At the end of Fritz Lang’s Smugglers of Moonfleet, the young boy initiated into buccaneering thanks his mentor thus: “The exercise has been profitable, sir. “Pronounced in 13 minutes 48 on the evening of April 17 in front of fifteen million compatriots, was the perilous exercise of a speech on hot coals beneficial to Emmanuel Macron?
Let us first observe that it took place in one of those periods when, as Ronsard had already written, the French people “groumelle” (grommelle) and “always spread some false news”. Less rhetorical and tighter than usual, the presidential verb tried to clear explosive ground by laying the foundations for a civic pact, foundations and Terminal helping.
Taking note of “respectful anger”, which is a beautiful oxymoron tinged with wishful thinking, the president revisited the charter of his soothing mantras, invoking a “democratic life beyond dividing lines”. Expectations are known. “Produce more wealth”, which is in his Physiocrat-Napoleon III-Georges Pompidou line. Opening of regionalized projects involving “valleys and cantons”, which has an Old Regime touch mixed with soft maurrassism. Repeated call, very much in the Ricœur way, in the sense of meaningful work, with future citizen conventions and participatory agoras, what is given in Girondin 2.0.
And in fact. At 11 minutes 40 from the start of his speech, Emmanuel Macron suddenly invokes the restoration work of Notre-Dame de Paris, carried out under the aegis of General Georgelin assisted by the Holy Spirit, as an emblem of the “major construction sites of the Nation”, a unifying symbol of a timed momentum that, after the grim predictions of four years ago, promises against all odds to be completed on time. “We said it, Joe,” Kamala Harris said after Biden was elected. “We will do it,” Macron proclaims in front of a Hugolian construction site.
The ultimate argument raised before the insubordinate children of the eldest daughter of the Church, sensitive to the ghosts of Esmeralda and Quasimodo, is therefore this peguyst reconciliation of national hearts, this hymn to an arrow, remanence of old eulogies of Saint Joan of Arc, in a France where bishops Cauchon and Mélenchon de la Nupes never ceased to feed black masses and blasphemies, at a time when the convulsionnaires of Saint-Médard danced shamelessly on the tombs of government fideism. Vade Retro, Satanas Rousseau!
