May 18, 2020 - 11:53am
While Emmanuel Macron is no stranger to pomp and symbolism aimed at enhancing the dignity of his office, his appearance yesterday at a ceremony in the small Picardie village of Clermont-les-Fermes, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the battle of Montcornet, has infuriated the country’s Gaullist Right.
The 1940 battle, one of the country’s few, brief successes in the Battle of France, saw then-colonel de Gaulle temporarily halt the German Blitzkrieg by deploying French heavy tanks in accordance with his own far-thinking ideas of armoured warfare. As a consequence of his battlefield success, de Gaulle was immediately promoted to Brigadier General, the rank he wore for the rest of his history-shaping career.
For Macron, who has repeatedly employed stirring martial imagery in the gruelling fight against Coronavirus (which has already killed around half as many French citizens as the Battle of France) the contemporary resonances must seem obvious. In his speech, he remarked that: “De Gaulle tells us that France is strong when it knows its destiny, when it stands united, when it seeks the path of cohesion in the name of a certain idea of France.”
For Macron’s critics on the Right, de Gaulle’s ‘certain idea of France’ is antithetical to the vision of a president they scorn as a cosmopolitan globalist, and Macron’s invocation of the father of the Fifth Republic an empty attempt to wrap himself in the mantle of a leader far greater than himself.
But Macron’s adoption of Gaullist symbolism is not new. In 2018 he added the Cross of Lorraine, the symbol of de Gaulle’s Free French forces, to the seal of the Republic. A leather-bound Pléiades edition of De Gaulle’s memoirs sits at his side on his gilded desk — originally de Gaulle’s — in all his pronouncements to the nation, next to a bronze-framed photograph of the great man himself. Even a replica of de Gaulle’s presidential car sits on Macron’s office mantelpiece.
The Élysée has even declared 2020 the year of de Gaulle, in commemoration of the 130th anniversary of his birth, the 80th of his historic June appeal from London to resist German occupation, and the 50th anniversary of his death.
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SubscribeOne of the main differences between the General and Mme Macron’s little boy is that de Gaulle was a passionate French patriot who worked ceaselessly for the betterment of la France; Macron, sadly, is a creature of the money-men and has priorities which the great man would find at best distasteful and at worst treasonous. When Société Générale finally falls over, as inevitably it must, Macron will bleed the country dry for his masters.
He wants to have his gateaux and eat it – on the one hand moving towards a centralised and unified Europe while on the other hand reaching pathetically for these displays of French pride.
As I have said many time there has not really been a French leader worth following since Asterix. And surely those that do have any pride in France (and the French have given us much for which they can be proud) will choose the original i.e. le Pen, not the imitation.
Joan of Arc? Louis XIV? Napoleon?