Gilles Rotillon: A Many-Sided Life in French Climbing
- Matthieu Amaré
- Feb 24
- 11 min read
Gilles Rotillon died on July 11 at 78. He wrote for Vertige Media, but more than that, he was one of the sharpest minds to ever take French climbing seriously as a subject worth thinking about—its growth, its contradictions, its promises, and the problems it keeps creating as it gets bigger. This is a portrait in tribute, written at human height.
Everything is quiet. The talk should have started already, but a low-grade drift hangs in the half-lit room at the 2025 Salon de l’Escalade. The program promises a “masterclass” by Lucien Martinez—then editor-in-chief of Grimper magazine—on the growth of climbing, framed as a simple question: good news or bad? But nothing’s moving. Because, clearly, everyone’s waiting for someone.
Gilles’ gift
A few minutes later, an elderly man comes in like he’s been dropped into the room mid-step. His neck looks stiff. He’s carrying a book and a few loose sheets tucked under his arm. He doesn’t scan the audience. He seems locked on one target only: the chair waiting for him. He sits down, unhurried. Only then does Lucien Martinez begin. “I was supposed to do this on my own,” he says, “but we changed plans at the last minute.” Then he adds, plainly: “I couldn’t do it without Gilles Rotillon.”
Since July 11, though, everyone has had to do it without him. Rotillon died of a stroke. People often introduced him as a “theorist of climbing.” He was also a professor emeritus in economics, a longtime member of the FSGT (Fédération Sportive et Gymnique du Travail), a founding member of the FFME (Fédération Française de la Montagne et de l’Escalade), the author of several reference books on how climbing evolved and spread in France, and an unrelenting columnist on the world of climbing.
Across all of it, one thread holds: he spent his life giving intellectual structure to a sport that was expanding fast—asking what made it tick, where it was heading, what it got right, what it broke, and what it refused to see. A former climber with a deep love for the practice, he also carried a lifelong commitment to left-wing politics, militant since adolescence against what he called “the drift of a capitalist society that is pushing humanity into an increasingly catastrophic situation.”
“Gilles was clearly an intellectual,” warns Yves Renoux, a longtime FSGT member and a friend of 40 years. “But—careful. At heart he was a math guy. He moved into economics, but he kept that logical mind. So yes, a theorist. But a theorist who turns ideas into action.” Renoux knows exactly what he means. He joined Rotillon’s FSGT climbing club after seeing, in the most concrete way possible, what “making climbing popular” could look like: bringing a climbing wall into the city. It happened at the Fête de l’Huma in 1976. “The first wall at the Fête de l’Huma was in 1955,” Renoux says, precise as ever. “But I met the FSGT, their ideas, Gilles Rotillon, by first seeing a wall with holds. That’s Gilles to me. Ideas—but above all, real proposals. Otherwise what’s left? Just talk.”
« It’s true we liked ticking boxes, but for us, climbing was still more about pleasure than pure performance »
Noël Rotillon, brother of Gilles
Rotillon’s own first encounter with climbing came a decade earlier, in Saint-Geneviève-des-Bois. He was 18 when the town’s youth center—the Maison des Jeunes et de la Culture—opened its doors. “The first director came from the Ivry section,” says his brother Noël, 18 months younger. “Her husband was an aspiring mountain guide, so one of the first sections they created was the climbing section.” In 1963, the two brothers discovered varappe—old-school French for rock climbing—at the same time. The next year, they went on their first trip to Fontainebleau.
This was France in the Trente Glorieuses, when mass leisure was spreading—but climbing was still a small world, reserved for a social and technical elite. For the Rotillon brothers, it wasn’t only a sport. It was also fertile ground for political thinking. “Our father was a Communist activist,” Noël says, “elected first deputy mayor of Saint-Geneviève-des-Bois. We grew up in a very left-wing environment.” The era’s events pushed them toward activism, the intellectual rush of May ’68, and the mountains.
Friends, games, and getting good—fast
Rotillon fell hard for the discipline. From his first days on rock, he approached the mountains with a methodical, almost scientific focus. “The most striking thing,” Noël remembers, “was that he knew the topos—the guidebooks—by heart. If he’d done a route or a crag, he remembered every move. Standing at the base, even if it was thirty pitches, he already knew which pitches he’d lead—climb on lead, with the rope running up above you—and which he’d follow.” That attention to detail carried him quickly into the big classics: the Dru, the Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses. He stacked alpine routes, ticked off some of the “100 finest” from Gaston Rébuffat—one of the era’s true bibles, a list of legendary Alpine climbs. “It’s true we liked ticking boxes,” Noël says. “But for us, climbing was still more about pleasure than pure performance.”
