damseaux, president of the Walloon liberal party, and took part in the talks that brought Walloon and Brussels liberals together with the regionalists led by François Perin and Jean Gol in 1976. He then worked as an adviser and head of department at the council of the French Community, and from 1981 to 1984 was chief of staff to the education ministers Michel Tromont and André Bertouille. For a year he headed Selor, the federal civil service recruitment office.

Hazette became a provincial senator for Liège in October 1985 and was elected to the Chamber of Representatives for Huy-Waremme in 1987, which also gave him seats in the Walloon regional council and the council of the French Community, where he became his party's education specialist and a vice president. In 1995 he was elected directly to the Walloon Parliament and the Parliament of the French Community and was sent to the Senate as a community senator. In 1996 he was a European Union observer at the first Palestinian elections.

In July 1999 he joined the French Community government led by Hervé Hasquin as minister for secondary education, arts and letters, and from October 2000 until July 2004 he was minister for secondary education and special education. His decrees covered the reception of newly arrived pupils, adult pupils in secondary schools, special needs education and work and study training, and he backed technical and vocational education with new workshop equipment worth about 25 million euros. A late decree creating centres for pupils repeatedly excluded from school was contested within the coalition and repealed by the following government. He also opposed the wearing of the headscarf in French Community schools.

From August 2004 to July 2008 Hazette was delegate general of Wallonia-Brussels in Dakar, responsible for Senegal, Benin, Guinea and Burkina Faso. In 2012 he lobbied African governments for Liège's bid to host the 2017 international exhibition, and in 2017 he advised the government of Togo on education. He also served as president of the MR's Huy-Waremme district.

In retirement he wrote essays, novels and biographies, among them Le Chemin va encore monter (1996), Les Taxis de Dakar (2006), Les Barreaux de sable (2008), Haïr César ? (2011), Perdition (2013) and Lettre ouverte aux parents responsables (2012), and the autobiography J'ai fait de mon mieux (2018).

In 1964 Hazette married Marie-Paule Leruth, and they had two children, Jean-François and Bénédicte. The family lived in Braives. His first wife died in 1992, and in 1995 he married Claudine Kinet, head of the Athénée in Jodoigne.

In 1972 he was founding president of the Richelieu club of Huy. A Latinist all his life, he drew on Caesar's Gallic Wars and the story of Ambiorix and the Eburones for two of his novels.

Pierre Hazette died at the age of 87. His death was reported on Tuesday 20 October 2026 by RTBF, Le Soir, RTL, L'Echo and L'Avenir, citing Belga, and was confirmed on Facebook by the French Community's education minister, Valérie Glatigny. Reports did not give the place or cause of death.

Glatigny wrote that she had learned of his death with great sadness and that she had lost a friend, describing a man of conviction with a strong ambition for a quality school that gave every pupil the means to learn and build a future. Manu Douette, mayor of Hannut and president of the MR's Huy-Waremme district, called him a great man and a political reference, and said the region was so liberal because Hazette had built that base stone by stone over many years. Funeral arrangements had not been reported at the time of writing.

Hazette is remembered as one of the pillars of Belgian liberalism in Liège province for several decades and as an education minister who championed technical and vocational schooling and the integration of newly arrived pupils. In 2010 the municipal school of Marneffe, where he had been a pupil, was named after him, and in 2012 he was made an honorary citizen of Liège. He was a Grand Officer of the Order of Leopold, an Officer of the National Order of Burkina Faso and an Officer of the French Ordre des Palmes académiques.