And yet: it was Rotillon’s mountain résumé that pulled in teenagers from the Paris region—kids who saw what was possible and wanted in. One of them was Pascal Étienne, who would become one of Rotillon’s closest friends. In 1975, he was 16 when he stumbled on an article in La Marseillaise de l’Essonne about two climbers from the Saint-Geneviève-des-Bois FSGT club. “It was a full-page story about a small feat,” Étienne recalls, “two climbers, including Gilles, who had climbed the Directe Américaine on the Dru.” He joined a club soon after. On his very first outing, he helped write a footnote in climbing history. “A guy from the club went to Fontainebleau to pick mushrooms,” says Étienne, now a climbing instructor, “and tells us he found a new passage on a nice boulder. It was Roche aux Sabots—this little area to us back then that’s now internationally famous.” The story says something about the FSGT’s early, exploratory spirit. But what struck Étienne most was the club itself.
« Every Tuesday night, Gilles brought me to the FSGT headquarters in Pantin. I was just a kid, but I listened hard. The flood of ideas was incredible. I felt like I was watching a revolution. »
Pascal Étienne, friend of Gilles Rotillon
“Gilles was kind of the guru at the time,” he says. “At 30, he was an excellent climber, an excellent alpinist. He could’ve just coasted on that. Instead, with his brother, they created a collective momentum that really hit us teenagers.” The Rotillon brothers built a whole training system designed to raise everyone’s level quickly. And they were willing to touch what was taboo. “I think they created some of the first competitions,” Étienne says, “back when competitions were basically forbidden in the culture.” At the club entrance, they put up a grid—names along one axis, and “all the sixes of Cuvier” on the other, a famous Fontainebleau sector. In the boxes: French bouldering grades—6A, 6B, 6C, up through “G,” because “7” didn’t exist yet in their system (roughly what many climbers would map to today’s V-scale mindset, even if the labels were different). They’d go out, climb, and check them off. And in that grid were already the Rotillons’ own checkmarks. For the kids, the goal became simple: catch them. The effect was immediate. “Honestly, we went at it harder than ever with our friends,” Étienne says. “I think it raised the club’s level a lot.”
The energy was everywhere—on Bleau boulders, in the club, and most of all, in people’s heads. By then, the FSGT already had a slogan with teeth: “Ni guide, ni client”—neither guide nor client. “For us, coming from working-class backgrounds,” Étienne says, “that spoke to us. It motivated us.” Behind the slogan was a social project: make it possible for people who couldn’t afford guides to still do alpinism—to climb and learn without being priced out. “We must have done a thousand routes with volunteer leaders,” Noël says, “without any problems beyond minor sprains.” It’s impossible now to count how many young climbers learned independent, self-sufficient climbing through the FSGT—but it’s clearly in the thousands. In the early 1980s, the federation created the Commission Fédérale de la Montagne (CFM), which Rotillon would lead. “I remember he took me under his wing,” Étienne says. “Every Tuesday night, Gilles brought me to the FSGT headquarters in Pantin. I was just a kid, but I listened hard. The flood of ideas was incredible. I felt like I was watching a revolution.”
The making of modern climbing
Forty years later, Yves Renoux still uses that word—revolution—without blinking. For him, the FSGT’s projects changed the sport from the ground up. He points to “Les 24h de Bleau,” a popular event that still matters today, where beginners and experienced climbers link up boulder problems across the forest. He points to the “yellow circuits” in Fontainebleau, designed to guide newcomers through some of the best rock with a clear, progressive path. And he points, especially, to the “Hauteroche cliff,” nicknamed the “falaise à l’aise,” which laid the groundwork for what many now think of as modern sport-climbing training cliffs. “Gilles was one of the main drivers,” Renoux says. “I love that project because it contains the whole flavor of our ideas.” In 1974, FSGT members bolted—or, in the older language, “equipped”—that cliff in Côte-d’Or with a clear concept: allow people to climb on lead from the very beginning of their learning. “That meant breaking with the alpinism mindset,” Renoux explains. “Before that, the people equipping cliffs were all climbing at least ‘6.’ They’d place pitons when they got scared. If you were a beginner, you had to be out of your mind to lead. Nothing was built for you.”
« It was the first time we separated the two disciplines that firmly, Climbing had always been seen as training for alpinism. For Gilles, it had to break free. »
Noël, brother of Gilles Rotillon
Alongside the push to popularize crag climbing, the FSGT also challenged the elitist logic that kept the “leader”—the first on the rope—at the top of a social pyramid. “What we wanted,” Renoux says, “was to show that being first on the rope is something anyone can do.” Hauteroche held, in miniature, what would shape the FSGT’s ideological backbone into the next century: climbing that was both popular and autonomous. Renoux himself would help bring those ideas to life. In the early 1980s, as a PE teacher, he and his students built the first climbing wall in a school setting, in Corbeil-Essonnes. But again, he points back to Rotillon’s influence. “It was him and Jean-Marc Blanche who first pushed the idea of climbing walls,” Renoux says. Blanche, a young architect at the time, designed mobile bouldering structures they hauled to Montreuil to get kids from working-class neighborhoods climbing. Étienne confirms it. He joined a study trip to England with Blanche. “We visited walls over there,” he says. “Either they were university setups hacked together by climbers, or they were private facilities. When we came back and brought it to the CFM with Jean-Marc, we decided to develop it in the public sector. We built walls in housing projects, schools, for events… and that matters, because unlike the UK, France’s history shows public climbing walls appearing before private gyms.”
The unaligned intellectual
For Rotillon’s friends, there’s no debate: he was ahead of his time. In the 1980s, he was everywhere—inside every committee, every structure. In 1985, he helped create the Fédération Française d’Escalade (FFE). Two years later, when the FFME was created, he took leadership of its climbing sports committee. For ten years, he defended a vision of climbing as a common good—something that should be accessible to everyone. But by the 1990s, the sport was shifting. Competitions multiplied. The FFME looked more and more toward competitive climbing. Too much for Rotillon. At the federation’s 1997 general assembly in Avignon, he was pushed out. “He fought tooth and nail for what we’d done at Hauteroche,” Étienne says. “For him, the federation should’ve put money there—scaled the experiment.”
Rotillon’s fights left marks—first in the people who knew him, and then, enduringly, in writing. Many of the people Vertige Media spoke with called him an intellectual. “I think he was born an intellectual when he met the FSGT,” his brother Noël says. After May ’68, Rotillon read constantly, argued constantly, thought constantly. Beyond federation work, he distinguished himself on the terrain of ideas. His first major book, L’Alpinisme laisse béton, was published in 1985 with Louis Louvel. In it, the two theorists argued—perhaps for the first time with that level of bluntness in France—that alpinism is a practice that kills. By contrast, climbing, through thoughtful bolting and the deliberate reduction of risk, could become popular. “It was the first time we separated the two disciplines that firmly,” Noël says. “Climbing had always been seen as training for alpinism. For Gilles, it had to break free.” The book landed hard in a small, tight world. “Let’s say the alpinists didn’t love it,” Étienne says with a smile. But it broadcast Rotillon’s central idea—the one he carried for life: climbing had to leave elitist circles. That thread runs straight into his 2016 book—arguably his most complete—La leçon d’Aristote, where he reworked and republished his theories.
« He read constantly, with an unbelievable ability to focus. He could read books while we drove 800 kilometers, while someone mowed the lawn right next to him, while his granddaughters pulled his hair »
Françoise Rotillon, Gilles' wife
His writing didn’t just document him; it defined him. “I immediately saw it was his thing,” says Françoise Rotillon, his wife. “When Louis came to work on their first book on Wednesdays at the house, they’d shut themselves in all day to talk, think, debate.” She adds: “He read constantly, with an unbelievable ability to focus. He could read books while we drove 800 kilometers, while someone mowed the lawn right next to him, while his granddaughters pulled his hair.” He wrote constantly, too. Near the end of his life, when his body kept him from climbing the way he used to, he poured his free time into analysis and debate about society. He was part of the Economists at Large (économistes atterrés), made videos for Xerfi Canal where he could summarize the myth of capitalism in four minutes, and starting in 2020 published a weekly column on Mediapart. As if that weren’t enough, he gathered his love of film into a book titled Goûts et Dégoûts cinématographiques. And of course, the climber never stopped writing for climbing outlets—Grimper, Alpine Mag, Vertige Media. “His secret?” Étienne says. “He didn’t sleep. How do you produce that much if you sleep? He knew everything about everything—the latest climbing performances, some new video, some institutional report… he amazed me. When you look at his life, you honestly wonder how he managed all his responsibilities.”
Masterclass
If you look at the core of “Rotillon,” the intellectual never left his path. “Today, events prove him right,” Renoux says. “His left-wing, Marxist vision—which is also the FSGT’s—still inspires everyone in the federation. I’m convinced the way we carry Gilles’ work forward will be collective.” Reading his columns, listening to his public remarks, you have to admit how modern his positions were—on ecology, economics, gender. He was a relentless observer of modern society. “Recently,” Françoise Rotillon says, “I’d even say that’s almost all he did. The day he went to the ER in the afternoon, up until one o’clock he was at his computer, writing things.”
Not necessarily optimistic things, given the times. “For me, he was a bit like our Frédéric Lordon,” Renoux says—meaning someone who understood that things weren’t necessarily moving in the right direction, and who sensed we might not find the fix in time. “He often said to his granddaughters, ‘I hope Papou is wrong,’” Noël says. “The way the world was changing, the future for his children and grandchildren—it didn’t make him happy.”
And maybe because of that, Rotillon never stopped climbing. After a ski accident, Noël says, he couldn’t lift his head anymore. “We used to say he climbed in Braille,” his brother recalls, “because he was feeling for holds. But he climbed—again and again.” Étienne, who watched him on walls and cliffs for fifty years, still can’t quite process it. “He was in rough shape at the end,” he says. “But he never quit. He always showed up at the wall. I’ve never seen anyone that motivated, that passionate.” If you’d only seen the limping outline, you might not have guessed that a many-layered legacy of French climbing was still moving through the world in that body. So when you picture that old man settling into his chair in front of the Salon de l’Escalade crowd, you can’t help but smile again at what Gilles Rotillon gave people—and kept giving, right to the end. Because after an hour, the schedule held. It really was a masterclass.
